‘Lost’ Darwin fossils found

SCIENTISTS have found scores of fossils which evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 160 years.

Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said yesterday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a “gloomy corner” of the British Geological Survey centre.

Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labelled “C Darwin Esq”.

“It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin’s signature on the slide,” the paleontologist said, adding he soon realised it was a “quite important and overlooked” specimen.

He described it as “a heart in your mouth situation” and said he wondered: “Goodness, what have I discovered!”

Falcon-Lang’s find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including botanist John Hooker and the Rev John Henslow, Darwin’s mentor at Cambridge whose daughter later married Hooker.

The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which laid the foundation for his work on evolution.

Falcon-Lang said the fossils — lost for 165 years — show there is more to learn from a period scientists thought they knew well.

“To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary,” Falcon-Lang added. “We can see there’s more to learn. There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn’t know existed.”

The discovery was made in April, but it has taken “a long time” to discover the provenance of the slides and photograph all of them, Falcon-Lang said. The slides will be made available to the public through an online museum exhibit which opened yesterday.

John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, called the find a “remarkable” discovery.

“It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.”