Dry Storeroom No. 1 (24 page)

Behind the scenes in the Museum. The leather-bound learned volumes and sports jacket of the traditional image;

Behind the scenes in the Museum. The white coat and dust-free conditions of the modern DNA laboratory.

Living colonial bryozoan
Adeona
in the warm seas of South Australia (
see, for example, Chapter 9
).

Virtual image of the Silurian fossil ostracod
Colymbosathon ecplecticos
with its limbs and genitalia remarkably preserved. Below is its living relative.

Entrepreneurial palaeontology: Devonian trilobites laid out for sale on brightly coloured fabric on the roadside in Morocco.

New data from old bones: braincase reconstruction (
below
) of the early bird
Archaeopteryx
prepared by Angela Milner and colleagues, with a full reconstruction to the left.

Excavating the early history of mankind in Britain: digging at Boxgrove, Sussex.

Unconsolidated sediments on the Suffolk coast near these cliffs have recently yielded the most ancient evidence of humans in Britain (
see Chapter 3
).

Cichlid fish have been a long-term subject of study among the zoologists: this is
Tropheus moorii,
one of many species endemic to Lake Tanganyika, Africa.

Coin-like fossils of nummulites from the early Cenozoic (Eocene),
Nummulites laevigatus
(Brugiere), Whitecliff Bay, Isle of Wight; see section through a fossil on lower right to understand what Kirkpatrick thought he saw in thin sections (
see Chapter 4
).

About as perfect as fossils can be: a sea spider (pycnogonid) reconstructed from thin sections through a hard nodule preserved with Silurian rocks in Herefordshire, England, by Derek Siveter and colleagues. At right, its living relative.

The commanding Sir Joseph Banks, Bt., the most powerful man in eighteenth-century British science (
see
Banksia
on plate 4
). Oil on canvas by Thomas Phillips,
1810
.