UK scientists find 'lost' Darwin fossils

[Judi Lynn]

UK scientists find 'lost' Darwin fossils
By Cassandra Vinograd
Associated Press / January 17, 2012

LONDON—British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.

Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled 'C. Darwin Esq."

"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.

More:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2012/01/17/uk_scientists_find_lost_darwin_fossils/

[alfredo]

1. The best digs are those long forgotten drawers in museum basements.

[Mabus]

2. I work as an archivist

and I can attest that those dusty corners and/or boxes contain a lot of "lost" gems.

K&R

[krispos42]

3. K&R for awesomeness.

We need more people to go through and computerize all those archives.