Jurassic Park Ground Zero

Or maybe closer to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Those who recall the end of that film and the vast warehouse full of strange possibly arcane treasures all boxed up would be delighted. This is Scotlands equivalent, specimens that aren't in museums. Today we were here.




There are thousands, possibly millions of fossils in this place, dinosaurs, amniotes, creatures that still haven't been identified.

This is some kind of ancient animal. No one knows what it is.


No one knows what this is either.


Trouble is there aren't enough people to examine the contents of all those cabinets. Work has been done but there's much more to do. We were there to see the relatives of this lady https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/natural-sciences/westlothiana-lizziae/ because the area where I live has been chock with fossils, especially around the quarry where she was discovered. Lizzy, Lizzy, amniote, reptile, amphibian, what were you? The scientists - no, I need to get into the spirit of this - the boffins still don't know, and discussions continue. The curator - aptly named 'Stig' - showed us choice bits and pieces. If DNA material could be extracted from this stuff, all we need is to terraform the right asteroid into Earth crucible, and we might be able to reproduce at least a couple of the processes. Yes, the problems of Jurassic Park wouldn't be completely impossible, but in fairness no natural disaster could account for Dickie Attenborough's accent so we can rest easy there.

Going back through my photos, I have signally failed to capture the magic that made us want to stay all night opening cabinets. So instead of trying to record that incredible world of icthyosaurs and allosaurs and tiny crocodiles and turtles on Skye and strange fish with long terrible teeth swimming their way around the Edinburgh suburbs, I will just put my favourite here; it's 55 million years old, the skull of some kind of roller bird, like the lilac breasted rollers we saw in Botswana. You can see its spinal cord going into the cranial base. To me it is a beautiful delicate thing. Also, I love the fact that birdsong is older than mankind.



Here's the heartbreak. Years back they offered a whole heap of fossils to our local museum who weren't interested, probably because of a lack of storage space, so those fossils went into a skip and from there into landfill. You'd think there'd have been the sense to sell them at least.

'Landfill? Where?' Said Badger, awake to the possibilities. As for me, I told them in all seriousness, 'don't ever do that again. You need somewhere to store them, I'll get a skip and I'll keep them in my garage, my house, some facility, we'll find a way. You have my contact details. I'm serious.' He took it seriously too. I'd cover every single wall in bits of old beast before letting snippets of Earth's history be lost forever just because people will not think, and I know R would understand though he might be a bit bemused at first. It's the reconstructed dinosaur in the front garden that's going to take some persuasion.