The Sedgwick Museum: discovering Earth's deep past

One of the joys of living at Cambridge Riverside is that our neighbours have a rich array of talents and interests. Last week, a group of Riversiders took advantage of Keith Tritton's knowledge of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, where he volunteers as a guide, to discover his favourite parts of the museum. Thanks to Keith for summarising the visit and to Ruth, Melissa and Tony for sharing their photographs.

The Sedgwick Museum is the oldest museum in Cambridge, dating from 1728, when Dr John Woodward left his collection of almost 10,000 rocks, fossils, minerals and other specimens to the university. He also left money to establish a professorship, to which Adam Sedgwick succeeded in 1818. Sedgwick was one of the founders of modern geology, whose expeditions, at first in Wales then later elsewhere in Britain and Europe, led him to propose the system of periods marking out the geological timescale.

The collections expanded greatly under Sedgwick, who died in 1873. The present building, which opened in 1904, was purpose-built as a memorial to him following a public appeal. The collections have since grown to at least two million items and a large proportion are now kept in the museum's Collections Research Centre in West Cambridge.

Of course, it was only possible to view a tiny proportion of these when the CRRA visited on Friday February 27^th. We picked out a selection to illustrate the theme of the evolution of life.

We first looked at the weird sea-dwelling animals from the Cambrian period, the first to grow hard shells or exoskeletons (for example, the trilobites). These lived a little over 500 million years ago. We then traced evolutionary developments through time, observing the half fish, half amphibian animals that made the first transition to land during the Devonian period, roughly between 400 and 360 million years ago; and the scary giant insects of the Carboniferous period, about 300 million years ago.

Some of the finest fossils in the museum are the giant marine reptiles that were unearthed from the Jurassic coast, many of them by the collector Mary Anning. But for size, the most impressive are the dinosaurs, the land-dwelling reptiles. The largest complete specimen in the museum is the Iguanadon, which measures 11 metres (36 feet) from nose to tail.

We heard about the mass extinction event of 66 million years ago that caused the disappearance of these giant reptiles and the subsequent rise of the mammals that would eventually lead to the emergence of humans.

Finally, we saw some local discoveries from more recent periods, such as the Barrington hippopotamus and even some specimens from a time when woolly mammoths were roaming around Cambridgeshire, excavated in Barnwell. This seemed a very appropriate end to the tour.