Cardiff, Wales — On our last day of the Larwood Meeting, we finished up business in the morning and then had guided tours of the marine, mollusc, and fossil collections in the National Museum Wales (above).
Highlights for me included this modern gastropod shell (a cold-water whelk from Alaska) collected by my hero Captain James Cook in 1778 a year before he was killed. A quote from Cook: “Ambition leads me … farther than any other man has been before me”. James Kirk of Star Trek is partly modeled after him.
Here’s another evocative modern shell: Conus gloriamaris, once thought to be the rarest shell and thus enormously valuable.
Here is the label for the specimen. It lists the 12 known specimens at the time. It is still popular among collectors, but now much more common. The excellent mollusc type collection of the Cardiff Museum is online.
The last activity for the Larwood crew was a tour of a coal mine turned into a museum: The Big Pit. Coal in South Wales played a huge role in the Industrial Revolution, as did Welsh iron ore. This mine tells the story of coal in Wales by taking visitors underground into the workings.
We couldn’t take images in the mine itself because of fire hazards, but Hans Arne Nakrem got a shot of the group prepared to go down the shaft. We had a great time with our story-telling guide. Our walk through the tunnels was punctuated by the loud bangs of my helmet on the ceilings. (It’s not just that I’m tall — it’s also that I bend far less!)
And that was the end of the 15th Larwood Meeting. Thank you again to Caroline Buttler and her team for such an excellent event. We all learned more about our precious bryozoans, with the bonus of getting to explore parts of beautiful South Wales.
