Touch ancient poo at the Natural History Museum's Jurassic sea monsters exhibition

A Natural History Museum exhibition invites visitors to touch fossil materials from Jurassic oceans, including a stone that represents ancient poo. The opening features an Ichthyosaur discovered in 1811, linked to Joseph Anning and Mary Anning’s early fossil hunting. Displays include fossils ranging from tiny teeth to large skeletons, with a plesiosaur skeleton about 200 million years old and fossilised algae mounds among the smallest items. Labels provide pronunciations for complex scientific names such as ammonite, belemnites, coprolite, and ichthyosaur. Visitors can also touch items like a dinosaur claw, mosasaur tooth, ammonite, fish scales, a fossilised squid, and shark skin, while encountering the unfamiliar appearance of many marine reptiles.

"The Natural History Museum is inviting people to touch some poo in a new exhibition about the monsters of the Jurassic Oceans. It's hundreds of millions old though, so you're touching a stone. A pooy stone which will still make children (and some adults) go a bit ick at the thought."

"The exhibition proper opens with a cast of an Ichthyosaur found by Joseph Anning in 1811 - a discovery that would spur his sister, Mary to become one of the leading early fossil hunters. And naturally, for an exhibition about a past as deep as the oceans themselves, most of what is on display are fossils, some as tiny as tiny teeth and others really quite large."

"Also, the complicated names given to the reptiles by scientists and used in the explanation boards are liberally explained with pronunciations. Ammonite (A-mon-ites) Belemnites (BEL-em-nites) Coprolite (COP-roh-lite) Crinoids (CRY-noyds) Hybodus (hy-BOW-das) Ichthyosaur (ICK-thee-oh-sore) Leedsichthys (leed-SIK-thees) Mosausaur (MOH-sah-sore) Phytoplankton (FIE-toe-plank-tun) Plesiosaur (PLEASE-ee-oh-sore) Pterosaur (TERRO-sore) Thalattosaur (tha-LAT-o-sore)"

"You can also touch a dinosaur claw, a mosasaur tooth, an ammonite, some fish scales, a previously squishy squid and a shark skin. I also learned that the ammonites I had learned about before were tiny compared to their shells, occupying only the front segment and dragging the rest behind them."

Read at ianVisits