Question: What is the most surprising thing you have ever found at the museum?

Christopher Dean answered on 12 Jan 2021:

You find all sorts of surprising things in the museum! When people were collecting fossils back in the 1800’s or early 1900’s, they didn’t have the kind of storage boxes that we use today to keep the collections safe, so they would often use things like tobacco tins, pie boxes, or other random items to store fossils! So you’ll often come across fossils in old matchboxes, which was quite surprising to me.

However, the most surprising thing was when I was working in the museum collections one day when I was asked by a curator if I was able to help open a large, old crate that they’d found whilst moving some things around. We got a crowbar and opened it up and it was filled with just straw and loads of newspapers from the 1930’s! Very odd!