Rotten fish 'are lab supplies' for geologists

Geologists' lab supplies do not only consist of the chisels and brushes associated with fossil-hunting.

Scientists at the University of Leicester explain that their own lab supplies in recent months included a selection of rotting fish.

Their aim was to see how the creatures decompose - and particularly how their soft body parts rot away to reveal the skeleton.

In this way, they hope to reverse-engineer the process, allowing them to more accurately build a fossilised skeleton into a picture of how an ancient fish may have looked.

"Our macabre experiments are grisly and smelly but they have revealed, for the first time, what characteristic vertebrate features look like when they are partially decomposed," says one of the study's leaders, Sarah Gabbott.

The fish are not the only unusual - and fragrant - lab supplies used at the university recently.

Climate change scientists have also been looking for evidence of developing weather patterns in the urine middens of the rock hyrax, a guinea pig-sized relative of the elephant.