Roger Mason is an English geologist. He is known as the discoverer of Ediacaran fossils, although it was later found that a then 15-year-old schoolgirl named Tina Negus had discovered the first Charnia fossil a year before he did. He is now a professor at the China University of Geosciences at Wuhan.
Charnia discovery
Mason grew up in the English Midlandscity ofLeicester, where he attended Wyggeston Boys’ Grammar School. In April 1957, while rock climbing with friends in Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, he spotted what looked like a leaf embedded in the rock. Mason took a rubbing of the rock. He showed the rubbing to his father, the minister of Leicester's Great Meeting Unitarian Chapel, who also taught at the local university and knew Trevor Ford, a geologist there. Mason took Ford to the site; Ford wrote up the discovery in the Journal of the Yorkshire Geological Society. Ford identified it as a Precambrian fossil and named it Charnia masoni after the forest and Mason. Mason credits this first step in his geological career to " father’s encouragement and the enquiring approach fostered by science teachers". The holotype now resides, along with a cast of its sister taxonCharniodiscus, in New Walk Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester. Decades later it came to light that Tina Negus, then a 15-year-old schoolgirl, had seen this fossil a year before the boys, but her geography schoolteacher discounted the possibility of Precambrian fossils. Mason acknowledges, and the museum's Charnia display explains, that the fossil had been discovered a year earlier by Negus, "but no one took her seriously". She was recognised at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the official discovery. Mason's discovery was mentioned on the February 2009David Attenborough documentary Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and again in Attenborough's 2010 series First Life and the documentary that accompanied it, Attenborough's Journey. Attenborough, a keen fossil hunter as a boy, mentioned that he attended Wyggeston a few years ahead of Mason, and having been in the same part of Charnwood a few years before Mason, but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that the rocks were too old to bear fossils and so Attenborough did not search them.
