Redpath Museum
Dinosaur fossils, Egyptian mummies and minerals inside Canada's oldest purpose-built museum.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Redpath Museum centers on a specimen its founder, McGill principal John William Dawson, named Eozoon canadense, a banded rock from limestone north of Montreal that Dawson insisted was the oldest fossil ever found, and used as ammunition against Darwin's Origin of Species. It follows the decades-long argument between Dawson and the geologists who said the rock was never alive, a dispute that ran alongside an unlikely friendship: in 1862, Darwin himself signed the paper nominating Dawson for the Royal Society. Eozoon still sits somewhere among the fossils and mummies Dawson filled this 1882 building with.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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