The Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service has collections of rocks and fossils that date from the cretaceous period to the Ice Age, in East Anglia. This collection includes a small collection of minerals, as well as a good general collection of rocks and fossils.
The R. M. Brydone collection of Cretaceous chalk fossils contains sea urchins from the oldest rock formation in Suffolk. The exhibits also include fossil sharks teeth and turtle shells from the Eocene London clay.
However, the most comprehensive fossil collections come from the last three million years. Colchester and Ipswich Museums have strong collections of Norwich, Coralline and Red Crag, including collections from Alfred Bell, Henry Canham, C. G. Doughty, C. Morley, and R. A. D. Markham.
Several stages of the Ice Age in Britain are named from East Anglian sites. The collection features specimens from Suffolk 'type localities' including – Bobbitshole, Ipswich ('Ipswichian'); Easton Bavents ('Baventian'), and Hoxne ('Hoxnian').
Fossils include include Woolly Rhinoceros, mammoths and other ice age elephants. Another important locality is the Stoke railway tunnel ('Stoke Bone Beds') which produced quantities of quality material when it was dug in 1846. The collections are important in understanding climate change during the Ice Age. The most important of these collections are by N. F. Layard, James Reid Moir, H. E. P. Spencer and the Rev. MacEnery.
A number of collections reflect local industrial activity from brick pits, sand and gravel quarries and the coprolite industry, which occurs as naturally phosphate enriched nodules, often containing fossils. During the late nineteenth century it was discovered that treating ground coprolite with sulphuric acid created "superphosphate", the forerunner of today's artificial fertiliser industry.