Geological museums of Britain: Maidstone Museum – dinosaurs, ancient seas and the geology of Kent
Jon Trevelyan (UK)
Maidstone Museum and an unexpectedly substantial geology gallery
Maidstone Museum is not primarily a geological museum. Its collections range across archaeology, natural history, fine and decorative art, costume, ethnography, and local history, with more than 600,000 objects in its care. Yet, tucked away on the first floor is an Earth Heritage Gallery containing a geological collection of a scale and quality that may come as something of a surprise (Fig. 2).
The museum grew from the collections of Dr Thomas Charles, a Maidstone physician and antiquarian who died in 1855. Charles left his library, art collection and antiquities to the town, asking that arrangements should be made for their permanent preservation in Maidstone. His former home, Chillington Manor, was initially rented while the collection was catalogued and then purchased by the Council in 1856. Following repairs, the Charles Museum opened on 20 January 1858.
Chillington Manor still forms the historic heart of the museum (Fig. 1). Built in 1562, the Elizabethan building has subsequently been surrounded by a series of additions as both the museum and its collections expanded. An important early benefactor was the explorer and naturalist Julius Brenchley, who bequeathed extensive natural-history, ethnographic and art collections in 1873. The result is a museum whose buildings, like its collections, have accumulated over more than a century and a half.
Geology now occupies part of the museum’s first-floor west wing. The displays concentrate particularly on Kent and southeast England, but the collection behind them is considerably larger. Maidstone Museum describes its fossil holdings as the most important in southeast England outside London. Particular strengths include fossils from the Chalk, Lower Greensand, Gault and London Clay, together with material from the Kent Coalfield, Pleistocene vertebrates and specimens representing British palaeontology from the Cambrian onwards. Beyond palaeontology, the museum holds some 46,000 rock specimens and about 7,000 minerals, including a mineral collection of national importance.
Only a fraction can be displayed at any one time, but the Earth Heritage Gallery compresses a remarkable amount of geology into a relatively modest space. Carboniferous plants, fossils from the rivers and floodplains of the Wealden, marine faunas from the Lower Greensand and Gault, fishes and invertebrates from the Chalk and younger fossils from the London Clay together provide a journey through the changing environments of southeast England. Rocks and building stones extend the story beyond palaeontology (Fig. 2).
There is, however, no mistaking what is intended to catch the visitor’s attention. Dinosaurs dominate the visual presentation, with large reconstructions occupying the entrance and upper parts of the gallery (Fig. 2). Their prominence is understandable, particularly because Maidstone has a genuine claim to a place in the early history of dinosaur palaeontology. But it can obscure the much greater breadth of the collection: some of the most impressive specimens in the gallery are the beautifully preserved fishes of the Chalk, the ammonites of the Gault, the Lower Greensand shell beds and the plants of the Carboniferous coal forests.
The dinosaurs nevertheless provide the natural place to begin. In 1834, a remarkable fossil was uncovered in a local quarry. Its discovery brought together the Maidstone quarry owner William Harding Bensted and Gideon Mantell, one of the most important figures in the early history of dinosaur research. The specimen became known as the Maidstone Iguanodon, or Mantell-piece, giving the town an unusually direct connection with the beginnings of dinosaur palaeontology.
That fossil, and the story surrounding it, provides our starting point for exploring the geology displayed at Maidstone Museum.
The fossil that put Maidstone on the dinosaur map
Of all the fossils associated with Maidstone Museum, one has a significance extending far beyond Kent. The large slab displayed in the Earth Heritage Gallery is a cast rather than the original, but the specimen it reproduces occupies an important place in the early history of dinosaur palaeontology (Fig. 3). Discovered in Maidstone in 1834 and subsequently studied by Gideon Mantell, it provided some of the best evidence then available for understanding the anatomy of the extraordinary extinct reptiles that were only beginning to be recognised.
The fossil came from a quarry operated by William Harding Bensted, in what is now the Queen’s Road area of Maidstone. The quarry worked Kentish Ragstone, part of the Lower Greensand succession, and in 1834, quarrying exposed numerous large bones preserved together within a block of rock. It was not a complete skeleton, but at a time when dinosaurs were known largely from isolated bones and teeth, the association of so much of a single animal made the discovery particularly important. The word ‘dinosaur’ itself did not yet exist: Richard Owen would propose Dinosauria only in 1842.
Mantell had already spent more than a decade investigating the large fossil reptile he had named Iguanodon. His original interpretation had been based principally on teeth, whose resemblance to those of a modern iguana helped suggest that they belonged to a gigantic plant-eating reptile. In 1825, he formally named the animal Iguanodon – essentially ‘iguana tooth’.
Maidstone Museum illustrates that connection particularly effectively by displaying a reconstruction of a modern iguana above Iguanodon material (Fig. 4). Beneath it are a neck vertebra attributed by the museum to Iguanodon bernissartensis and one of the characteristic conical thumb spikes. The display is a useful reminder that Iguanodon was originally recognised not from a spectacular skeleton, but through anatomical detective work involving much more fragmentary material.
The Maidstone discovery therefore provided unusually valuable evidence. Mantell acquired the specimen from Bensted for £25 and used it in his continuing attempts to reconstruct the animal. Inevitably, some of those early interpretations now appear strange. With few comparable skeletons available, palaeontologists were trying to reconstruct an entirely unfamiliar group of animals from incomplete remains. Famously, the conical bone now recognised as the thumb spike of Iguanodon was at one stage interpreted as a horn on its nose.
| Bensted, Mantell and the Maidstone dinosaur |
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| The fossil that made Maidstone famous in the history of dinosaur research was discovered not by a professional palaeontologist, but by a local quarry owner and amateur geologist. William Harding Bensted (1802–1873) recognised the importance of the bones uncovered in his Kentish Ragstone quarry and brought the specimen to the attention of Gideon Mantell (1790–1852), the Sussex doctor and geologist, whose earlier discoveries had led him to establish Iguanodon as a new genus. Mantell acquired the fossil for £25. Because numerous bones belonging to one animal remained associated within the rock, the specimen provided considerably more anatomical information than the isolated remains on which much of the early understanding of Iguanodon had been based. It became widely known as the ‘Mantell-piece’. Bensted himself produced a reconstruction showing how he believed the animal might have appeared. Like other early attempts to reconstruct dinosaurs, it was very different from modern interpretations – a reminder of just how little was then known about these newly discovered animals. The specimen was long identified as Iguanodon, but subsequent research has altered its classification. It is now generally referred to Mantellisaurus, a more lightly built relative of the larger Iguanodon bernissartensis. The original specimen is held by the Natural History Museum in London; Maidstone Museum displays the cast shown in Fig. 3 (above). The discovery has acquired particular local significance. An Iguanodon was incorporated into Maidstone’s coat of arms during the twentieth century, making a dinosaur an unusually prominent part of the town’s identity. |
From Iguanodon to Mantellisaurus
The changing identification of the Maidstone specimen is itself an interesting part of its history. Much more complete Iguanodon skeletons were discovered at Bernissart in Belgium in 1878, and continuing discoveries gradually transformed understanding of these dinosaurs. The Maidstone animal was eventually recognised as differing from the large, robust Iguanodon bernissartensis and is now generally assigned to the more lightly built Mantellisaurus, named in honour of Mantell.
The familiar description ‘Maidstone Iguanodon’ is therefore historically understandable, even though its taxonomy has changed. Indeed, that changing identification adds to the interest of the specimen: it records not only an important nineteenth-century discovery, but almost two centuries of changing ideas about dinosaur anatomy and classification.
The gallery contains other dinosaur material as well. A substantial basal toe bone from the Upper Wealden, identified by the museum as Iguanodon, gives some impression of the robust construction of the feet of these large herbivores (Fig. 5).
Elsewhere, two very different predatory dinosaur claws provide a striking comparison (Fig. 6). One represents the strongly curved claw associated with the Asian Velociraptor, while the other is the enormous forelimb claw of Baryonyx walkeri, a spinosaurid predator known from the Wealden rocks of southern England.
Here, the museum’s enthusiasm for dinosaurs extends somewhat beyond the local story: Velociraptor has no particular connection with Kent, whereas Baryonyx, Iguanodon and, above all, the Maidstone specimen belong much more naturally within the geology of southern England. Nevertheless, the comparison is an effective display.
More importantly, these dinosaurs were only part of much larger Early Cretaceous ecosystems. Their rocks also preserve fishes, plants and sedimentary structures recording the rivers, lakes and floodplains across which dinosaurs moved. To understand them properly, therefore, we need to look beyond their bones and reconstruct the landscapes in which they lived. That is where the museum’s Wealden collections take the story next.
The Wealden world – more than dinosaurs
The Maidstone dinosaur provides a compelling introduction to the Early Cretaceous, but dinosaurs formed only one part of a much more complex ecosystem. Maidstone Museum’s Wealden material helps reconstruct the landscapes in which these animals lived and the other organisms that shared them.
During the Early Cretaceous, much of southern England was a low-lying landscape crossed by rivers and channels, with lakes, floodplains and areas of wet ground. Sands, silts and clays accumulated as rivers changed course, lakes expanded and contracted and floods spread sediment across the surrounding plains. The Wealden succession, therefore, records not one unchanging environment, but a landscape that evolved over millions of years.
Some of the simplest specimens in the gallery are particularly effective at bringing that landscape to life. A slab of Wealden sandstone preserves a surface covered by ripple marks (Fig. 7). Formed as moving water shaped loose sand into ridges and troughs, these structures survived, because they were buried beneath later sediment. They provide direct evidence of the physical environments in which the Wealden organisms lived.
Such evidence is easily overlooked beside a dinosaur bone. However, fossils and sedimentary structures tell different and complementary parts of the story: fossils reveal the organisms that were present, while features such as ripple marks help reconstruct the environments they inhabited.
The animals of the Wealden were by no means confined to dinosaurs. Maidstone Museum displays an impressive fossil fish identified as Lepidotes mantelli (Fig. 8). Substantial areas of its characteristic covering of thick, rhomboidal scales survive, together with part of the head. These scales formed a tough external armour very different from the thinner, more flexible scales of many modern fishes.
Lepidotes inhabited the freshwater and brackish environments represented within the Wealden succession, sharing its river and lake systems with turtles, crocodilians and dinosaurs. Its presence is a useful reminder that the fossil record preserves an ecosystem rather than simply its largest and most spectacular inhabitants. A Wealden landscape reconstructed entirely from its dinosaurs would be rather like reconstructing the modern African savannah entirely from elephants and lions.
Plants were equally important. Wealden and associated Early Cretaceous deposits preserve evidence of a varied vegetation that included ferns, conifers and cycads. These plants formed the basis of terrestrial food webs and sustained the large herbivorous dinosaurs for which the succession is so well known.
The museum’s substantial Iguanodon toe bone can therefore be seen in a wider context (Fig. 5, above). Impressive though it is, the bone represents only one component of an ecosystem whose sediments, plants and other animals allow us to reconstruct something of the world through which the dinosaur moved.
There is, however, an important distinction to make. The celebrated Mantell-piece discussed in the previous section did not come from the Wealden represented by many of the museum’s other dinosaur fossils. Bensted’s quarry worked the younger Kentish Ragstone of the Lower Greensand. The various Early Cretaceous fossils in the gallery should, therefore, not be treated as though they all belonged to precisely the same environment or moment in time.
That distinction also takes us naturally into the next stage of the geological story. The predominantly terrestrial environments represented by the Wealden were followed in southeast England by increasingly marine conditions. The Lower Greensand contains abundant evidence of marine life, while the succeeding Gault Clay records a still more fully marine environment, with a particularly rich ammonite fauna.
The museum’s displays thus allow us to leave the rivers, lakes and floodplains of the Wealden and follow the geological record towards the Cretaceous sea.
The sea returns – Lower Greensand and Gault
The transition from the Wealden to the Lower Greensand marks a major change in the Early Cretaceous history of southeast England. The rivers, lakes and floodplains represented by much of the Wealden succession increasingly gave way to marine conditions as the sea spread across the region.
The Lower Greensand is a varied succession of sands and sandstones, deposited during the Aptian Stage of the Early Cretaceous. In Kent, one of its most familiar components is the Hythe Formation, which includes the alternating harder and softer beds traditionally known as Kentish Rag and Hassock. The harder Ragstone was extensively quarried as a building stone – and it was in one such quarry that William Harding Bensted discovered the Maidstone dinosaur.
The marine character of much of the Lower Greensand is demonstrated more directly by its fossils. One of the museum’s most striking specimens is a slab crowded with shells (Fig. 9). Rather than preserving a single isolated fossil, it contains numerous individuals together within the sediment, providing an immediate impression of the abundance of life on the Early Cretaceous sea floor. Such concentrations could result from shells accumulating over time and subsequently being reworked and buried by currents or storms.
Other Lower Greensand fossils demonstrate the variety of animals inhabiting these seas. Figure 10 brings together two very different examples. Pleurotomaria gigantea is a large marine gastropod with a conspicuous conical shell, while beneath it is a shark vertebra. Because most of a shark’s skeleton consists of cartilage, its teeth are much more commonly fossilised than its vertebrae, making the latter an interesting specimen.
The gallery contains other Lower Greensand molluscs, including bivalves and the nautilus Cymatoceras radiatum. Some appear in the mixed Cretaceous assemblage shown in Fig. 14 (below), alongside younger fossils from the Chalk. The comparison is useful, because there was no single, unchanging ‘Cretaceous sea’: marine environments altered considerably as sea level, geography and sediment supply changed through time.
Into the Gault sea
Above the Lower Greensand lies another distinctive marine deposit, the Gault Clay. Deposited during the Albian Stage of the Early Cretaceous, its fine sediments preserve a particularly rich marine fauna. Among its most celebrated fossils are ammonites, and Maidstone Museum possesses some attractive examples.
Figure 11 brings together several forms, including Euhoplites, Dipoloceras, Anahoplites and Dimorphoplites. Their shells vary considerably in shape and ornamentation, with different combinations of ribs, keels and tubercles, illustrating the diversity of ammonites inhabiting the Gault sea.
Ammonites were cephalopods, related to living squid, cuttlefish, octopuses and nautiluses. Their shells were internally divided into chambers, with the animal occupying the outermost part. They are also extremely useful to geologists. Because ammonite species evolved comparatively rapidly and many were geographically widespread, successive assemblages can be used to subdivide and correlate sedimentary rocks. The abundant ammonites of the Gault have consequently played an important part in establishing its detailed stratigraphy.
Not all ammonites possessed the familiar tightly coiled shell. Hamites maximus is a particularly striking example of a heteromorph ammonite, in which the shell became partly uncoiled (Fig. 12). Its long shafts joined by curved sections produce a form sometimes compared, rather appropriately, with a gigantic paper clip.
The Gault fauna was not confined to ammonites; the museum also displays bivalves, belemnites, crustaceans and shark remains. Nevertheless, the ammonites provide some of the most visually impressive evidence for the diversity of these Early Cretaceous seas.
By Gault times, the predominantly terrestrial environments represented by the Wealden had been replaced by an extensive marine setting. Yet, the Cretaceous marine story was still far from complete. During the Late Cretaceous, much of southern Britain would lie beneath an even more extensive sea in which comparatively little sand or mud arrived from land. Instead, the distinctive white limestone of the Chalk accumulated – together with some of the finest fossils displayed at Maidstone Museum.
Life in the Chalk sea
By the Late Cretaceous, the geography of southern Britain had changed dramatically again. The terrestrial landscapes represented by the Wealden and the sandier marine environments of the Lower Greensand had disappeared beneath a much more extensive sea. Comparatively little sediment was reaching many areas from the land; instead, enormous quantities of microscopic calcareous material accumulated on the sea floor and eventually formed the white limestone we know as the Chalk.
Its familiar white appearance can disguise the fact that the Chalk records a rich marine ecosystem. Sponges, molluscs, echinoids, crustaceans, fishes and sharks inhabited these seas, and Maidstone Museum displays representatives of several different parts of this community.
One of the less spectacular-looking fossils is a sponge preserved in the Chalk (Fig. 13). Sponges were important inhabitants of the Cretaceous sea floor, living attached to the substrate and filtering food particles from the surrounding water. Their remains are common in parts of the Chalk and form a characteristic element of its fossil fauna.
More immediately recognisable are the molluscs and echinoids. Figure 14 includes a cluster of the bivalve Pycnodonte vesiculare together with two Chalk echinoids, Micraster coranguinum and Gauthieria spatulifera. The same figure also includes the Lower Greensand nautilus Cymatoceras radiatum and the gastropod Pleurotomaria, providing a useful comparison between fossils from two different phases of the Cretaceous marine story.
Micraster is one of the classic fossils of the Chalk. Unlike the more obviously symmetrical sea urchins, it belonged to the irregular echinoids and possessed a distinctly heart-shaped test. Different species and forms occur through the Chalk succession and have long proved useful in its stratigraphical study.
Some of the most striking fossils in the gallery, however, are fishes. Figure 15 shows an articulated section of the vertebral column of a bony fish, identified by the museum as Hoplopteryx lewesiensis. Numerous neural and haemal spines remain attached to the vertebral column, providing an unusually clear view of the internal framework of a Cretaceous fish.
Figure 16 provides a different view of the Chalk fauna. It includes Hoplopteryx simus, preserved with much of the skull and body skeleton articulated, together with further fish material and the robust claws of the lobster-like crustacean Enoploclytia leachii. These specimens give a particularly vivid impression of some of the animals inhabiting the Chalk sea.
Their preservation is itself significant. Fish skeletons consist of numerous bones that can easily become separated after death, so the survival of articulated material indicates that the remains escaped prolonged disturbance before burial. The fossils, therefore, tell us something, not only about the animals themselves, but also about what happened to their bodies after death.
Taken together, the fishes, crustaceans, molluscs, echinoids and sponges reveal the Chalk as the product of a functioning marine ecosystem, rather than simply a monotonous mass of white limestone. This is one of the strengths of the Maidstone display: comparatively modest fossils can be combined to reconstruct an entire environment.
The Chalk also completes an effective sequence through the museum’s Cretaceous collections. The Wealden records predominantly terrestrial environments; the Lower Greensand marks the increasing influence of the sea; the Gault represents a rich marine setting; and the Chalk records the widespread marine conditions of the Late Cretaceous. The fossils therefore document not simply a succession of organisms, but a profound transformation of southern Britain over tens of millions of years.
Yet the museum’s geological story extends much further back in time. Long before the dinosaurs of the Wealden or the fishes of the Chalk, Britain lay much closer to the equator and supported extensive wetlands dominated by plants unlike those of any modern British woodland. Their remains contributed to the coal-bearing rocks of the Carboniferous – including those concealed deep beneath Kent.
Before the dinosaurs – Kent’s Carboniferous story
The Cretaceous understandably dominates much of Maidstone Museum’s geological display, but another part of the gallery takes the visitor much further back in time, to the Carboniferous and a landscape very different from those represented by the Wealden, Gault or Chalk.
More than 300 million years ago, Britain lay much closer to the equator. Extensive low-lying wetlands developed in a warm, humid climate, supporting dense vegetation. Repeated accumulation and burial of plant material eventually contributed to the formation of the coal seams that would become one of Britain’s most important geological resources.
The vegetation itself would have looked distinctly unfamiliar. Among its most conspicuous plants were giant lycopsids such as Lepidodendron, distant relatives of the small clubmosses that survive today, together with Calamites, a tree-sized relative of modern horsetails.
Maidstone Museum brings several components of this vanished vegetation together in its Carboniferous display (Fig. 17). The specimens include Cyperites bicarinatus, representing the leaves of a clubmoss; part of Lepidodendron dichotomum; and Lepidostrobus variabilis, a reproductive cone. Alongside them are a stem of Calamites and Stigmaria ficoides, part of the rooting system associated with the giant lycopsid trees.
Seen individually, such fossils can appear to be little more than disconnected impressions and fragments. Together, however, leaves, stems, reproductive structures and roots allow something of the original plants to be reconstructed. They also provide evidence for the vegetation, whose accumulated remains ultimately contributed to the formation of Britain’s coal.
The connection with Kent is particularly interesting, because its Carboniferous rocks are largely concealed beneath much younger strata. During the nineteenth century, geologists suspected that the coal-bearing formations exposed elsewhere in Britain might continue beneath southeast England. Exploration by drilling eventually demonstrated the presence of coal at depth, leading to the development of the Kent Coalfield and a mining industry concentrated in the eastern part of the county.
That concealed coalfield also brings one of the more unexpected personalities into Maidstone Museum’s geological story – Marie Stopes.
| Marie Stopes – palaeobotanist in the Kent Coalfield |
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| Marie Stopes (1880–1958) is remembered principally for her later campaigning on birth control and women’s reproductive health, but her original career was in a very different field. She was a botanist, geologist and palaeobotanist who became an authority on fossil plants and the formation of coal. Her scientific work brought her to Kent, where the discovery and exploitation of the concealed Kent Coalfield provided an opportunity to study the fossil vegetation associated with the coal seams. Because coal is largely derived from accumulated plant material, fossil plants provided important evidence for understanding how these deposits had formed. The Carboniferous vegetation included giant lycopsids such as Lepidodendron and tree-sized horsetail relatives such as Calamites. Their stems, roots, leaves and reproductive structures occur as fossils within the Coal Measures. Maidstone Museum’s examples of Lepidodendron, Lepidostrobus, Stigmaria and Calamites therefore represent the kind of ancient vegetation central to palaeobotanical studies of coal-bearing rocks. Stopes’s work in the Kent Coalfield also brought her into contact with mining communities. The museum links this experience with her subsequent interest in women’s health and the social campaigning for which she became much better known. That later career has a controversial legacy. Alongside her advocacy of birth control, Stopes promoted eugenic ideas that are now widely rejected and rightly criticised. Her relevance to the Earth Heritage Gallery, however, lies in her earlier scientific career: before becoming a prominent social campaigner, she was a palaeobotanist studying fossil plants, coal and the ancient vegetation from which it formed. |
Beyond the Cretaceous – and beyond fossils
Although the Cretaceous provides the strongest thread running through Maidstone Museum’s Earth Heritage Gallery, the displays continue into the Cenozoic and also extend beyond palaeontology. A few carefully chosen specimens are sufficient to demonstrate just how much the environments of southern Britain continued to change.
One of the most striking is a crocodile skull from the Eocene London Clay (Fig. 18). About 50 million years ago, southern Britain experienced a much warmer climate than today, with a warm sea bordering land supporting lush vegetation. Crocodilians formed part of the fauna of this very different world, and the skull, with its elongated jaws and numerous tooth sockets, provides an immediate indication of conditions that would now appear distinctly exotic in Britain.
The London Clay was primarily deposited in a marine environment, and other fossils in the museum represent animals inhabiting that sea. Figure 19 includes a sectioned nautilus, worm tubes, part of a crab and a bivalve. Displayed alongside them are shark teeth, including a particularly large tooth identified by the museum as Carcharocles megalodon, its size emphasised by comparison with much smaller teeth from the modern great white shark.
There is an important chronological distinction within this display. Megalodon belongs to the Neogene and is therefore considerably younger than the Eocene London Clay fossils beside it. The case brings together specimens from different parts of the Cenozoic, rather than reconstructing a single community – a useful reminder that museum cases often group objects thematically, rather than chronologically.
Rocks as resources
Not everything in the Earth Heritage Gallery is a fossil. One display turns instead to rocks and their practical use as building materials (Fig. 20). Large polished slabs reveal textures and structures that can be difficult to appreciate in smaller or weathered specimens, including the rounded grains characteristic of oolitic limestone and concentrations of shell debris.
Building stone provides a particularly direct connection between geology and everyday life. Rocks vary in properties such as strength, porosity, durability and ease of working, and these differences have influenced which materials were quarried and used in buildings.
There is also a neat connection back to the story with which we began. Kentish Ragstone was itself an important building stone, and it was commercial quarrying for that rock that led to Bensted’s discovery of the Maidstone dinosaur. The same material can, therefore, be considered as a sedimentary rock, a source of fossils and an economically useful resource.
These younger fossils and building stones broaden the gallery considerably. Dinosaurs and other Cretaceous fossils inevitably provide many of its most conspicuous exhibits, but the geological story extends from ancient organisms and vanished environments to the rocks people have quarried and used. That breadth, rather than any single spectacular specimen, is one of the principal strengths of Maidstone Museum’s geological collection.
Conclusion – much more than the Maidstone dinosaur
It would be easy to visit Maidstone Museum’s Earth Heritage Gallery principally to see its most famous inhabitant. The cast of the Maidstone dinosaur represents a specimen of genuine historical importance, discovered in William Harding Bensted’s quarry in 1834 and subsequently studied by Gideon Mantell at a formative moment in dinosaur palaeontology.
But, the principal impression left by the gallery is how much more there is to see. Its fossils record environments separated by hundreds of millions of years: Carboniferous coal forests, the rivers and floodplains of the Wealden, the advancing Cretaceous seas represented by the Lower Greensand and Gault, the very different marine world of the Chalk, and the warm Cenozoic environments represented by the London Clay. Rocks and building stones add another dimension, showing how geology has influenced the materials people have quarried and used.
There are human stories running through this succession as well. Bensted and Mantell take us back to the beginnings of dinosaur research, while Marie Stopes represents a later generation of palaeontologists investigating fossil plants and the origins of coal. The quarrying of Kentish Ragstone and development of the concealed Kent Coalfield provide further reminders that the geology represented in museum cases has also influenced the economic and social history of the county.
This breadth is perhaps the most impressive feature of the Earth Heritage Gallery. It is not enormous, particularly when compared with the geological galleries of the major national museums, and only a fraction of Maidstone’s much larger collection can be displayed at any one time. Nevertheless, it contains an unusually varied selection of fossils and rocks, ranging from historically important specimens to less conspicuous objects from which vanished environments can be reconstructed.
The dinosaurs undoubtedly provide the immediate attraction, and the Maidstone specimen gives the museum an entirely legitimate reason for emphasising them. But the fish backbone, the Hamites, the Lower Greensand shell bed, the Chalk sponge, the Carboniferous plants and the polished building stones all contribute to a much richer geological story.
So come to Maidstone Museum to see the dinosaur by all means. But don’t leave once you have seen it. The greater story lies in the rocks and fossils surrounding it – a record of changing landscapes, vanished seas and lost ecosystems that makes this a remarkably substantial geological display for a regional museum.
| About the museum |
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| Address: St Faith’s Street, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 1LH Website: https://museum.maidstone.gov.uk/ |