Chemical Analysis of the Dust on a Historically Important Collection

Abstract

The Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, houses an important historical collection: the W. B. Carpenter collection of Eozoon, which is of great significance in the history of science, specifically with regard to a nineteenth-century controversy about the presence of fossils in rock of Precambrian age. After providing a history of the Eozoon Collection, we then give an overview of its care and curation up to the present before describing new research on the history of the specimens and the origin of the thick black dust which covers them. Chemical and morphological analysis of the dust using SEM-EDX (scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy) allows identification of one silicate and one sulphur-calcium phase. The silicate may derive from the Eozoon specimens themselves, whereas the sulphur-calcium phase may indicate gypsum from plaster. It is possible that the gypsum dust may have come from collapse of the ceiling during the fire in November 1885 at Carpenter's home that led to his death.