'Lost' Darwin plant fossils rediscovered
25 January 2012
A collection of fossilised plants discovered by Darwin has emerged from 165 years of obscurity after a palaeontologist discovered them by accident in an old cabinet hidden away in the vaults of the British Geological Survey (BGS) headquarters near Nottingham.
The fossils had been labelled 'unregistered fossil plants' because an administrative mistake in 1846 by Darwin's friend, the plant collector Joseph Hooker, meant they were never numbered in the Survey's specimen register.
They were moved several times and finally forgotten altogether until palaeontologist Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, of Royal Holloway, University of London, spotted them.
'What I found inside the drawer made my jaw drop,' he said. 'Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled 'C. Darwin Esq'.'
The drawer contained hundreds of glass slides made by polishing fossilised wood into thin translucent sheets so they could be studied under microscopes. They include fossil wood collected by Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle in 1834, and a specimen from Hooker's own collection of prototaxites, a fungus the size of a tree which grew 400 million years ago.
The specimens are now the subject of an online museum exhibit on the BGS website.