Geology museums of mainland Europe: A hidden gem in the heart of Barcelona – the Geological Museum of the Seminary
Paul D Taylor (UK) and Consuelo Sendino (UK)
Barcelona is an extremely popular tourist destination. For many visitors, the idiosyncratic buildings of Antoni Gaudi represent the principal attraction, but the Catalan capitol has its fair share of art galleries and museums too. Among the latter are several geological museums, including the Geological Museum of Seminary of Barcelona (MGSB), which is the focus of this article.
The seminary museum is a remarkable hidden gem. Although situated close to the city centre, it is likely to be overlooked by all but the most well-researched and determined visitors. This is at least in part due to the fact that the museum occupies a tiny part of the imposing seminary building (Fig. 1) and is not well signposted.
Furthermore, this free museum is very much of the old style (Fig. 2), its wooden cabinets crammed with fossils and minerals displayed in a manner well suited to many of the readers of Deposits Magazine, but perhaps not to the children, who nowadays represent the main target audience for most museums of natural history.
It may seem a little odd to find a geological museum in a catholic seminary. To find the reason for this unusual association between religion and science, we must investigate the origins of the museum, which can be traced back to 1818 when a geological collection formed an annex to the Library of the Catalonian Writers. In 1874, this co-called ‘Museum of rare and valuable things’ became the Natural History Cabinet of the seminary and the Geological Museum of Seminary of Barcelona began life.
There have been only five directors of the museum since 1874. The first was Canon Jaime Almera (1845-1919), who wrote with Artur Bofill i Poch (1844-1929) three monographs on fossil Mollusca from the Upper Tertiary of Catalonia and produced the first geological map of Barcelona Province. Next came Monsignor Norber Font (1873-1910), an important geological populariser and speleologist. The third director was Dr Jose R Bataller (1890-1962), also the first Professor on Palaeontology at the University of Barcelona, who reconstructed the museum after the Spanish Civil War. One of the two palaeontological journals (Batalleria) published by the MGSB was named in his memory (the other journal is Scripta Musei Geologici Seminarii Barcinonensis). The fourth director, Dr Lluís Via (1910-1991), was responsible for increasing the size of the museum, both in terms of space and number of specimens, and was an expert on crabs. He was succeeded by the current director Dr Sebastián Calzada, who is currently a researcher on Cretaceous brachiopods and gastropods.
There are many palaeontological treasures in the museum, just a few of which are depicted in this article. Its collections comprise more than 78,000 specimens, of which 520 are holotypes, that is, specimens used in the first description of a particular species and critical as the reference specimens that define these species. For example, the museum houses the type specimens of several Moroccan Ordovician trilobite species described recently in the house journal Batalleria, including Basilicus calzadai Corbacho, 2011 (Fig. 3).
Although the collections are dominantly invertebrates, some significant vertebrate fossils are also present, such as the ape Dryopithecus (Fig. 4).
Not surprisingly, fossils from Catalonia are particularly well represented. These include exceptionally preserved specimens from the Triassic locality of Montral-Alcover in Tarragona Province. Here, a finely laminated micritic dolomite, resembling the famous Solnhofen Limestone of Jurassic age, has been the source of a rich biota of soft-bodied and other fossils, including fishes, jellyfishes (Fig. 5), horseshoe crabs (limuloids), insects and holothurians (sea cucumbers) (Fig. 6).
Another local Triassic locality has yielded some wonderful starfishes (for example, Fig. 7) that are on display in the cabinets of the seminary museum.
While not nearly as exotic as the Triassic fossils mentioned above, Miocene internal moulds (steinkerns) of the irregular echinoid Clypeaster are noteworthy (Fig. 8).
Geologists are accustomed to finding steinkerns of molluscs, representing the hardened sediment cores left after the aragonite shells were dissolved during fossilisation. However, echinoid calcite is much more resistant and most Cenozoic echinoid tests are preserved intact, albeit usually in an altered, recrystallised state. It is far less common to see an echinoid in which the test itself has dissolved, leaving an internal mould somewhat reminiscent of an ‘endocranial cast’ of a vertebrate skull. A similar state of preservation characterises some British Chalk echinoids (usually Echinocorys, Micraster or Conulus) preserved in flint, but these Cretaceous echinoids have a less elaborate internal structure than Clypeaster.
A Late Miocene freshwater lake deposit at Libros near Teruel is famous for spectacular preservation of non-mineralised soft parts, especially in frogs (Fig. 9). As with many other soft-bodied Lagerstätten, early phosphatisation of soft tissues mediated by bacterial activity is responsible for the superb preservation, with the phosphate being derived from the decaying tissues of the frogs themselves.
Fossil crabs and tortoises have little in common apart from their hard protective carapaces. The seminary museum houses fine examples of both, including those shown in Figs. 10 and 11.
Museum director, Dr Sebastián Calzada, is nearing retirement and the future of the museum hangs in the balance. Safeguarding the scientifically important fossil collections of the museum must be a priority, while updating the displays as well as improving the curatorial state of the material in the collections should also be high on the agenda. As always, lack of money is a main obstacle to achieving these goals. Support from the public, who are appreciative of fossils as uniquely ancient educational and aesthetic objects, and from scientists who understand the value of fossil collections in deciphering the history of life, will undoubtedly be needed.
| For those wishing to visit, the seminary museum is located at Diputació 231, just a few minutes’ walk from the Place Catalunya in central Barcelona. The museum is open to the public from 5 to 7pm on weekdays (closed in August) and entrance is free. |