Lost Charles Darwin fossils found in dusty cabinet

London, Jan 17 (ANI): Scientists in Britain have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, draughty British Geological Survey.

Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Dr Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labelled "C. Darwin Esq."

"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the Telegraph quoted the paleontologist as saying.

He added that he soon realised it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.

He described the feeling of seeing that famous signature as "a heart in your mouth situation," saying "Goodness, what have I discovered!"

Dr Falcon-Lang's find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including John Hooker - a botanist and dear friend of Darwin - and the Rev John Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.

The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution.

Dr Falcon-Lang said that the unearthed fossils - lost for 165 years - show there is more to learn from a period of history scientists thought they knew well.

"There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn't know existed," Dr Falcon-Lang said.

He speculated that perhaps it was because Darwin was not widely known in 1846 so the collection might not have been given "the proper curatorial care."

The fossils became "lost" because Hooker failed to number them in the formal specimen register before setting out on an expedition to the Himalayas.

The collection was moved several times and gradually became forgotten.

Dr John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, called the find a "remarkable" discovery.

"It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections," he added. (ANI)