Five hundred million years ago, soft-bodied sea animals used phosphate to build elaborate, protective armor. Then their resource dried up, and evolution moved on.
Local historian Fred Hughes
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It was my unanticipated pleasure several years ago to come across a painting in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery by the English landscape and portrait painter Joseph Wright entitled, The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus.
The picture, first exhibited in 1771, initially showed a scholar experimenting over the enigmatic Philosopher’s Stone, a substance that could turn ordinary metal into gold.