Petrification: Fossils & the Revelation of Deep Time

News has come to me of this free exhibition at the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution and it sounds very interesting. It runs until Saturday 11th October.

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What makes fossils so special? Fossils provide the evidence that there was life on earth before humans and this year Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution is displaying a selection of the best from the depths of our amazing collections. Petrification is BRLSI’s latest exhibition and in it you will discover fossils from across 505 million years of the history of life. The BRLSI’s earliest fossil is a trilobite from the Cambrian geological period!

Our exhibition begins by encouraging visitors to follow a Deep Timeline, starting out at a meteorite which represents the formation of both the Solar System and planet Earth 4.567 billion years ago!

Crossing the gallery, the timeline leads visitors through the Precambrian era, when only single-celled life existed, all the way through to the Cambrian Explosion of life. The final ninth of the timeline, which is depicted in a scale running up the wall of the gallery, is where all the palaeontologic action happens.

This is where visitors get to experience trilobites and corals, dinosaurs, marine reptiles, mammoths and cave bears! Colour-coded exhibits in the room correspond to the timeline so that visitors always know where in Deep Time they are.

And that’s really just the start! Learn more about some of the amazing things you can hope to find in Petrification, and our accompanying activities for families and children here.

Come to BRLSI and discover the beautiful complexity of prehistoric life and Bath’s influential role in the birth of palaeontology.

Please note our opening hours are Monday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm (closed on Sundays).

We are open Good Friday (18 April) and Easter Monday (21 April).

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