Visit to the Fossils Galore Museum in March

Ammonite, colour enhanced

The Chancellor Phillip Hammond and various EU officials continue to raise the ire of hard-line Brexiteers, baying for their blood. President Trump's decisions on Obamacare and the Iran deal are also being picked over. The main news is still about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation and also the wildfires that are still raging across California. Former hostages in Afghanistan Joshua and Catlin Boyle return safely to Canada with their three children after being rescued by Pakistan.

We made an afternoon trip to March, to visit the Fossils Galore museum. The entrance was a bit misleading as it simply looked like a shop selling fossils and crystals. However, there was much more. Curator Jamie Jordan had just offered to give us a tour once he'd completed a task when a confident and earnest voice piped up 'I can give them a tour of the exhibits'.  The White painted face with black patches belonged to a nine or ten year old who added 'Today, I'm Dalmatian'. She was one of the 30 or more volunteers of all ages who regularly came to this museum to help. We followed the skipping figure to find that the rooms of the large high street house had been filled with displays of fossils from mammoths to ammonites, many from our region.

Jamie took over and showed us one of the prize exhibits, the left hand side of a woolly rhino jaw and part of the skull which, he assured us, still contained remnants of soft tissues in the ear canal. Behind the scenes upstairs, there was a small laboratory where two volunteers were working on cleaning individual fossils. Opening a box of recent acquisitions, we admired the partial tooth of a Mammuthus trogontherii or Steppe Mammoth and I took a picture with a ruler as a future reference to compare with the Norris finds. Also had a chance to inspect a woolly rhino tooth, which had apparently still had remains of plant material caught within it when found.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me was seeing work being conducted on extracting the bones of a complete Iguanodon from rock recovered from a Surrey quarry. Fossils Galore has a small fishbowl lab where you can see trained volunteers painstakingly removing the rock to reveal the bones of the dinosaur. Remarkable was the find of fossilised tendons with the bones, a rarity. There is still at least five years of work to reveal the full skeleton bones which will then hopefully be reassembled into a final display.

The whole venture is self-financing, using the shop front to generate income and relying on enthusiastic, trained volunteers. A remarkable success in an era where museums are struggling to survive.