Redpath Museum

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.