Our mission in Cardiff was two-fold, firstly to explore a city that David once knew so well and secondly to have a meander around and see some new things. This fell into the latter category. He’d never been inside Cardiff’s rather impressive art gallery and museum hitherto so we had to put that right didn’t we?
Aside from some rather splendid art, there is a big natural history display and I got myself rather over-excited when I saw this – it is, for those who don’t know, an Archaeopteryx. Some people think it’s a direct ancestor of modern birds but my understanding is it’s from a different branch of the evolutionary tree, one that’s only part was the Archaeopteryx. It’s exciting because it was one of the first “dinosaurs” to be discovered to have feathers.

Anyway, being ignorant of the limited number of Archaeopteryx fossils in existence, I got rather worked up about this one and did feel just a tiny bit cheated to discover that it’s actually a copy of the “Berlin Specimen”. Bah!

Still, I can feel a little bit smug because the name “Archaeopteryx” only became known to me through my scientific studies in the Evolution module of my Biological Sciences degree so had I not spent four years in a dark cave studying, I’d have walked past this with barely a second glance and would not have experienced that tiny shiver of excitement when I realised what I was looking at.