From fossil hunter to palaeontologist

As a boy, Wood had been fascinated by Roman Britain, and was convinced that he could calculate the existence of "missing" Roman forts along the Antonine Wall but it wasn't long before he discovered he could also find "missing" fossil fish from rock strata even closer to home.^[5] At the age of 29, with no training but with a natural enthusiast's eye for detail, Wood spent two years scouring the Wardie coastline for fossils but with no success. He made contact with the Royal Scottish Museum and found out that he had been looking at the wrong rock-type. Lesson learned, Wood started to build his own carefully curated collection of fossil fish.^[6] He trained himself to recognise the signs for the presence of fossil fish at outcrop by visiting localities made famous by nineteenth century fossil hunters.^[7] This paid off with his first significant discovery in 1971 and over the next few years, he amassed a valuable collection, which he sold to the museum, supplementing his income as an insurance salesman.

In 1974, Wood struck out at a new locality when he read that a new opencast coal mine was planned in Fife, convincing the National Coal Board to allow him on site to hunt for fossils. The following year, he uncovered a rich bone bed at the mine, which contained the first Carboniferous tetrapods to be discovered in the UK for almost 100 years. Wood convinced the contractor to interrupt their work and carefully strip a layer over 600m², bagging more than three tons of bone bed over a few weeks.^[8] The resultant research material included rare discoveries, initiated a string of new Ph.Ds from Newcastle University, which gave Wood the recognition he needed to initiate projects at scale with research funding. Crucially, Wood was able to sell enough of what he found to break from selling insurance and become a full-time fossil hunter. Fully committed, Wood curated his own specimens by working as a technician in the vertebrate paleontology group of Dr Alec Panchen of Newcastle University,^[9] completing a geology degree with the Open University,^[10] and securing work on a new site on the Scottish Borders,^{[n 1]} which created a series of research initiatives published in twelve scholarly papers in 1985.^[11]

Local legend

The Bearsden Shark - Akmonistion zangerli

Once Wood had identified fossil-rich strata in a specific locality, he would follow through at scale, inspiring others to participate and research his finds, which attracted funding for new, sometimes ambitious projects to uncover new discoveries. In 1982, Wood had moved with his family to a housing estate at Bearsden and almost immediately uncovered rare fish remains from a burn running through the estate. Wood alerted the neighbouring Hunterian Museum^{[n 2]} and persuaded the local council, the estate residents and local youth groups to join him in a huge muddy dig, which led to the discovery of the metre long Bearsden shark, regarded as the most complete skeleton of a Carboniferous shark ever found.^[12][13][14] Wood was awarded the prestigious Worth Prize at the Geological Society of London in 1983,^[15] and remains part of the community of Bearsden.^[16] In the same year, Wood became "Stan, Stan the Fossil Man" in a BBC Television documentary about him,^[17] receiving the BBC Enterprise Award presented to him by Prince Charles in 1986,^[5] and appearing a few years later alongside David Attenborough in the BBC series Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives.^[18]

Global impact

Lizzie - not a true lizard, a close relative of Amniota

Eucritta, also discovered at East Kirkton Quarry

Arguably Wood's greatest single discovery came in 1984, when he opened up an abandoned Victorian quarry in East Kirkton near Bathgate.^[19] The quarry revealed an abundance of fossil marine and terrestrial arthropods, along with examples of several classes of fish and early amphibians.^[20][21] The most important single discovery was a tetrapod nicknamed "Lizzie", a small lizard-like animal (Westlothiana),^[22] which is possibly the oldest known reptile.^[23][24] Ever mindful of commercial opportunity, in 1986, Wood exhibited his large collection on tour,^{[n 3]} opened by David Attenborough, entitled "Mr. Wood's Fossils" and hosted by three museums across the UK.^[27][28] The following year, Wood opened a fossil shop in Edinburgh by the same name, which is still trading today.^[29] East Kirkton was subsequently leased by Wood and systematically excavated by a dedicated research team from the Hunterian Museum. Their combined efforts were presented at a conference of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1992 and compiled in twenty-eight papers,^[30] considered by the scientific community as a major milestone in the understanding of the evolution of the earliest known community of land animals and plants on the planet.^[7]

Notes