Found: Darwin’s long-lost fossil collection

By Clive Cookson

A “treasure trove” of fossils collected by the greatest biologists of the early 19th century, including Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker, has been rediscovered after being lost for more than 150 years.
Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, found the collection – 314 glass slides containing thin, polished slices of fossilised plants – in an old cabinet at the headquarters of the British Geological Survey near Nottingham.
While looking for specimens for a research project, he noticed some drawers marked “unregistered fossil plants” and pulled one open to take a look. “What I found made my jaw drop,” he says. “Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets.
“Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled ‘C. Darwin Esq.’ This turned out to be a piece of fossil wood collected by Darwin during his famous voyage on the Beagle in 1834.”
Further investigation showed that the famous botanical explorer Joseph Hooker, who was Darwin’s best friend, assembled the collection while working for the British Geological Survey in 1846. It also includes fossils that Hooker himself found during an intrepid voyage in the southern oceans in 1840; others came from John Henslow, Darwin’s mentor at Cambridge.
Another important part of the collection was created by William Nicol, an Edinburgh geologist who, in the 1820s, invented the process of mounting a fossil on a glass plate and then grinding it down to a translucent slice just 0.05mm thick, for study under a microscope. His technique was quickly adopted by Darwin, Hooker and Henslow.
The collection was lost because Hooker failed to number the specimens in the formal register before setting out on an expedition to the Himalayas in the late 1840s. The “unregistered” fossils were moved to the Museum of Practical Geology in Piccadilly in 1851 and then transferred to the Geological Museum in South Kensington in 1935 and finally on to the British Geological Survey HQ in 1985.
By then their significant past was long forgotten.
Some of the specimens are far larger than today’s microscope slides, measuring up to 15cm by 10cm, and very beautiful.
Besides the collection’s aesthetic and historical significance – it accounts for about one-third of the fossil specimens left by Darwin and his circle – it remains scientifically important. “We might get a dozen [scientific] papers by examining the specimens in the Hooker collection,” says Falcon-Lang.
The British Geological Survey has set up an online museum to showcase the Hooker collection.

Publicado en The Financial Times (London), 27/1/2012

Imagen: Left, a piece of a 40-million-year-old tree fossil from Chiloe Island, Chile, collected by Charles Darwin in 1834. Right, a cross-section of a 300-million-year-old club moss tree collected by Joseph Hooker in 1846