The museum’s Geology collection includes minerals, rocks and fossils from East Anglia and further afield.
Objects of particular note include the mineral specimens from Sir John St. Aubyn, Dr. W. Babbington, George Stacey Gibson and J.E. Drew, collected from mines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include examples of sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous rocks.
A particular strength of the fossil collection is the fossilised remains of animals from the Chalk and Red Crag seas that once covered East Anglia. There are local chalk and boulder clay fossils and remains of animals from the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene period. Most fossils date from the Caenozoic and Mesozoic eras of geological time. You will also find Ichthyosaur bones, marine reptiles from the age of the dinosaurs, and part of the fossilised stem of a giant horsetail fern.
Objects in our Geology collection are on display in the Earth Beneath Our Feet gallery. You can also see a glacial erratic boulder (or septarian nodule), weighing around 2 tons, on display in the museum grounds! Many more objects are kept in storage and can be viewed by appointment.
Here are digital copies of the gallery text labels: