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The Lapworth Museum of Geology dates back to 1880 and the formation of Mason College
of Science, the forerunner of the university. Since the collections have expanded to 200,000
specimens and are growing year on year. The Lapworth Museum has supported teaching and
research here at the university for over 130 years. In addition, the education role of
the museum extends through our outreach programmes to cover schools, colleges, adult education
groups and higher education institutes. The collections are used here in the University
for research and we also get a very large number of visiting researchers and academics
who make use of the collections. In addition we loan out a large number of specimens worldwide
to institutions and universities elsewhere.
We also use the museum to encourage student recruitment in earth sciences. We base our
admissions days here. The museum and the collections are a fantastic resource for teaching in geology
and in joint honours and one which most of our competitors do not have.
Geology is a very practical based subject and learning from real objects is an essential
component of that. It helps to understand the subject and its concepts.
We’ll make extensive use of the mineral collection to illustrate aspects of mineralogy
and crystallography and from then on we’ll use it to help deliver our teaching programmes
and to enhance the learning experience.
The Lapworth Museum contains a world-renowned collection of fossils and minerals which come
from a whole variety of sources, from overseas and also within the UK and the ability for
us to be able to use these for teaching purposes and also research purposes is invaluable.
We use the Lapworth in a variety of different ways, both pulling material of display and
also out of the stores to actually give the students a real hands-on experience in terms
of studying major fossil groups. A particular example we’re looking at today is looking
at the evolution of the skull through the vertebrate lineage, so the students today
are able to actually get hands-on experience of looking at the skull evolution in a three
dimensional sense.
This practical has been really useful because it’s allowed us to see stuff that we normally
only see as diagrams in 3D and we get hands-on material.
I’ve found it useful to look at the size and scale of the different animals and also
to look at how they would have evolved and their evolutionary journey’s a lot more
clear when you can see the individual specimens.
The practical session today is we’re looking at footprints and how much information students
can actually glean from the footprint record and how we can use that in terms of scientific
interpretation with the biology of vertebrates in the past. This practical session deals with
constructing hippos and gorillas, based upon skeletal remains alone and actually understanding
how the skeletal functions in terms of its biomechanics and this is again based upon
material that we have here in Lapworth. The Lapworth Museum supports the research projects
of the undergraduate students in a variety of different ways, but one aspect is using
the collections as the basis for their project work. So for example Emma Randall is doing
her project based upon fossil fish from the UK, using material that we’ve got here in
Birmingham in a whole variety of different angles so we can make major breakthroughs
in terms of understanding fossil fish.
My MSci project’s on primitive vertebrates, agnathans which are jawless fish and the Lapworth
Museum has some of the best fossil fish collections in the country. I’ve used the Lapworth Collection’s
speciation comparing it with other museum collections along with making thin sections
of my fossil fish so I can tell the make-up and histology of the specimens to see if there
are differences between a species.
The museum and its collections have supported teaching and research here at the university
for 130 years. This underpins the activities in the department here and this work will
continue for many years to come.