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After the Flood
A strange case of mistaken identity
I’ve taken ages to write this — not because it’s difficult, but because it doesn’t have a punchline. But does every piece need to finish neatly?
Years ago on a visit to the Natural History Museum — when it was still called the British Museum (Natural History) — I saw a fossil that captured my imagination. To be accurate, lots of fossils captured my imagination — truck tyre-sized ammonites with their off-road tread, Mary Anning’s ichthyosaur and plesiosaur, an Archaeopteryx pressed between the pages of a limestone book…
Like the German Archaeopteryx, this fossil was still in its matrix, but a palaeontologist’s tools had etched the rock from around its petrified skeleton. I don’t know if what I saw in the Natural History Museum was the original on loan from the Teylers Museum in the Netherlands, a cast of it, or a different specimen from the NHM’s own collection. But I do remember it on display in one of Alfred Waterhouse’s cathedral-like halls.
The creature was about a metre long and it was displayed vertically, as if standing up. It was a strange-looking beast, but you expect strange when it comes to fossils. A…
