Qualla: Lapworth Museum of Geology

Lapworth Museum of Geology: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Butlerrich1981, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wenlock Limestone outcrops near Dudley have been famous to fossil collectors for almost three hundred years. The rock, formed about 428 million years ago in a warm tropical sea, is full of trilobites. The most common species, Calymene blumenbachii, is so closely associated with the Black Country that locals nicknamed it the Dudley Bug and put it on the borough's coat of arms. Most of the fine specimens were pulled out of the ground in the 18th and 19th centuries by quarrymen who were not after fossils. They were after flux for the iron furnaces. The trilobites kept turning up anyway. The best ended up in private cabinets and then, eventually, in glass cases at the Lapworth Museum of Geology on the University of Birmingham campus, where you can still meet them face to compound-eyed face.

Image: Butlerrich1981 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lapworth Museum of Geology: The man and the name

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TomWG00, CC BY-SA 4.0. Charles Lapworth was a Victorian schoolmaster who became one of the most important British geologists of the 19th century. Born in Faringdon in 1842, he taught at a school in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders and spent his free time mapping the local rocks. He used tiny fossils ...

Image: TomWG00 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lapworth Museum of Geology: Aston Webb and the redevelopment

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Norrie, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Lapworth is housed in a wing of the Grade II* listed Aston Webb Building, the great red-brick semicircle that anchors the university's Edgbaston campus. The building was designed by Sir Aston Webb, who also designed the facade of Buckingham Palace, and Ingress Bell, with orig...

Image: Graham Norrie | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lapworth Museum of Geology: Three galleries, four and a half billion years

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Butlerrich1981, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Evolution of Life gallery fills the main hall, with a replica skeleton of Allosaurus standing guard and a Pteranodon hanging overhead. A floor-to-ceiling rock wall explains the rock cycle. Animated reconstructions show the Midlands as it shifted across the planet over geologi...

Image: Butlerrich1981 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lapworth Museum of Geology: The collection behind the cases

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TomWG00, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lapworth holds about 250,000 specimens. Most of them are in storage rather than on display, available to researchers and serious enthusiasts by appointment. The collection includes fossils from the famous Solnhofen Limestone of southern Germany, which preserved Archaeopteryx,...

Image: TomWG00 | CC BY-SA 4.0