Beach Party at the Tethys Ocean

In 2021, Derek Briggs and his team ordered a handful of models for a deep time exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum. Among them was an enlarged model of Marella splendens. It looked delicious - the model - and Stacey, from our team, suggested we make one for ourselves and glue it to a plate, adding a knife and fork to make a little gastronomic tableau. We laughed about that, and then nothing more happened - physically, anyway.

But inside my head, the idea kept growing. I had a feeling there was something here we could take further. It wasn't the first time our passions for food and palaeontology had crossed paths. Whenever we made models of prehistoric animals, we always talked about what they might have tasted like.

After the idea of a Marella dish had sat at the back of my mind for a couple of months, the penny finally dropped. We should make an exhibition serving dishes with ingredients from each of the major geological periods. 

Time Travellers' Guide to Gastronomy was born.