Dry Storeroom No. 1 (2 page)

To trace my journey behind the scenes, follow me along one of the few galleries remaining from the old days of the Museum, one flanked by a high wall lined with cases bearing the fossils of ancient marine reptiles: ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. They look as if they are swimming along this wall, one above the other, making a kind of Jurassic dolphin pod (although of course they are not biologically related to those similar-looking living mammals). They comprise a famous collection, including some specimens that are the basis of a fossil species name. One of the ichthyosaurs probably died in the process of giving birth to live young, although few visitors notice the label explaining this curious and fascinating fact. Several of the skeletons were dug out by the pioneer fossil collector Mary Anning, who was one of very few women scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century; on summer afternoons an actress may play the part of Miss Anning on the gallery, much to the bemusement of Japanese visitors who think she must be selling something. At the end of the gallery stands the skeleton of a giant sloth from South America, geologically very much younger than the ichthyosaurs. This fine specimen is routinely mistaken for a dinosaur by the more desultory Museum visitors, but it is a mammal, albeit of a special and monstrous kind. Behind the sloth there is a door. And behind the door lies the Department of Palaeontology, home of the really old fossils.

Pen-and-ink drawing of a Jurassic plesiosaur, made by pioneer fossil collector Mary Anning in 1824

The door opens with a special key. When I first joined the Museum, the keys were issued every day from a key pound staffed by a warder. Every department had a coloured disc attached to the key, a different colour for Botany, Palaeontology, the Office, or whatever. Each member of staff had an individual number. So when I arrived at the key pound in the morning I had to cry out “47 Grey!” and within a few seconds I would be handed my keys by a uniformed warder. When a member of staff became well known to the warder, the arrival of the right keys might anticipate the hollering. The keys were massive, old-fashioned steel affairs such as you might expect to be carried by a “screw” in a prison, or by a miser to open an antique oak chest, and they turned in the locks with a satisfying clunk. There was a specialist locksmith hidden away somewhere in the bowels of the Museum, whose job it was to oil the locks, and keep the keys turning. I soon learned that had I attempted to get into the room where the precious gems were stored I would have discovered that my keys would not fit into that particular lock. There were hierarchies of trust. Presumably only the Director had keys that worked in every lock. We were instructed to keep the keys on our person at all times. Graven into the metalwork were the words “20 shillings reward if found,” a measure of the antiquity of the keys, since even in the early 1970s a quid was not much of a reward. From time to time the Secretary would tour the Museum to see which naughty boys and girls had left their keys upon their desks while they went off for a cup of tea, and a ticking-off from above by means of a pompous memorandum would follow. An even worse crime was unwittingly to walk out of the Museum bearing the precious keys. At the end of the working day, the warder could spot a miscreant by an unfilled space in the ranks of keys. Forgetful members of staff were commanded to come back late at night from Brighton or East Grinstead to restore their keys to the hook. A dressing-down would follow from the head of department the following day. The locks were changed in the 1980s to modern Yale varieties, but the new keys were still tailored to different security needs, so I still cannot get to steal the diamonds. By one of those weird volte-faces that only bureaucratic institutions can manage, it is now against the rules to
fail
to take the keys home with you.

Let us go through the doors to the collections. They are housed in a long gallery, across which run banks of cabinets, each some ten yards or so long. There are fifty-seven such banks on the ground floor of the Palaeontology Department, every cabinet neatly sealed by a sliding door designed to keep out the dust. Most of the doors are locked as they are supposed to be. But there is one that has obviously not been sealed away. Carefully slide open the door, and there lies revealed a series of a dozen or so mahogany drawers inside each cabinet. There are labels attached to the middle of the drawers, any one of which might be deeper than the typical cutlery drawer at home. A curator has written a scientific name of an animal in a neat hand on the label, together with some locality information. Pull open the drawer and peer inside: it slides easily on metal runners. There are white cardboard trays on which rest a number of what are evidently bones of various kinds. Even without specialist knowledge it is possible to recognize teeth of several varieties, alongside fragments of limb bones. One of the teeth is a very stout affair, a kind of ribbed washboard on a massive bony base—this is completely characteristic of the elephant family, a monument of masticatory might. These teeth allow elephants to crush tough vegetation of many kinds. All the bones and teeth are more or less stained a yellowish colour. And all of them are fossils, retrieved from the ground by searching strata, digging or scraping in quarries or cliffs; they have acquired the stain of time from their long interment of several hundred thousand years, possibly as a result of the action of iron-rich fluids. Every fragment, no matter how unspectacular it is, tells a story about past time; each one is a talisman for unlocking history. The specimens in this drawer are all fossil mammals, distant cousins of the sloth that guards the entrance to the department.

The collections in this particular part of the Museum and in this particular aisle are devoted to vertebrates from the geologically recent period known as the Pleistocene, a time slice that includes the last ice ages. Inside the tray on which each fossil rests there is a neatly written label which tells us that this particular collection was derived from the cliffs at Easton Bavents, near Southwold in the county of Suffolk, a place where the sea is eroding some of the youngest rocks in Britain, though they are still over a million years old. Sharp-eyed local collectors had spotted these organic remains as winter storms excavated them from the soft sandy cliffs. Had they not been collected and housed in a museum, a few seasons of weathering on those harsh shores would have reduced the bones to meaningless rubble. So the Museum provides a way of cheating decay, of sequestering information from the degradations of time. Doubtless, each specimen provoked a thrill of recognition in its discoverer, the satisfaction of a search rewarded. This single drawer preserves the record of days of endeavour and an archive of pleasure in discovery, or secret gloating over finding the best specimens of the season. Each bone could tell a story of the relative roles of luck and perseverance in science. Fossil fragments have an eloquence that belies their yellowish uniformity. Perhaps the observer will feel a twinge of disappointment at the incompleteness of the specimens, having seen reconstructions in books and films of whole animals striding about the landscape. These remains are just scraps, bits and pieces, odds and ends. The truth is that much fossil material is like this. The skill of the scientist often lies in being able to identify small pieces of a whole animal: from tooth to elephant. Every morsel of the past is useful.

The writing on the labels does not betray any drama of discovery. Old labels like these are written in the hand of the curator at the time the specimen is identified. They are small slips, about the size of one of those special postage stamps issued by countries like San Marino. The writing has to be very neat. Old labels are frequently found written in the copperplate script preferred by the Victorians. Newer ones favour small, neat script. Everything is written in Indian ink so that time will not allow the messages to fade. After all, the 1753 Act of Parliament that set up the British Museum specified that the collections “shall remain and be preserved in the Museum for public use for all posterity.” These labels were meant to last. An old label is a message from a curator whom one might never have met, but a little personal message on paper nonetheless. There was a time when the hiring of curators was accompanied by a writing test; nobody with overly large writing would be employed, nor any scribblers, nor any who employed extravagant curlicues. Graphologists would have had a very dull time with those who came through the interviews. More recently, the computer has replaced the skilled human being, as so often, so that neat little labels can be spewed out of a laser printer at the touch of a button. In future, labels will always be impersonal (and if there is a mistake, probably nobody will know who made it). At the top of the label accompanying the large tooth is the Latin, or scientific, name of the animal concerned:
Mammuthus primigenius
—an ancient mammoth. Any visiting scientist will recognize that name. The rock formation from which it was recovered (Easton Bavents Formation) is given next. The age of the specimen within the Pleistocene period follows. Beneath this again is the locality, specified quite precisely. Nowadays a locality might well be given by a GPS position, but British specimens could be fairly precisely located by reference to the national grid, and I have seldom had a problem relocating a locality if this information was given. Then there is the name of the collector of the specimen, who also happened to donate it to the Museum “for all posterity.” Many labels will include more information, especially if the specimen to hand has been mentioned or figured in a scientific paper. This is how the importance of the material is conveyed to the outside world: not everybody can come to root around in the drawers of the Museum to see the specimens themselves. Specimens are made known to experts around the world primarily through catalogues and technical publications. So the label might also bear something like: “Figured by Ann T. Quarian in
Transactions of the Society for Ancient Things
Volume 1, Plate 1 figure 2.”

That is just one specimen taken at random from a single drawer in a rank of drawers in just one cupboard from one row of cabinets. Some drawers may contain a hundred specimens or more—the next one down includes tiny vole teeth, for example. There may be a dozen or more drawers in a single rank; and there are some ten ranks of drawers in a row. On this floor there are fifty-seven rows or lines of cabinets; except where very large specimens are accommodated, almost every drawer carries a full burden of specimens. In this department alone there are three floors of fossil collections of comparable or greater size. That adds up to a very large complement of drawers, and a vast number of specimens. It does not require a calculation to show that only a tiny fraction of the material held by the Museum is on display to the public: the galleries show the merest sample from a colossal collection. In the secret world behind the scenes there is no shortage of specimens; indeed, one of the main problems is how to accommodate the sheer bulk of new material. Much of it is fragmentary, like the Easton Bavents bones. Its value is scientific and it would not fetch much on the open market. A few specimens are precious and valuable in their own right. “Million dollar fossils” might include the famous original of the Jurassic bird
Archaeopteryx
or the exquisitely preserved fossils of Cretaceous fishes from Brazil. But that is not why we have museums with collections of natural history specimens. A few scraps of bone can tell us what the climate was like three hundred thousand years ago: that is a value that cannot be reckoned in euros or dollars.

My first office was not in the present palaeontology wing, which was officially opened in 1977—by which time I was already an old hand. I originally had an office in the old building, tucked away in the basement beside the main entrance. On busy days I could hear the chattering of children as they swarmed up the steps. It was a hugely tall room, and not like an office at all, lit from a large window that looked out on to the lawn in front of the Museum. The collections—my part of the collections—were stored within the room in old storage cabinets. The office was so tall that it had an extra gallery halfway up, reached by a steel staircase. If I wanted to examine some part of the collections, I would have to clunk up the stairs, carrying my hand lens, like an antiquarian gaoler, and open drawers in this upper storey. There were railings all around it to ensure that I did not fall off. The cabinets were beautifully crafted. Each drawer had an independently suspended glass top to keep out the dust. The mortise and tenon joints that formed the corners of the drawers would have struck dumb any carpenter. Labels on the front of each drawer recorded the scientific names of the fossils within. They were cupboards made for eternity. From my first day in that office I felt like an expert—the man from the BM.