There has been a brick-making industry in Peterborough for over a hundred years, but few people realise that the foundations of that industry were laid down in the Jurassic Age, 150 million years ago. At that time, most of the British Isles did not exist, and many of the rocks we now see were being slowly deposited as sediments at the bottom of sub-tropical seas. One of those rock formations was the Oxford clay, formed from mud washed in from surrounding land, which came to be used in the brick industry.

 

The seas swarmed with strange animals, including the coiled ammonites so familiar to fossil-hunters today, huge marine reptiles like plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and crocodiles, and fish. Sometimes when these creatures died, their skeletons were preserved in the mud at the bottom of the sea, to be buried deeper by later sediments.

 

This process continued for 100 million years until enormous earth movements squeezed up the ocean floor above the surface of the sea. In southern Europe the Alps were formed, and in Britain the ripples of those earth movements pushed the Oxford clay to the surface.

 

Over the next 50 million years the forces of erosion laid bare the ancient rocks that are now to be seen in the brick pits and limestone quarries to the west of the city. Then, in the last few hundred thousand years, a succession of ice sheets scraped off the surface of the land. During the intervening warm periods, when the ice sheets melted, huge quantities of sand and gravel were washed out and left behind in the river valleys and fens.

                                        

These gravel deposits are quarried today for building materials, bringing evidence of a landscape that is difficult to imagine. Elephants, rhinoceros, bison, hippopotamus, reindeer and wild oxen roamed, some in the ice tundra, others in the warm inter-glacial periods, and their bones are often found in the gravel pits, together with fragments of plants, fish, beetles, snails and other small forms of life.

 

Our museum houses the skeleton of the 117,000 year old Deeping elephant, several skulls of woolly rhinoceros and the skeleton of the Whittlesey ox and also the best display of Jurassic marine reptiles in Britain, outside of London.