Collections
The Museum is responsible for around 1.5 million fossil, rock and mineral specimens from around the world, encompassing more than 500 million years of Earth's history.
Palaeontology Collections
Curator: Dr Liz Harper
Collections Manager: Dan Pemberton
Collections Assistant, Palaeontology: Matthew Riley
To learn more about the palaeontology collections, please contact Matthew Riley.
Mineralogy and Petrology Collections
Curator: Professor Michael Carpenter
Collections Manager: Dan Pemberton
Conservation Facility
The Geological Conservation Unit was founded in 1991 as the conservation unit for collections of the Sedgwick Museum and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. The Unit has a fully equipped laboratory where we do conservation work and prepare objects for display.
The specimens on display in the gallery are just a fraction of the entire collection. Most of the Museum's specimens are stored in environmentally controlled rooms at the Conservation Unit.
Research Activities
Into the Field Again: Re-Examining Charles Darwin's 1835 Geological Work on Isla Santiago (James Island) in the Galápagos Archipelago
A dispute over the provenance of some of Charles Darwin’s rock collection, now housed at Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, led to an expedition to the Galapagos two years ago that in turn has resulted in an entirely new analysis of the geology of the Archipelago. The specimens are part of a collection of some 2500 rocks, minerals and fossils collected by Darwin on his 1831–1836 voyage aboard HMS Beagle.
Read the web story in full ...
Download the full article in PDF format as published in Earth Sciences History, v. 28, No.1, 2009, pp. 1-31.
Collection level descriptions
A to Z Index: List of Donors
Click on a letter below to search for information held on this website.
This directory provides an alphabetical listing of our donor collection level discriptions' (CLDs) Here you can find the collection biography and discription, you may then download the nformation file (PDF format).
