For 160 years they lay forgotten in a
dusty cabinet, lost to science because they had been hastily filed away.
Now a treasure trove of fossils
collected by the young Charles Darwin has been discovered by chance.
They were collected in the 1830s in
South America during his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle
Experts say the find sheds new light
on this formative period for Darwin, then in his 20s, whose study of tropical
plants and wildlife set the stage for his ground-breaking theory of evolution.
The fossils, neatly pressed on to
slides, some bearing Darwin’s signature, were discovered by Dr Howard
Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London.
He was searching for some other
fossils at the British Geological Survey’s cavernous storeroom in Keyworth,
Nottinghamshire. Dr Falcon-Lang came upon an old cabinet, with drawers inside
labelled ‘unregistered fossil plants’, and decided to take a look.
‘I can’t resist a mystery
so I pulled one open,’ he said. ‘What I found inside made my jaw
drop! Inside were hundreds of beautiful glass slides. Almost the first I picked
up was labelled “C. Darwin Esq”.
‘This is an amazing snapshot
into Darwin’s working life. This was one of the most exciting periods in
the history of science, forming the mind of the man who would develop the
theory of evolution, which would change the world.’
The 314 slides found by Dr
Falcon-Lang include 40million-year-old plants from a remote island off the
coast of Chile.
Another shows a towering tree-sized
fungus which covered the Earth 400million years ago when the climate was so hot
there was no ice even at the Poles
The slides were made by slicing and
polishing the fossils into translucent sheets and then placing them between two
glass plates so they could be studied under a microscope. Dr Falcon-Lang added:
‘There are 100 million-year-old fossil trees from the latter age of the
dinosaurs. It’s real Jules Verne stuff, and scientists are only now
starting to study it and understand its scientific importance.’
The fossils were lost because
Darwin’s best friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, did not catalogue them
properly. He had been given the job while working at the British Geological
Survey in 1846.
But before he was able to put them in
the official specimen register, he was offered the chance to go on a voyage to
the Himalayas so simply stored them in the cabinet.
It was moved to the group’s
first headquarters in Charing Cross in London in 1851. The cabinet
moved to the Geological Museum in South Kensington in 1935 and half a century
later to Nottinghamshire – but it was never opened.
Dr John Ludden, of the Geological
Survey, said: ‘This is quite a remarkable discovery. It makes one wonder
what else might be hiding in our collections.’ The discoveries can be
viewed on the British Geological Survey website from today.
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