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Talk:Great Achievements by Teenagers (view source)
Revision as of 00:26, February 6, 2011
, 00:26, February 6, 2011→Roger Mason entry
::: OK, so I see there's been some discussion of Roger Mason. The point is that he didn't just stumble over some strange markings in the rock: he knew they were fossils and he knew the rocks were pre-Cambridge. His teenage open-mindedness led him to see what older, more closed-minded professors did not see. He had the confidence to go to a professor and tell him what he'd discovered - the professor didn't believe him till he'd seen it with his own eyes. A whole new era of biological life? A big discovery by anyone's standards. I've part-reverted the deletion, i.e. I've made it clear why it was such a big deal. [[User:BenjyB|BenjyB]] 18:30, 3 February 2011 (EST)
::: OK, so I see there's been some discussion of Roger Mason. The point is that he didn't just stumble over some strange markings in the rock: he knew they were fossils and he knew the rocks were pre-Cambridge. His teenage open-mindedness led him to see what older, more closed-minded professors did not see. He had the confidence to go to a professor and tell him what he'd discovered - the professor didn't believe him till he'd seen it with his own eyes. A whole new era of biological life? A big discovery by anyone's standards. I've part-reverted the deletion, i.e. I've made it clear why it was such a big deal. [[User:BenjyB|BenjyB]] 18:30, 3 February 2011 (EST)
Mason's achievement is that he discovered the first fossil to come from rocks that were undoubtedly of a Pre-Cambrian era. Before that, the consensus of professional scientists was that there were no complex lifeforms before the Cambrian. Mason knew the rocks were Pre-Cambrian and he knew that what he found was a fossil. The fossil is named for the place it was found, Charnwood Forest, and for him: ''Charnia masoni''. Very very few people have revolutionised a whole area of science as teenages - Mason is one of them. You can read about it in New Scientist, issue of April 14, 2007.
The text I wrote looks pretty much correct (bar one spelling mistake). I suggest you re-insert it in the article:
'''16''' - Roger Mason discovers fossils from a whole era of complex life, the Ediacran (c.600 million years ago). His open-mindedness leads to an insight which overturns the limited preconceptions of earlier scientists, including Darwin, about life on Earth. [[User:BenjyB|BenjyB]] 19:26, 5 February 2011 (EST)
== ''Teen''agers ==
== ''Teen''agers ==