Today we visited the Warwick Market Hall Museum. You’re never quite sure what you are going to find in a local museum in England. Perhaps it will be a fez…

… a stuffed bear…

… or even a battle swan.

There will usually be a hoard of Roman coins.

Thank you whoever invented the metal detector. Sometimes there will be Saxon jewelry…

… teddy bears…

… a chance to dress up…

… or a beehive.

The Warwick museum has lots of fossils.

If you want to know what Jurassic Park would really look like, it would be full of these.

Velociraptors didn’t turn up until the Cretaceous Period. Admittedly, swimming around being pursued by a sea snail doesn’t have the same box office appeal as being chased by a raptor but they could have called it Late Cretaceous Park. (Asteroid incoming, everybody duck.)

They have a dinosaur footprint.

But the footprints I liked best were in Roman period roof tiles. The tiles were left out to dry in the sun before being fired, and sometimes an animal would wander across. The tiles would still be used in spite of footprints from a deer and a cow…

… a cat and a dog…

… and a stoat.

Well it was labeled stoat, and it had a stuffed stoat next to it, but I think it is actually a weasel footprint, as a stoat has bigger feet than that. Maybe the museum didn’t have a stuffed weasel.

Often a small museum will have one item that is unique and special. Warwick has a magnificent tapestry map of Warwickshire woven in the late 16th century. This was Warwickshire as Shakespeare knew it.

You can see Warwick Castle…

… and Kenilworth House, where Robert Dudley’s last doomed attempt to propose to Elizabeth I was rained off.

The bit I liked best was the corner of the map that showed the bit of Staffordshire where I grew up.

Walsall, my home town, was Walshal, Sutton Coldfield was Svtton Cofeld, and Birmingham was the little village of Bromicham. You still hear the locals call it Brummagem.

Apparently this ring has a skull engraved on it, but I couldn’t see it.

So, a fine little museum, apart from the lack of human skulls. It isn’t every day you see an 1,800 year old weasel footprint with the wrong label on it.