h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Clive,

Have you seen this programme about the paleontologist Professor Jenny Clack? You're love it. She's an amazing woman who carried on fighting her way through male dominated academia to make a fantastic discovery of a creature that links fish to the first terapods on land.

It's a riveting programme. She keeps talking about looking at things at different ways if you want to try to understand...she rides motorbikes as well. She was so dogged..

You have to watch it for the discovery and her story...also about politics and etiquette in science. Also how she became enthused by fossils and the Devonian era in her childhood.

That's if you can tear yourself away from phase 2 with your ex?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01fq4yh/Beautiful_Minds_Series_2_Professor_Jenny_Clack/

It's available until early May.

I really enjoyed the first series of this programme* and I have now set it to series record on Iplayer - thanks for the heads up!

*One had that quaker lady who discovered pulsars - name escapes me.

Yeah...won't spoil it...but she has this amazing insight about how evolution onto land occurred that turned existing thought on its head. That comes towards the end.

It's a very profound moment in evolution the move from water breathing to air breathing..and the land had been empty but for plants before that. She says all they would have heard would have been the wind in the trees and a few leaves blowing around. She seems quite poetical.

She opened up a whole new part of science.

Why haven't we heard of her? I hadn't.

I see it's Dick Dawkins next...may give that one a miss..