Castles and Coprolites

It's been a frustratingly long process, but we have finally been given an end date for the set up of the new Earthslides lab at Newcastle - I am pleased to say that it will be up and running by the 22nd December. I started discussions about acquiring Earthslides way back at the end of 2017, when previous owner Julie Boreham announced her retirement. It wasn't until April that I mentioned this on my blog, which is about the time it took to put forward a proposal to the university to purchase the equipment/business, and to secure the funding. After getting an agreement in principle the next major hurdle was finding a space to house the new lab. Space is always an issue, but we managed to find a room in the same building as our existing Wolfson lab , which is ideal. However, as the room was currently a tea room/storage area, it has required a complete refurbishment to make it suitable to use as a lab, hence the rather long delay in the whole process. I have never been in a pos...

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, but have been busy behind the scenes sorting out all the logistics. Finally I can announce that Earthslides is to be relocated at Newcastle, as a new facility within the McCord Centre . After many years providing one of the best thin section processing services in the world (seriously!), Earthslides owner Julie Boreham is retiring in June. We have been in discussions since last year about Newcastle taking over the facility. The whole process has taken up a large part of the past year for me, from getting permission from the university, securing the funding to purchase the equipment, to finding a space at the university to put it in (harder than you could ever imagine!), to finally this morning, our first meeting with estates to assess the new space and go over the requirements for getting it refitted. This has been a long term dream of mine - setting up my own micromorphology lab, where we can train researchers and develop amazing c...