Most people prefer to read of the exciting, unexpected and unusual. Scientists are no exception and the statement applies equally to newspaper items and scientific journal articles. Before starting this chapter, I was reading a brief article in a Dutch newspaper on ‘Man Bites Sea Snake’ (De Telegraaf, March 13, 1991, front page) – much more of an eye-catching story than the more numerous but less highlighted reports on ‘Dog Bites Man’. For the ‘man’ involved, however, the encounter with the dog may have been just as exciting.

It is no different in paleomagnetism. We are awash in a sea of paleomagnetic results, and encounter many snakes in the grass as well as in the sea.

Paleomagnetic researchers these days must try to avoid the snakes by doing everything possible in terms of field sampling and re-sampling, rock magnetism and laboratory experiments, data analysis and fancy plotting to convince themselves and their colleagues that the result is indeed the useless, uninteresting, secondary and post-tectonic overprint that they thought it was when they did the first few measurements. Without the elaborate work, they would not succeed in getting the results published. A man-biting dog does not make the front page, for sure.

There are, however, also very gratifying moments in the life of a paleomagician, when she or he can pull a neat result out of the hatful of possible sampling targets; a result, moreover, that settles, or at least appears to settle, a long-standing controversy.