The Sedgwick museum - Cambridge pt1.

The first day of our circumnavigation of the UK led us through Cambridge, and I was keen to stop by and visit the famous university’s natural history museum.

Cambridge is a great walking city, with cobbled streets and lanes packed with spired buildings and wide, green courts lined with ancient trees. These streets were very busy when we arrived and the reason for this became evident when we noticed large numbers of people walking around in gowns - it turns out we were there during graduation. This proved to be good timing for us as we had the run of the museums.

Dr John Woodward was a late 17^th and early 18^th century scientist who, upon his death, bequeathed his natural history collection and a substantial amount of cash and land to the University of Cambridge. This led to the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology (still a valid chair today) and the Woodwardian museum at Cambridge. Today this museum is part of the larger Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences.

This makes Sedgwick one of the world’s oldest museums, with its origins dating back to 1728.

Home to around 2 million geological specimens and fossils, the museum is ‘a major teaching and research resource in the Department of Earth Sciences.’

The front door is at the end of a rather grand double staircase, with bison statues on one side and bears on the other. Inside the display is like stepping back in time- in a good way I assure you. Sure there are modern displays of ichthyosaurs, dinosaurs and ancient mammals, not to mention a number of modern dinosaur replicas- such as a copy of the skull from Stan, the T. rex - but these all seem almost secondary to the gems in the old style display cabinets- and when I say old style, I’m not kidding. 

The display is split into two wings, with the Mesozoic fossils on one side and older Palaeozoic fossils on the other. Standing between the two is a life size bronze statue of Adam Sedgwick, one of the fathers of modern geology and the man who first recognised and proposed the Cambrian and Devonian Periods. Highlighting this, the statue holds a geological hammer in one hand, while in the other outstretched hand he holds that universal symbol for fossils everywhere, a trilobite.

Charles Darwin was Sedgwick’s most famous student, and there is a large display in the museum of the fossils the naturalist brought home from the HMS Beagle voyage. These tiny treasures were given to the museum after Darwin’s death. 

This and many other displays are amongst the great enjoyment of this museum to a paleo-nerd. Not only have many items kept their original labels, some now centuries old, but just to read some of the names of those who collected them is a thrill.

It’s all well and good to read about the great men and women of palaeontology, but to actually see specimens collected by Agassiz, Huxley, Cope, Leidy, Buckland, and the dame of English palaeontology, Mary Anning.

Though there are fossils from all over the world, including some rare Burgess Shale specimens, most of the fossils on display are from regions around the UK.

The most iconic of these early dinosaurs was Iguanodon, one of the first found and described, explaining why there is a stone carving of one standing guard over the coat of arms above the front door (the second animal I judge to be a giant sloth). There is also a complete skeleton towering over the front door to the museum.

The Museum’s website takes up the story of its skeleton: ‘we have a letter sent on 26 October 1825 by Dr Gideon Mantell (the discoverer and describer of Iguanodon) to Professor Adam Sedgwick. The letter came with a parcel of specimens, including ... " casts of the best teeth of the Iguanodon in my collection; and of a horn (which you well doubtless remember) which the French [experts] declare is the bony base of a horn of a saurian animal – of course I shall claim it for the Iguanodon." Some of these original specimens are exhibited nearby.’

The museums specimen is the cast of Iguanodon bernissartensis, one of the complete individuals found by Louis Dollo, who: ‘described these dinosaur remains in the 1880s and kindly offered to Cambridge (through King Leopold II) a cast of one of the best Bernissart Iguanodon skeletons. The rearing pose of the animal conforms to Dollo’s original conception of the animal, but we now understand (through the work of a former Director of the Sedgwick Museum) that it would have normally walked with a more horizontal pose.’

There are not that many dinosaur skeletons left in the original kangaroo-pose, so for that alone the Iguanodon is worth a look.

The other species to start the world wide craze for dinosaurs in the 1820's was William Buckland's Megalosaurus and the museum proudly displays a skull fragment of M. bucklandi, a dinosaur that has been recently renamed Duriavenator bucklandi. 

The museum is really like a greatest hits album from the golden age of palaeontology. Row after row, cabinet after cabinet are brimming with fossils from the quarries of Europe. There are German pterosaurs; along with ichthyosaurus and pliosaurs from Whitby, Devonian fish from Canada, ancient stromatolites from Australia and tusked dicynodonts from South Africa- prehistoric remnants from the once global spanning English empire.

It is also worthwhile taking a walk outside all around the building as there are a number of gargoyles and stone depictions of prehistoric life everywhere.

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences can be found AT University of Cambridge, Downing Street Cambridge. Admission is free, and it is open from 10am to 1pm, then 2pm to 5pm Monday to Friday; and 10am - 4pm on Saturdays. The museum is closed on Sundays and some public holidays so check the museums website for these on:

www.sedgwickmuseum.org

Clash of the Mammoths - The Fossil Freeway, Part two.

Their names are Cope and Marsh, but more about them later...

Running between Kimball in Nebraska and Rapid City, South Dakota, is highway 71- known today as the Fossil Freeway. From this main artery it’s possible to visit at least 20 fossil sites, both natural and institutional. Amongst these in Nebraska are the Huson-Meng Bison Bonebead, the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, and the Trailside Museum.(http://fossilfreeway.net/)

Due to the nature of the winters in Nebraska the Trailside Museum is closed from November to March except, and this is the important bit, by appointment. As we were heading that way near the end of November, and on a Sunday to boot, I took the chance and emailed the museum to see if there was any possibility they’d be open. They weren’t, but the wonderful Pattie Norman agreed to open the museum for us, so we got to see one of palaeontology’s greatest spectacles- one very few have ever heard of.

I’d been unaware of the museums two Colombian Mammoths until I fortuitously caught NOVA’s ‘Mammoth Mysteries’ (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/mammoth-mystery.html). In 1962 a surveyor was searching the grasslands of Nebraska for a new dam site when he noticed large bones sticking out of the earth. Contacting the University of Nebraska, a team was soon in the field digging out what they thought was a mammoth. When more dirt was removed the team realised it wasn’t one, but two mammoths they were working with, and something very unusual was going on. Both creatures were face to face, their enormous tusks wrapped around each others heads. Collected and wrapped in plaster, the specimens lay at the university, untouched, for nearly 40 years.

Finally the fossils were prepared, with forensic palaeontologists studying closely items like the tusks, which proved so well preserved under the microscope an individual days growth could be seen (you can still see clearly where these samples were taken from). Both mammoths were confirmed males, in their prime, and for elephants this can mean only one thing- Musth!

When male elephants grow sexually mature they go through what’s called Musth, a time when bull elephant testosterone goes through the roof and they become highly aggressive and fight other males (or giraffes, or rhinos, or trees…just about anything really that ticks them off while they’re in such a state), but rarely do they kill each other.

So what had gone so wrong with these two mammoths?

Unluckily for both, each had one broken and one full length tusk, meaning the two could get in close to each other, far closer than most mammoths normally could. Fighting, they jabbed and stabbed at each other, with one managing to strike the other in the eye with its broken tusk. At some point during the struggle both managed to encircle their good tusk behind the head of the other and they became interlocked. Exhausted, both fell (it’s been speculated spring rains had made the normally bone dry Nebraskan soils slippery), and it’s the way they fell that brought about their deaths. The fossils were found in such a way the weight of one elephant lay on the tusk of the other, so for one to get up it literally had to lift the other enormous bull with it at the same time- an impossibility even for these brawny beasts. Trapped, both animals lay facing each other until they died.

In a tongue-in-cheek nod to another pair of famous fossil duellists, the mammoths were nicknamed Cope and Marsh- the two palaeontologists from the famous ‘Bone Wars’ who between them collected and described almost every iconic American dinosaur. They had begun their careers as friends, and ended them as bitterest enemies.

Examination has revealed Marsh was slightly older, but Cope had larger tusks, and just like these mammoths, O.C. Marsh had been older, and the work E. D. Cope produced far more abundant. The comparison it must be said between the four is a fair one.

Such important specimens deserve a special home, and the University of Nebraska placed the mammoths at the Trailside Museum, a building that was once an army theatre. Here they dominate the display, with a large wooden walkway built around the beasts so visitors can see them from all angles. Behind them is a mural that was hauntingly familiar. The artist turned out to be Mark Marcuson, the very same artist who painted the life-sized mammoth mural at Morrill Hall at the University of Nebraska (as reviewed in my previous article, the parade of elephants http://bonerooms.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=5)

There’s also a mammoth standing at the front entrance which, I believe, is either a copy of Marsh (or Cope) and was possibly made from the unseen half of one mammoth.

The museums cabinets also hold numerous fossils from the region, mostly ice age mammals like horses (Mesohippus), rhinos (Menoceras), camels (Stenomylus) and bison- there’s also a few dinosaur bones (Stegosaurus) and even a mosasaur skull (Tylosaurus).

At one end there’s a set of stairs heading up to a small balcony, and bounding up there (yes, I do bound) to get a photo of the entire room I noticed a stuffed bison in the corner. Not so unusual for Nebraska I dare say, but this specific animal comes with a tag, noting it had been shot by Buffalo Bill himself.

The museum isn’t the only interesting thing to see here either as it’s situated at Fort Robinson, famous as the launching point for the US cavalry’s final move on the Lakota and Ogallala tribes situated in the Dakotas. It was also here the famed Sioux warrior, Crazy Horse, surrendered and was killed- and today a plaque marks the spot of his death. Sadly I wasn’t aware of this at the time or else I’d have visited the spot…and this, after all, is what my blog is all about, making sure people don’t miss the important things when they’re visiting a museum. It was also a prisoner of war camp for German soldiers during the Second World War.

Surrounding the entire region, on the very edge of the grass prairies the fort is situated in, are rows of weathered, steep bluffs. These make this part of the Nebraskan Badlands look a little like a mini-monument valley. Pulling over to the side of the road and using the zoom on my camera, I noticed some odd looking animals grazing along the edge of the tree line at the base of those cliffs.

To my eternal pleasure they turned out to be something of a living fossil (or a better way of describing them, an Ice Age survivor), the Pronghorn Antelope. Considered the fastest animal in North America, the Pronghorn evolved when an entirely different type of cat prowled America’s endless prairies- the Miracinonyx or American cheetah.

Though not the largest museum in the world, Nebraska’s Trailside Museum is most certainly worth the drive, as is the local scenery….and if you, go say hi to Pattie for me.

DIRECTIONS:

 The Museum is located in historic Fort Robinson State Park. Three miles west of Crawford, NE, on Highway 20, about 2 hours from Interstate 80.