Lost Charles Darwin fossils rediscovered in cabinet
BBC News:
Dr [Howard] Falcon-Lang, who is based in the department of earth sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, spotted some drawers in a cabinet marked “unregistered fossil plants”.
“Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets,” Dr Falcon-Lang explained.
“This process allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled ‘C. Darwin Esq’.”
The item turned out to be a piece of fossil wood collected by Darwin during his famous Voyage of the Beagle in 1834. This was the expedition on which he first started to develop his theory of evolution.
Totally crazy, but at the same time, not really that crazy at all. Universities and museums have huge collections of stuff that are often poorly sorted and catalogued, if at all.