An ancient university

In Cambridge earlier this week, I enjoyed a visit to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, which I never actually went to while I was studying there. It's like a smaller version of the Natural History Museum but with the distinct advantage that I was the only visitor.

At the heart of the collection are 1.5 million fossils, mostly collected in the late Victorian period and still bearing Victorian labels. Chalk, clay and cliffs yielded huge numbers of fossils of every sort of life form: sea urchins, fish, sponges, molluscs, ferns. And bigger stuff: the hippopotamus skull shown here was excavated in the chalk pits at Barrington in Cambridge. This was the evidence that dramatically changed nineteenth-century minds about the origins and development of life and the earth itself, and which showed that climate change is nothing new.

There's also a very fine minerals gallery, with lucid and non-patronising labelling explaining the crystallography of the specimens.

Commercialisation has started to reach this part of the University in the form of a gift shop. But it hasn't got very far. They don't publish a guide book to the collection. Instead, for the grand total of £7.50, I bought some very pretty samples of:
Quartz
Amethyst
Iron Pyrites
Fossilised Nautiloid
Peacock Ore
Agate slice
Haematite
Obsidian
Fluorite

Fortunately Easyjet has a more generous luggage allowance than Ryanair.