Pre-historic Life
Come and see the north-west's own T.rex and countless other fabulous fossils in the Pre-historic Life gallery at The Manchester Museum. The best of the 250, 000 fossils in the Museum have been selected to take you on a journey through time.
The amazing tour of life on Earth over the last 3500 Million years starts with the earliest evidence for life, bacteria found in rocks from Australia and Canada. From these humble beginnings wonderful fossils such as trilobites, plants and dinosaurs evolved.
An impressive range of fossil fish evolved in the Devonian about 380 million years ago. The specimens on display show that most of them had strange boney plates which they used as armour.
The Manchester Museum has one of the best collections of fossil plants in the country. One of the stars of the display is the massive tree stump from Bradford. It is from the Upper Carboniferous coal swamps that covered the north of England around 300 million years ago. The lush fossil ferns and other plants such as horsetails, give an amazing sense of a tropical climate.
A massive slab on display shows the hand-like footprints of a large reptile called Chirotherium from about 250 million years ago. No fossil bones have ever been found of this animal, but scientists think it was a bit like a crocodile. A model shows what it might have looked like.
One of the stars of the fossil collection is a cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex, called Stan. The original fossil was found in South Dakota, USA and was excavated in 1992. The skull is the best ever collected and the skeleton is about 70% complete. The skeleton shows amazing details such as puncture wounds from battles with other T.rex. Vital clues to the environment where Stan lived have come from fossil leaves found with the bones.
Some of the biggest fossils in the museum are from the tropical seas that covered much of Britain in the Lower Jurassic, 180 million years ago. This was a time when large marine reptiles swam through the water chasing their prey. The enormous fossil Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs on display were found on the Yorkshire coast. Ammonites that would have swam through the water like squid, surround the giant reptiles.
Delicate plants and animals do not turn into fossils very often. At The Manchester Museum we have some very rare examples of when conditions were just right to preserve them. The Solenhofen Limestone from Germany represents shallow lagoons where animals fell into soft mud and became fossils. Examples of a lobster and a dragonfly are on display.
One of the hidden gems of Manchester's collection are the fossils from the last Ice Age, more than ten thousand years ago. These fossils tell the story of the ebb and flow of the ice across Britain and how life survived and adapted. Massive mammoth teeth are on display proving these amazing animals once roamed the tundra of Derbyshire. During the warmer periods between the ice ages, exotic animals such as rhino, elephants and hyena thrived. Spectacular fossils from Windy Knoll and Creswell Crags in Derbyshire show the amazing range of life. The centerpiece of the display is an almost complete skeleton of a bison from Derbyshire.
Our Fossil Gallery narratives section takes you on a journey through the evolution of life from the Ediacara fossils of Australia 3500 million years ago.- Keep up with our Curator of Palaeontology, David Gelsthorpe on his Palaeontology Blog
