Colchester Has the Oldest Fossil Collection on Earth. It's One Bone.

Someone in Roman Britain found a fossilized sea monster bone and decided it was worth keeping forever. That makes it the oldest deliberately preserved fossil ever documented, beating famous fossil hunter Mary Anning to the punch by about 1,700 years.

Archaeologists excavating a site in Colchester, England found a single fossilized vertebra tucked into a second century pit. It was sitting next to pottery, a horse tooth, cat bones and a small Roman grooming spoon.

The vertebra belonged to an ichthyosaur, a dolphin shaped marine reptile that died more than 100 million years before anyone built a road in Britain. Someone picked it up along the Kent coast, carried it many miles inland and buried it on purpose, according to new findings published in the journal Britannia.

Nobody in the second century knew what a fossil actually was. Ancient people generally assumed giant bones belonged to giants, gods or sea monsters. So this Roman was not doing science. They were doing what beachcombers still do today: spotting a strange rock, deciding it mattered and giving it a permanent home. In this case, a hole in the ground next to a spoon.

Nobody has explained the spoon.

Read the full story at Muy Interesante, July 17, 2026

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