Trinity College Dublin's small natural history museum has some unique specimens, including fossils of some of the world's first land plants, writes Bernie Dwan
Do you know how many meteorites have fallen on Ireland over the past 200 years? Would you like to see a 430-million-year-old land plant or some of the oldest land animals in the world? Or how about examining the coprolite or fossilised dung of an ichthyosaur - a marine reptile that lived 150 million years ago?
You can see these and more in one of Ireland's historic scientific gems, hidden away on the second floor of the museum building beside the croquet lawn in Trinity College. With collections dating back to 1777, the main palaeontological holdings include Irish silurian and carboniferous invertebrates, mesozoic ostracods, and upper palaeozoic miospores. It is here that you will see a chunk of the meteorite that fell in Dundrum, Co Tipperary, in 1865, and a piece of the Adare meteorite that fell in 1813.
Its forerunner, the Dublin University Museum, was really a general museum of curiosities including items brought back from the South Sea Islands by James Cooke's surgeon. The present curator, Patrick Wyse Jackson is indeed an enthusiastic and animated proponent of his science and takes particular pleasure in conducting primary school tours. "Apart from showing them some fantastic fossils, I try to bring it home to them that geology is all around them," he says.
For Wyse Jackson, the type specimens hidden away in a cupboard are priceless because they are the unique items that describe a species. "If you find a new fossil you have to describe it," he says.
"A paleontologist will go through all of the old literature looking for a similar example. If they discover it hasn't been noted before they fully describe it, illustrate it and designate it as the type specimen for their new species. If somebody wants to do research they need to go back to the original to see if you are comparing like with like. If there was a fire and somebody asked me what I would rescue first, I would go straight to the type cupboards and save them first."
The mineral collection largely dates from the 1820s and contains both Irish and foreign specimens. "Specimens from the Dingle peninsula are particularly interesting, containing a variety of marine organisms and corals to little brachiopods to trace fossils where you get burrows," he says.
"In Ireland during both the Silurian and the later period of the Carboniferous, we had lots of corals, which suggest that Ireland was covered in warm tropical water.
"Perhaps the nicest material from the Dingle peninsula are these trilobites - arthropods that looked somewhat like woodlice and are related to crabs," he adds. "A dentist drill was used to drill out all the limestone rock around these fossils - a task that would have taken thousands of hours - it is one of the highlights of this collection."
He next points out a fossil plant that looks the least attractive in the collection, but is one of the most important. Discovered in the late 1970s, it just looks like a shard of rock but when you take a microscope to it you can actually see a stem which breaks into two branches with oval shapes on top.
It dates from the Silurian period of 430 million years ago and it came from the Devil's Bit mountain in Co Tipperary. "It was probably growing on algae on the shoreline and is one the earliest examples of a land plant in the world," says Wyse Jackson.
And finally to what is known as the Jarrow Fauna. "Our most important specimens are some early vertebrates - small amphibians with tiny skulls and limbs preserved on coal from Jarrow colliery in Co Kilkenny," he explains.
"They were found in the 1860s and subsequently acquired by Prof Wright who lectured in zoology in Trinity. They are important because they are an early example of land animals and there are only two or three other examples in the world of such faunas."