Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences sits behind an iron gate, distinguished by a massive, tiered stone archway inscribed with the name of Adam Sedgwick. This building houses the oldest collection of the University of Cambridge. In eighteen thirty-five, a young Charles Darwin returned from the HMS Beagle voyage and dumped thousands of rock and fossil samples here for his mentor, Sedgwick, to categorize. Those crates sat unopened in the basement for decades, their contents eventually revealing entire extinct species to Victorian science.