The Lapworth Museum, Birmingham

Named after the geologist Charles Lapworth (1842-1920), this museum is part of the University of Birmingham and has a fine collection of fossils and early geological maps, some of which are illustrated on the website. Among the world-renowned fossil lagerstätten represented in its collections is the Wenlock Limestone of the West Midlands and Welsh Borders (Silurian period). The museum also houses many manuscript works of Lapworth himself, a leading authority on the extinct plankton group called graptolites. Graptolites proved to be one of the keys to resolving the depositional sequence of strata in the Southern Uplands of Scotland. Lapworth showed that there was a significant gap between the Cambrian and Silurian periods, which he named the Ordovician.

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Renowned for its neo-Gothic architecture within and without, this spectacular building was completed in 1860 and now houses the university’s palaeontological and zoological collections. You could spend a whole day here, for this is a real museum, not a playground, and in the happiest of ways it engages the interest of people at all levels, young and old. There is plenty to touch, from fossilised dinosaur eggs to stuffed animals, and plenty to see. Many of the exhibits are as spectacular as the building.

The experience starts even before you enter. Sunk into the lawn are casts of dinosaur footprints from a quarry in nearby Ardley, made by Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur ever to be described (by William Buckland in 1824). Inside a thicket of slender pillars greets the visitor, and before long you realise that the animals within the thicket are more alive than dead. A giant of an iguanadon takes centre stage, chased by an even more massive Tyrannosaurus, while row upon row of display cabinets introduce you to the main groups of vertebrate, from fish to mammals. One cabinet holds the world’s most complete remains of a dodo, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice in Wonderland, another holds clutches of dinosaur eggs from Henan province, China, another an ichthyosaur so well preserved that you can trace around its skeleton the outline of its body.

The building is also famous for hosting, one year after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, a debate on evolution between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. A plaque by a door on the first-floor gallery marks the spot, close to two panels that discuss in some depth the protagonists and substance of the debate. Darwin’s ideas are mentioned in numerous places, and one caption even suggests that natural selection provides an explanation for animal camouflage, but perhaps the truest words are these, commenting on the debate:

The adoption of any scientific explanation, such as natural selection, is never independent of what is going on around the scientist. Social and political ideas affect the acceptance of scientific ones, as well as vice versa. It is easy to imagine scientists as seekers after absolute truth, which once found will allow society to identify and attain goals for its betterment. In practice, socio-political systems may dictate, consciously or subconsciously, what scientists are allowed to find out, and different philosophical commitments may dictate whether absolute truth is thought to be attainable or not. Scientists are people too, and their personalities affect their science and that of others.

The reader is left to consider for himself what systems of belief control or influence the scientific pursuit of truth today.

There is much more to be enjoyed along the gallery. Magnificent displays of stuffed birds stand against the wall. On the opposite side of the walkway another series does much the same for the living world of shellfish, parading the glorious colours, markings and shapes of the oceans’ bivalves and gastropods. But the biggest omission from the survey of animal groups below is any sampling of the Insecta. At the top of the stairs a board studded with jewel-like beetles, butterflies and a host of other hexapods announces what is yet in store:

There are 1.25 million known animal species on Earth – 75% are insects. Insects are key components of every food chain – without them global ecosystems would collapse.

Perhaps that simple observation offers a profounder insight into their origin than any Darwinian presuppositions. Insects exist not because they are accidents of nature but because they play a vital role in communities that are much bigger than themselves. Whether prey or predator, organisms are interdependent, and both their origin and their subsequent diversification can be understood in the context of creation, cataclysm and ecological recovery. So take time to study and marvel at the different insect orders on display: the crickets, the termites, the praying mantids, the stick insects, the earwigs, the flies. And don’t miss the case teeming with live Madagascan hissing cockroaches up to three inches long. As we said at the beginning, there is something for everyone in this museum.

The Rotunda Museum, Scarborough

Built in 1828, the Rotunda is the oldest geological museum in Britain and after a period of refurbishment was re-opened in May 2008. It was founded in order to illustrate the work of the pioneering stratigrapher William Smith (1769-1839), dubbed ‘the father of English geology’. Smith showed that particular fossils occurred only in the strata of particular periods and could therefore enable strata from different areas to be correlated with one another. This ‘principle of faunal succession’ was a crucial first step in piecing together Earth history on a regional and ultimately global scale. In 1799 Smith produced the world’s first geological map, showing the distribution of rocks around Bath, and in 1815 he published the first geological map of England and Wales. His main purpose was practical, an ability to map rocks hidden from view being important for canal-building and mining. He offered no explanation as to why fossil species had such a restricted stratigraphic range.

The museum consists of three main areas. One, ‘Shell Geology Now’, shows video interviews of geologists who tell what it is like working in the field they have chosen, be it oil exploration, fossil preparation or researching dinosaur tracks. Also interesting is a display of the newly discovered ‘Speeton plesiosaur’ from the Lower Cretaceous. It shows signs of predation by other animals, and oysters are said to have colonised some bones. Another area on the same floor, ‘Gateway to the Dinosaur Coast,’ is a disappointment: hackneyed in its reference to dinosaurs and only superficially child-friendly – the games amuse a little but educate hardly at all. The one redeeming feature here is a wonderful slab of fossilised invertebrates if you know to search for it at knee level. The third area is the rotunda gallery, the heart of the museum. Visually this is stunning, and with perseverance you can make some sense of its exhibits. But they try to do too much, presenting material on the social history of Scarborough, its natural history and even some Egyptology as well as on Smith himself, who consequently gets crowded out.

Above the showcases is a diorama of the geology of Yorkshire’s coast as published by Smith’s nephew, John Phillips. The Jurassic sequences along this coast are of international renown, the basin in which they accumulated being one of several fault- bounded depocentres that developed as Pangaea broke up to form the continents known to us today. The most important fossils for determining the relative chronology of Jurassic sequences are ammonites. These make for ideal zonal fossils, since they tend to be plentiful, of wide geographical distribution and, owing to their rapid evolution, of narrow stratigraphical range. Several beautiful specimens are illustrated here. Smith’s pioneering work in establishing the sequence of zonal fossils for the British Jurassic culminated in his Stratigraphical System of Organised Fossils of 1817. He lived in Scarborough from 1824 to 1826.