London, Jan 17 (IANS) A treasure trove of fossils collected by a young Charles Darwin in the 1830s in South America during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle that was lost has now been found in a dusty storeroom in Britain.

The fossils - neatly pressed on to slides and some bearing Darwin’s signature - were found by Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, the Daily Mail reported.

The scientist was searching for some other fossils at a massive storeroom of the British Geological Survey in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, when he came upon an old cabinet, with drawers inside labelled “unregistered fossil plants”, and decided to take a look.

“I can’t resist a mystery so I pulled one open. What I found inside made my jaw drop! Inside were hundreds of beautiful glass slides. Almost the first I picked up was labelled “C. Darwin Esq,” Falcon-Lang was quoted as saying.

“This is an amazing snapshot into Darwin’s working life. This was one of the most exciting periods in the history of science, forming the mind of the man who would develop the theory of evolution, which would change the world,” he said.

The 314 slides found include 40-million-year-old plants from a remote island off the coast of Chile.

Another shows a giant tree-sized fungus which covered the Earth 400 million years ago when the climate was so hot there was no ice even at the Poles, the daily said.

The fossils were lost because Darwin’s friend, botanist Joseph Hooker, did not catalogue them properly. He had been given the job while working at the British Geological Survey in 1846.

But before he was able to put them in the official specimen register, he was offered a chance to go on a voyage to the Himalayas. So he simply stored them in the cabinet.

The cabinet was moved to the first headquarters in Charing Cross in London in 1851, to the Geological Museum in South Kensington in 1935, and to Nottinghamshire in 1985 but was never opened.