It is not often that the Geological Survey of Canada considers it necessary to hire a foreign expert to adjudicate a local paleontological matter. In 1911 Marie Stopes was brought in as a hired gun to check the paleobotanical work of Sir William Dawson in St. John, New Brunswick

In 1940, a Mr. J.F. Coates, M.P. from New South Wales gave a speech in the Australian Parliament that included this statement: "The Empire today has three enemies -- all from Munich. One is Hitler, the other Goebbels, and the third that doctor of German philosophy and science -- Dr. Marie Stopes. The greatest of these is Marie Stopes". Why such enmity? Her German doctorate was in the field of paleobotany -- not usually a field that provokes vitriolic hate. But Stopes was also the author of the first sex manuals, Married Love and Wise Parenthood, and an active promoter of birth control who established Britain's first family planning clinics in 1921. The Marie Stopes International now provides reproductive health services in over thirty countries and, in 1999, she came first in the Guardian's "Women of the Millennium" poll.

But our interest here is not primarily with Marie Stopes, the birth control promoter; it is with Marie Stopes, the paleobotanist, who in 1911 was hired by the Geological Survey of Canada to settle a vexing controversy about the age of plant fossils at "Fern Ledges" near St. John, New Brunswick. With a Ph.D from Munich and a D.Sc. from London, this 30-year-old lecturer in botany at the University of Manchester, and the author of Ancient Plants, was well qualified for this task.

This controversy dated from 1861 when J. William Dawson, the most respected paleobotanist in Canada declared that the abundant ferns, seed-ferns and sphenopsids from the "Fern Ledges" locality at St. John are Devonian in age and among the oldest plants known at that time.. The associated insect, fishes and amphibian trackways must be Devonian as well. The presence of insects and amphibians in Devonian rocks was particularly difficult for many paleontologists to accept because, previously, their oldest occurrence had been in the Late Carboniferous. Some paleobotanists claimed that the Coal Age-like plants are Carboniferous in age.

The Geological Survey of Canada remained aloof in this controversy but, when Survey geologists began to squabble in public about the ages of Carboniferous and Devonian rocks in the Maritimes (including those from "Fern Ledges") the Director could not allow the apparent scientific harmony of the Survey to be threatened. An independent scientist, Marie Stopes, was brought in to adjudicate. She examined all collections of fossil plants, reviewed all previous work and she described, illustrated and identified about 40 species of plants. Her memoir, published by the Survey in 1914, could not have been clearer. The "Fern Ledges" flora is, without question, a standard Carboniferous flora very similar to Late Carboniferous floras from Cape Breton Island, Pennsylvania and England. The associated fishes, insects and amphibians are, of course, also Carboniferous.

Compared to her crusade promoting contraception and family planning, the earlier work on Canadian fossils by that "doctor of German paleobotany" was comparatively non-controversial. Still, one wonders what Sir William Dawson, Presbyterian minister, would have thought of the sexual revolution initiated by the young woman hired to straighten out his paleobotanical work at "Fern Ledges".