British Geological survey unearths Darwin’s collection
Monday, January 23rd, 2012 6:21:02 by Taimoor Tariq
A team of scientists from the British Geological survey have by chance rediscovered fossils from Charles Darwin’s collection which had been ‘lost’ for over 165 years. Some of these collections were actually collected by Darwin himself and were simply in
a drawer marked as “unregistered fossil plants”.
Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at the Royal Holloway, at the University of London states that he was in the BGS archive looking for carboniferous fossil-wood when he made the discovery. The slides show pieces of fossils, one of which Darwin collected
on the Island of Chiloe, Chile, in 1834. The piece of wood is from the Tertiary period and over 40 million years old.
Hundreds of fossilised plants were found by Falcon-Lang and were then captured in glass slides in order to be studied under the microscope. Joseph Hooker, who was a long-time director at Kew Gardens was Charles Darwin’s best friend and he assembled this
collection in the beginning of his career in 1846.
Some of the specimens were actually hand-picked by Hooker when he went to Antarctica in 1840. Others stem from the cabinet of Reverend John Henslow, Darwin’s mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.
This collection slipped through obscurity largely because Hooker had set off for an expedition to the Himalayas by the time BCG’s formal specimen register was established in 1848. Upon his return, the collection had already been moved to the Museum of Practical
Geology in Piccadilly and he no longer had the opportunity to label the findings. The collection was then moved again to the Geological Museum in South Kensington.
The fossils returned to the BGS fifty years later. The BGS is home to more than three million fossils, which were collected and recorded with precision over the last two centuries. The significance of Hooker’s uncatalogued collection gradually passed out
of memory.
Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=10194
Posted by Taimoor Tariq
on Jan 23 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech.
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