When I win the lottery, I shall build myself a house with a fossil wall. I’ll put a sandstone wall behind and mount museum-grade fossils as a patchwork facade. There will be one or two window boxes to let in light and to support those fossils that need to be put on stands rather than wall mounted. It can’t be planned too much in advance as it depends on what high-grade fossils are available at the time of building, but it will look something like this:

I really should have put a person there for scale; the large fan-like plant fossil on the bottom row would come up to an average man’s shoulder.

The fossils are (L to R, top to bottom): a large trilobite, theropod tracks, some flying thing (a real Archeopteryx that size would need more than a lottery win!), a Jurassic fern, Paleohyrax reprobae, a leaf, a group of fish (probably Knightia from the Green River fossil fields), a large skull (I’d go for a sabre-tooth cat myself), a frond of river plant such as a Seirocrinus with an accompanying Knightia, a mammoth tusk, an ichthyosaur, a stromatolite section (the polished yellow rings), a pair of large eurypterids, a cluster of Vendian soft-bodied echinoderms, brittle starfish, a field of large ammonites, and lastly, on a mount, the hugest insect in amber.

Tags: fossil, fossil wall