A BRITISH scientist has stumbled upon a treasure trove of Charles Darwin's work in a gloomy corner a building where it lay undiscovered for more than 150 years.

Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said today that glass slides containing important Darwin fossils were in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.



Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labelled "C. Darwin Esq".



"It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realised it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen.



He described the feeling of seeing that famous signature as "a heart in your mouth situation," saying he was wondering "Goodness, what have I discovered".



Falcon-Lang's find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including John Hooker - a botanist and dear friend of Darwin - and the Rev John Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.



The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution.



Falcon-Lang said the unearthed fossils - lost for 165 years - showed there was more to learn from a period of history scientists thought they knew well.



"To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary," Falcon-Lang added. "We can see there's more to learn. There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn't know existed."



He said one of the most "bizarre" slides came from Hooker's collection - a specimen of prototaxites, a 400 million-year-old tree-sized fungi.



Hooker had assembled the collection of slides while briefly working for the British Geological Survey in 1846, according to Royal Holloway, University of London.



The slides - "stunning works of art", according to Falcon-Lang - contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes. Some of the slides are 15cm long, "great big chunks of glass," Falcon-Lang said.



"How these things got overlooked for so long is a bit of a mystery itself," he mused, speculating that perhaps it was because Darwin was not widely known in 1846 so the collection might not have been given "the proper curatorial care".



Falcon-Lang expects great scientific papers to emerge from the discovery.



"There are some real gems in this collection that are going to contribute to ongoing science."



Dr John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, called the find a "remarkable" discovery.



"It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections," he said.