Richard Fortey

“Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.”

“Later . . . the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of carabids.”

“My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.”

“The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.”

“I confess that the idea of taking off one's boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.”

“I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life.”

“Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”

“Mankind is nothing more than a parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate is clement. But the present arrangement of land and sea will change, and with it our brief supremacy.”

“But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.”

“The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”

“A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators. ”

“Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"--I never did find out what that meant. ”

“I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums. ”

“I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.”

“You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.”