Our county museum collections have many uses and mean many things to many people. Displays and exhibitions at Market Hall Museum, in county libraries and other venues are key examples of our visibility, but much else goes on, behind the scenes.
Recently, Nic Minter, an Associate Professor at the University of Portsmouth, paid a visit to our collections centre at Hawkes Point on a special mission. Nic is involved with an international project to study ‘trace fossils’ – fossilised tracks, burrows, and other traces of extinct life – in museum collections in many parts of the world. Ultimately, Nic’s research will feed into a state-of-the-art academic publication – The ‘Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology’.
Trace fossils
Nic visited Hawkes Point to look at one specific set of trace fossils. I collected these nearly 25 years ago from a now-flooded cement quarry just north of Southam, at a time when field collecting for the museum collections was an important part of the curator role. These peculiar little markings, preserved in sedimentary rock, were created by Jurassic shrimps burrowing into the muddy floor of an ancient sea that covered Warwickshire, 200 million years ago.
The specimens were originally studied, described, and named by a postgraduate student from the University of Bristol, 15 years ago. The scientific name, ‘Solusichnium southamensis’, means ‘only little trace from Southam’, in Latin.
A grand tour
Nic’s visit to Hawkes Point was just one stop on a grand tour, taking in collections housed by the British Geological Survey, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Yale University’s Peabody Museum, Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. All of us here at Heritage & Culture Warwickshire are looking forward to seeing one of Southam’s earliest inhabitants take its rightful place on the global stage.
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