Today (17th May 2024) marks with 50th Birthday of the Geological Curators Group. A group of members, both long-standing and newcomers to the group, will be celebrating in Leicester. Lookout on this website for photos and a report from the event.
Thanks to our Journal full text search project you can read (and even cite using a DOI...) the minutes of the inaugural meeting here
To mark our birthday, we have commissioned a new logo and are pleased to be able to unveil it to you here. It is the result of a design competition run amongst our membership, and feel that the new design will help us to modernise our brand appearance.
It will take us a while to update all of our channels to show the new logo, but we will be doing this over the course of the summer. In the meantime, if you would like to get in touch with us, you can contact
With great sadness we have just learned that long time GCG member and friend, Martin Warren of Cromer died aged 72, on 30th April after a long battle with cancer.
Martin Roger Warren graduated from the University of Leicester with a degree in Geology as well as gaining the Museum Studies diploma. He was initially employed for two years as a curator at the University of Strathclyde, then from 1978 to 1999 he was curator of two museums in Norfolk. He was mostly based at the delightful little Cromer Museum, but was also responsible for Walsingham Museum. He was heavily involved in the excavation of the West Runton Mammoth skeleton, made enormous contributions to the knowledge of the Cromer Forest Bed, led numerous fieldtrips, gave talks and helped set up the Sheringham Museum as well. He was heavily involved in piloting the early digitisation of collections documentation across Norfolk, and between 1999 and 2010 he took on the role as Collections and Information Manager with the Norfolk Museums Service in Norwich running their documentation, conservation and digitisation programmes across 12 Norfolk museums. Even after retiring at the age of 60, he still continued to lead local geological walks and was a great ambassador for geology and the interpretation of the landscape. He had a great interest in flint knapping and was very proud of his own efforts in that field.
In addition, he ran the successful Poppyland microbrewery in Cromer for over seven years, and was also very involved in documenting the detailed history and patterns of the knitted fisherman’s ‘Ganseys’ through his blogs and personal Northfolk Project website. He was keen on gardening and was recently pleased to report on the good progress of his home-germinated orange and lemon bushes.
Martin was an incredibly friendly and welcoming person, with a sometimes-wicked sense of humour, and always happy to receive visitors with a smile. He was an active member of GCG for many years and welcomed the group to a most enjoyable meeting in Cromer in 1990. Many older GCG members will remember Martin with great fondness. We send our condolences to his wife Steff, and family.
DiSSCo UK is a £155 million, 10-year programme to digitise natural science collections held in the UK
The Secretary for State for Science, Innovation and Technology has announced that the Natural History Museum will lead a major new project, DiSSCo UK, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to digitise a critical mass of the UK’s natural science collections.
Entries to:
Terms and Conditions: Logo competition T & C
GCG member (and former chair) Sarah King, writes from York:
This summer, there will be a series of free online talks to accompany the Yorkshire Museum’s ‘Mary Anning Rocks’ exhibition, which is now open. These will be delivered by a range of experts on themes connected with Mary Anning, palaeontology, and ground-breaking women in science.
Each talk will be broadcast live on the Yorkshire Museum’s YouTube page, with a chance to ask questions of the speaker at the end. A link to sign up will be made available a few days before, which will be visible on the exhibition page (https://www.yorkshiremuseum.
- 26 July 2023, 4.30pm – Tom Sharpe: Mary Anning, The Fossil Woman
- 10 August 2023, 4.30pm – Dr Anjana Khatwa: The Missing: Embracing equitable engagement for science and nature
- 7 September 2023, 4.30pm – Dr Liam Herringshaw: Fossils from Teesside to Spurn: Why Mary Anning would have loved the Yorkshire Coast
- 14 September 2023, 4pm – Dr Tori Herridge: The Adventures of Mary Anning and her Network of Trowelblazing Women