Natural History Museum of the University of Zurich

The Natural History Museum of the University of Zurich guide opens in 1919, when a young zoologist named Bernhard Peyer spotted a curved bone poking out of discarded shale at an oil works near Meride and recognized an ichthyosaur the miners had never bothered to search for. It follows him back five years later with hired miners, tunneling into the limestone ridge above the mine to find an oxygen-starved ancient seabed that had preserved skeleton after skeleton intact. Look for the slabs of stone behind the glass, each one pulled from a mountain that began as a nuisance in somebody else's rock pile.