Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
Before you've even reached the door, the building is already showing off its credentials: the stone used for its dressings is shelly oolitic limestone, roughly 170 million years old, and the animals flanking the double staircase — brown bears on one side, bison on the other — were carved from rock full of tiny shell fragments. The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, on Cambridge's Downing Street, holds around two million rocks, minerals and fossils spanning 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, and it charges nothing for admission.
Inside, a complete Iguanodon skeleton gifted by the King of Belgium stands near a replica skull of 'Stan', a Tyrannosaurus Rex unearthed in South Dakota. Elsewhere you'll find the Museum Woodwardianum — the oldest intact geological collection in the world — and a nearly nine-foot William Smith map, the first geological map of the UK, published in 1815.
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Regulars tend to mention Bay 3, where fossils from the Barrington Beds include remains of hippo, hyena and elephant — animals that once lived in the Cambridge area. The coprolite (fossilised dinosaur dung, found on Cambridge Greensands) also earns a loyal following. Pick up the Cambridge Geology Trail leaflet on your way out and keep looking at the pavements on the walk back.
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Book directly at the providerHow Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences came to be
The collection began with Dr John Woodward, who spent over 35 years cataloguing nearly 10,000 specimens, storing them in five walnut cabinets. That founding collection arrived at Cambridge and became the Woodwardian Museum in 1728. The real expansion came under Adam Sedgwick, who by his death in 1873 had grown the holdings to half a million specimens, sourcing material through a wide network — including ichthyosaur specimens purchased from fossil hunter Mary Anning.
The current building opened on 1 March 1904, inaugurated by King Edward VII, and was designed by architect T G Jackson. The project only happened because Thomas McKenny Hughes persuaded the university to build it and raised over £95,000 through public appeal. The museum was named in Sedgwick's memory.
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.