Thursday, 22 January 2015

WARWICK MUSEUM STORES VISIT

Today I was very lucky to meet a geologist and museum curator Dr Jon Radley who took me on a tour of the museum stores.

When I arrived at the stores, I thought that it might be a bit strange, but when I got inside I went, “Wow!” This is because I was excited to see so many brilliant rocks, fossils and minerals. There were lots of big shelves with over 200,000 specimens that had been collected since the Victorian times. Dr Radley showed me some very exciting and very old specimens, which included:
A giant ammonite fossil and some smaller ones:


 
A fossil of a lake bed.
This is a fossil of a prehistoric straight-tusked elephant that lived in Great Britain up to 115,000 years ago. Dr Radley told me that it used to be hunted by prehistoric hunters that were a bit different to us. Our scientific name is homo sapiens, but they were called homo heidelbergensis. This fossil was found near Stratford on Avon.

A fossil of a dinosaur's footprint.
 
A fossilised tree from the carboniferous period. I can’t believe that it used be like a rainforest around where I live!
 
 
 
There have been quite a few ichthyosaurs found in Warwickshire. This is a baby ichthyosaur. He would have been a fun pet because he was a bit like a dolphin!
 
These are ichthyosaur teeth fossils.
 
My favourite fossils were the trilobites because you can get them in different shape and sizes, and they look like perfect models of the real thing. This is what makes them so interesting.
 


 
I had a great time and learned a lot from Dr Radley.
 

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