Scarborough360

The Rotunda Museum

Britain's oldest geology museum, Scarborough's Rotunda recognises the work of William Smith, the 'father of English geology'. Smith single-handedly mapped the geology of Britain for the first time, and invented 'fossil-ordered stratigraphy' – correlating rocks across the country on the basis of the fossils they contain.

Rotunda Museum

The Rotunda was a purpose-built museum, with its circular plan suggested by William Smith himself, then a resident in Scarborough. A painting round the gallery showed a cross-section of the geological formation of the east coast from the Humber to the Tees.