Abstract With its long-standing coal industry working the measures of the Scottish central belt, fossil plants have long been known in Scotland. The earliest significant work dealing with Scottish palaeontology, David Ure’s The History of Rutherglen and East-Kilbride (David Niven, Glasgow) had been published in 1793, with its plates of Equisetum , ferns and bark impressions. But, as in Yorkshire and Lancashire, it was not until the industrial revolution’s increased exposure of fossils was matched by the advent of the ‘new European botany’ (which, in part, grew from substantial improvements in the optics for microscopy) that fossil plant study began in earnest in Scotland. In 1959 John Walton reflected on palaeobotany in Britain at the end of the 19th century, as ‘awakening from a long sleep’. In Glasgow, this awakening centred on the university’s Botany Department, and the development of the study of fossil plants closely parallels the growth of this department as a whole for much of its time. In the same city during this period a collective of artists called the ‘Glasgow Boys’ were pushing the boundaries of representational painting. With Frederick Bower’s own cohort of palaeobotanical ‘Glasgow Boys’ (David Gwynne-Vaughan and William Lang) facilitating the work of Robert Kidston, a veritable ‘School of Palaeobotany’ existed in the university at this time. John Walton himself was also destined to serve an unusual, but critical, later role in the preservation of Kidston’s work.

Abstract Petrophysical characteristics of shales have been analyzed to improve our understanding of wire-line log response to overpressure. Bulk density and neutron porosity logs sometimes mask pore-pressure increases that are clearly evident on sonic and resistivity logs. This may be because sonic and resistivity logs respond to transport properties, whereas neutron and density logs reflect bulk properties. Results of this study indicate that shale pore structure can be characterized by a storage-connecting pore system, with connecting pore sizes on the order of 2–20 nm. Laboratory compaction tests indicate that connecting pores are mechanically more flexible compared to storage pores and are likely to have lower aspect ratios. Consequently, connecting pores are likely to undergo more elastic rebound (widening) compared to storage pores as a result of effective stress reductions caused by overpressure. Essentially, these results provide evidence that suggest sonic and resistivity logs respond to transport properties, whereas neutron and density logs reflect bulk properties, as previously proposed. This suggests that, whereas overpressure resulting from compaction disequilibrium may be detected by all four logs, fluid expansion overpressure may be best detected by sonic and resistivity logs.