Fossil exodus via volkswagen
Today some of the Sedgwick Museum’s youngest fossils were taken out of the Museum for the first time since it opened over a hundred years ago.
To make room for the Darwin exhibition at the far end of the Museum’s ‘Mahogany Wing’ gallery, this part of the Museum has to be cleared. It currently houses the youngest fossils in the collection such as those from Barrington Sands which date from about 100,000 years ago and Burwell Fen which are roughly 4,000 years old, as well as an assortment of archaeological artefacts and general geological ‘curiosities’.
Before the Darwin display can be installed, around 500 of these specimens have to be carefully packaged and removed. After months of photographing, catalogueing and packaging each specimen, Esther Sharp, the Darwin project conservator, drove the first batch of Barrington fossils to our storage facility in West Cambridge this morning. The very first shipment consisted mostly of mammoth teeth. So far about 300 specimens have been moved inside roughly 120 boxes.