October 8, 2016:

by Mark Carnall

This summer, I have spent a lot of time thinking about popularising palaeontology.

On the 16th of September, palaeontological museum curators, researchers, students, authors and performers packed up some of their fossil collections (and even a whole restaurant inside an Iguanodon) and descended upon Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum for the Yorkshire Fossil Festival. The three-day festival was a chance for the public to get up close to fossils and for palaeontologists to enthuse, inspire and engage about evolution, extinction, anatomy and taxonomy. In the evenings it was a rare chance for palaeontologists from across the country to catch up, share news and there was a fair bit of geeking out.

Two days before the Yorkshire Fossil Festival was the Popularising Palaeontology workshop at King’s College London. This was a more formal meeting of curators, researchers, palaeo artists, authors, historians and journalists, who met to discuss the past, present and future of popularising palaeontology.

As a museum professional, my interest lies in how we popularise palaeontology in museum spaces. Museums and their physical specimens still remain one of the prime gateways into communicating palaeontology to a broader audience. Talking to fellow palaeontologists, educators and members of the public, there are a number of threshold challenges in the public understanding of palaeontology that are enduring.

One of the biggest problems is the dominating dinosaurs. Many museum visitors, young and old, assume that palaeontology is just dinosaurs. Every articulated skeleton in a museum must be a dinosaur and every museum must have a dinosaur. So pervasive is this idea, that natural history museum educators spend a lot of their time, telling visitors what isn’t a dinosaur. Can you blame visitors for thinking every skeleton or fossil skeleton must be a dinosaur, however, when so many museum displays, touring exhibitions, popular palaeontological books, images in this article and museum shop merchandise focus on little else?
Britain's oldest dinosaur fossil found on North Yorkshire coast

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Another challenge is the idea that palaeontology, or at least interesting palaeontology, is something that we don’t have in the UK. This does seem to vary regionally. At the Yorkshire Fossil Festival, people of all ages could recognise an ammonite and many had collected these fossils locally, even if they didn’t know that ammonites were the shells of extinct cephalopod molluscs. In other parts of the country where fossil sites are a less obvious part of the local landscape, people are nearly always surprised to learn that mammoths, plesiosaurs, hippos and yes, even dinosaurs were stomping (and swimming around) in their neighbourhood millions of years ago.

This is where the amazing range of the UK’s palaeontological museums come in and not just the larger better known ones. Museums up and down the country are filled with local, national and international fossil collections but many of them are not widely known about.

This isn’t just a public perception issue either, many palaeontologist researchers are unaware of the UK’s many museums, collections and important characters from history beyond the Natural History Museum London. For example, there’s no mention of museums at all in the 2015 Geology for Society report by the Geological Society and the European Federation of Geologists, despite museums and palaeontology being one of the key entry points into an interest in geology.

Another common misconception encountered whilst doing outreach for museums, is the idea that museums are more than static display cases and hushed spaces. There’s a pervasive notion that museums are treasure houses guarded by curators who go back into cupboard themselves at the end of the night and that collections definitely aren’t for non-experts, let alone for handling or, dare it be suggested, for being interesting. This is a much bigger challenge that the entire museum sector is working to address. Fighting to maintain free entry and running large public programmes, isn’t enough alone to encourage would-be visitors to step over the threshold of our intimidating public spaces.

One of the best kept secrets about museums is that they are institutions for the public. Increasing accessibility is at the core of most modern museum strategies from outreach and public engagement through to using the latest technology to increase our visitor and user numbers.

The perception that palaeontology happens elsewhere and not in the UK, couldn’t be further from the truth. Many aspects of palaeontology and the popularisation of palaeontology were pioneered in the UK, which has a geological as well as a historical richness exemplified by many UK museums and institutions.

Below is an incomplete list, of some of the UK’s palaeontological museums to hopefully signal boost the diversity and richness of collections and collectors. From national museums, local authority museums and universities, museums are more than just their collections, many have expert staff and active public programmes. The institutional websites are linked to where appropriate, although with rare exception few give a good indication of their galleries and displays or are any good in general (a blog post for another day).

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Worth visiting for the Scelidosaurus family and marine reptile fossils alone.

Dinosaur Isle, Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight’s unique geology and long history of excavations make this dinosaur-focused museum worth visiting.

The Dinosaur Museum, Dorchester. Very family friendly visitor attraction, again dinosaur-themed...

Dorset County Museum One of many Jurassic Coast institutions celebrating the region’s palaeontological history.

Dudley Museum and Art Gallery. If it wasn’t already notable for its collections, it would be for the fact that it’s the only museum and art gallery to state on its website that the most important collections are the geological ones, as opposed to the paintings of naked ladies.

Etches Collection Museum of Jurassic Marine Life, Dorset. A rare new palaeontological museum, due to open in October 2016. A unique collection in the UK focusing on the exquisitely preserved fossils collected by one person all from one geological formation.

Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL, London. Small mixed university collection with zoological and palaeontological displays. Home of awful blog series underwhelming fossil fish of the month.

Great North Museum: Hancock, Newcastle. Large museum with palaeontological collections from Newcastle University. Coal measure collections are a particular strength.

Horniman Museum and Gardens, London. Founded by Frederick John Horniman and includes many specimens he collected. Old-school palaeontology displays with large behind the scenes collection.

The Hunterian, Glasgow University. Currently closed for collections movement. Historically important palaeontological collections, particularly of Scottish fossils.

Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London. Known for its medical and anatomical collections. With anatomist William Hunter as the founder of the collection and Richard Owen as a previous director, this museum contains important palaeontological material examined, cited and figured by both.

The Jurassic Coast, Dorset and East Devon. Not so much one museum as a whole group of museums, visitor centres and ‘a living museum’ in the fossiliferous coastline. Designated as a World Heritage Site.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. A gallery of palaeontological material amongst the paintings and ceramics.

Leeds Museums and Galleries Housing the palaeontological and geological collections from Leeds’ learned societies. The discovery centre housing the stored collections is also worth a visit on special days when it is open.

Ludlow Museum, Shropshire. Not the Lapworth museum. A sizeable collection held in the museum resource centre.

Lyme Regis Museum, Dorset. Closed for the construction of the Mary Anning Wing extension which should tell you all you need to know about its contents.

Natural History Museum London Sometimes referred to as the ‘National History Museum’ in error. The most visited natural history museum in the UK but give the dinosaur gallery a miss during holidays and explore the better Earth galleries instead.

National Museum Cardiff As above but for Wales.

New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. Home of the ‘Rutland dinosaur’ one of the most complete UK dinosaur fossils.

Manchester Museum Part of the University of Manchester with palaeontological collections acquired from Manchester’s learned societies.

Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. This collection contains specimens from important and unique local Mesozoic and Pleistocene deposits.

Rotunda Museum, Scarborough. Museum designed by William Smith, creator of the first geological map of Britain. Beautiful building and important collections of type material- the first fossils of their kind to be described.

Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Devon. Large collection with strengths in local Triassic, Jurassic and Pleistocene fossils.

Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. The Earth Science collections of a lesser-known UK university. Important local and global collections of fossils.

ThinkTank, Birmingham. Large museum/science centre which has increasingly been showcasing some of the fossil specimens from the vast collections.

Ulster Museum, Northern Ireland. Palaeontological collections from all over the world but with a strength in fossils from Ireland.

Whitby Museum, North Yorkshire. Contains many of the fossils first described from Yorkshire.

Wollaton Hall and Park, Nottingham. A rare historic house with palaeontological credentials. Fossil collections from across the globe with a huge deer park to boot.

World Museum, Liverpool. Another huge museum, with one floor dedicated to palaeontological displays. Sadly the historic collections were decimated in the Second World War. Triassic footprints and coal measure plant fossils are important collections.

Yorkshire Museum Yet another palaeontological museum in Yorkshire. At least it’s not Dorset I guess. This museum contains a huge collection of Carboniferous, Mesozoic and tertiary material. Public displays include a very nice marine reptile.

The Geological Curator’s Group maintains a more comprehensive list of regional geological museums and collections, including geology and mineralogical collections although much of the information needs updating.