Find the Robert Hooke Biodiversity Bell

Found in the Festival Garden beside St Paul’s Cathedral is the Robert Hooke Biodiversity Bell. Designed by sculptor Marcus Vergette and cast at Taylor's bell foundry in Loughborough using a mould of fossil-rich Portland limestone, the Bell is a scale model of a much larger version proposed for MEMO, the Mass Extinction Monitoring Observatory on the Isle of Portland, designed to be rung every time a new species becomes extinct.


The Bell is cast from Portland Stone in reference to Robert Hooke, the polymath often described as one of the most brilliant and versatile of English scientists, who deduced that species become extinct after observing giant ammonites found in Portland stone. Hooke sounds like a thoroughly interesting chap, and was at one time curator of experiments and a member of the council at the Royal Society, Gresham Professor of Geometry, and a Surveyor of the City of London in the aftermath of the the Great Fire.

For more, see http://www.roberthooke.org/page7.html