Author: More than a Dodo

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‘Welcome to My Museum’

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I’ve been to see the dinosaurs at the Pitt Rivers Museum!

It’s a common exclamation, but alas, there are no dinos in the Pitt Rivers, nor totem poles in the Museum of Natural History. Rather, there are two museums with a shared front door, and a fair amount of confusion.

To address this perpetual museum muddle we present a short play, Welcome to My Museum, where the Victorian founders of each institution come to life to discuss ‘two marvellous museums under one roof’.

A small grant from the Oxford University Museums Partnership allowed a collaboration between us, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Pegasus Theatre, and Film Oxford to produce two versions of the play – one for public performance and another for a film adaptation, which is the one you can watch below.

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Ciaran Murtagh (left) as General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers and Andrew Jones as Henry Acland

Working with Pegasus Theatre, Rachel Barnett scripted an imagined conversation between the founders of the two museums, Henry Acland and General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers. Pegasus helped to source actors and costumes and even a prop-maker for Pitt Rivers’s fine pufferfish helmet.

Film Oxford spent several late nights with a very patient rent-a-crowd, immortalising their adaptation of the play on film. The public performance was well attended, with over 250 visitors dropping in to watch General Pitt Rivers rudely interrupt Henry Acland’s speech welcoming visitors to his museum. Pitt Rivers rightly points out that there must be two museums as the building has two gift shops and even two differently-branded pencil sharpeners for sale in them – ‘scientifically incontrovertible’ proof!

So if you think that you have ever been to the Pitt Rivers Museum to see the dinosaurs, or the Museum of Natural History to look at the totem-pole, watch the film below and you will discover that our building is actually ‘two sublime museums under one roof’.

Chris Jarvis – Education officer

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‘Dead Shrimp Blues’

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I woke up this mornin’ and all my shrimps was dead and gone

So sang the legendary blues artist Robert Johnson back in 1937. Sadly, it’s a lyric which resonates today, according to a study led by the Museum and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Almost 28% of the world’s 762 freshwater shrimp species, a group which supports the livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest communities, are now threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The main threats include urban and agricultural pollution, human intrusions and disturbance, and invasive species.

Euryrhynchus amazoniensis, a widespread Amazonian species. Photo: W Klotz
Euryrhynchus amazoniensis, a widespread Amazonian species. Photo: W Klotz

“Freshwater shrimps are extensively harvested for human food, especially by the poorest communities in tropical regions, where they often dominate the biomass of streams and play a key role in regulating many ecosystem functions. However, little is known about the impacts the loss of these species may cause to ecosystem services,” say the Museum’s Sammy De Grave, lead author of the report, which is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Two species were declared as Extinct and a further ten are also Possibly Extinct, but require field surveys to confirm that status. Several of these species are only known from a single cave or stream in locations which have undergone significant levels of habitat degradation and conversion, and have not been sighted for decades. For example, Macrobrachium purpureamanus is only known from peat swamps on Kundur Island, Riau Archipelago (Indonesia), an area which from 1998 has been extensively converted to an oil palm plantation.

Caridina woltereckae, endemic to Lake Towuti (Sulawesi), currently under threat due to overharvesting for the aquarium trade, pollution and invasive fish species. Photo: C Lukhaup
Caridina woltereckae, endemic to Lake Towuti (Sulawesi), currently under threat due to overharvesting for the aquarium trade, pollution and invasive fish species. Photo: C Lukhaup

The research, which collated distribution data for all species, identified areas containing high levels of species diversity in the Western Ghats, Madagascar, the Guyana Shield area, the upper Amazon, Sulawesi and Indo-China.  Additionally, high concentrations of cave-dwelling species were found in areas of China, the western Balkan Peninsula, the Philippines and Cuba.

Palaemonias alabamae. Photo: D Fenolio
Palaemonias alabamae. Photo: D Fenolio

Although threatened species are found across the globe, notable concentrations were found in Sulawesi (Indonesia), Cuba, the Philippines and southern China, many of which are restricted to cave habitats. As well as cave-dwelling species, those restricted to lakes and freshwater springs also face higher levels of threat. The Alabama Cave Shrimp (Palaemonias alabamae), for example, is listed as Endangered, and is known from only four cave systems in Alabama, USA that are currently under threat from groundwater abstraction and habitat change.

Global species richness of freshwater shrimps
Global species richness of freshwater shrimps

As well as making a number of recommendations for conservation actions, the report stresses the urgent need for field research to increase understanding of the life histories, threats and distribution of many shrimp species.

“The high levels of extinction threat that the team found for freshwater shrimps have also been found for freshwater crabs and crayfish, and these studies of global faunas highlight the fragile state of freshwater invertebrates across the world,” says Neil Cumberlidge, Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Freshwater Crustacean Specialist Group.

“Sadly, the prospect of losing these important species often goes unnoticed. The information on these threatened freshwater crustaceans is readily available on the IUCN Red List and needs to be incorporated into decision making at all levels if we are to protect the world’s rapidly deteriorating freshwater habitats and the amazing but highly threatened species that live there.”

Werner Klotz, one of the co-authors of the study collecting a new species of freshwater shrimp in Taiwan.
Werner Klotz, one of the co-authors of the study collecting a new species of freshwater shrimp in Taiwan

The study, Dead Shrimp Blues: A global assessment of extinction risk in freshwater shrimp (Decapoda: Caridea), involved researchers from the UK, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore and Taiwan.

Sammy De Grave – Head of Research

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Back to your roots

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If you have ever tried to trace your family tree and come to a dead end, the chances are that your missing ancestors were still living in the same place over a thousand years ago. A paper just published in Nature, and co-researched by the Museum’s environmental archaeologist Professor Mark Robinson, looked at the genotypes of more than 2,000 people and found some surprising results.

The People of the British Isles (POBI) survey selected people with grandparents who were born in shared rural locations, so as to remove the effects of recent population movements, and created the first fine-scale genetic map of any country in the world. It showed that the UK’s population could be divided into 17 genetically distinct groups, most with very little interbreeding for the last thousand years or more.

A genetic map of Britain created by the People of the British Isles study
A genetic map of Britain created by the People of the British Isles study

The Romans, Danish Vikings and Normans, despite conquering Britain, seem to have made not much of a mark genetically. However, there is an Anglo-Saxon component to the population of south east, central and eastern England and, as might be expected, the inhabitants of Orkney are partly Norse (Norwegian). In both these areas, the earlier populations were not wiped out but merged with the invaders.

Amongst the surprising discoveries was the fact that many of the groups in north and west Britain seem to have been living in the same areas as their Celtic-speaking tribal ancestors since at least the 6th century. If you’re Welsh you may be more genetically similar to an Ice Age settler than you are to someone from Bristol or Liverpool. If you’re Cornish, you are most likely from a genetically different group to a Devonian.

And if you have ever thought of yourself as belonging to an ancient Celtic kingdom, you’d better decide which one as there was no single ‘Celtic’ genetic group. In fact, the parts of the UK in which the Celtic language survived longest (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall) are among the most different from each other genetically.

While our ancestral history is very interesting, it is not the primary purpose of the research study. Instead, the research group, led by Sir Walter Bodmer and Professor Peter Donnelly, is looking to decipher the genetic structure of the UK in order to track down genes associated with common human diseases.

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Ancient arthropods

3. Aegirocassis benmoulae reconstruction low Meet Aegirocassis benmoulae – a 480 million year old, two-metre sea monster. This unlikely looking creature has been described, and imagined in this illustration, thanks to the work of one of the Museum’s research fellows, Dr Allison Daley.

Through collaboration with Dr Peter Van Roy and Professor Derek Briggs at Yale University, Allie has published a paper on Aegirocassis that is published in Nature this week. Here, Allie tells us a little bit more about it…

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In December 2012, I met Peter Van Roy at the Palaeontological Association annual general meeting in Dublin. He told me about a new specimen that had just been unearthed in Morocco, and I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Peter was working with professional fossil hunter Mohamed Ben Moula, discovering ancient Cambrian-type animal communities in the much younger rocks of the Ordovician period. What you can see above is a recreation of one of their finds, which was spectacularly preserved in three dimensions. Peter invited me to join him in studying this material, and I accepted with great excitement.

Reconstruction of the giant filter-feeding Aegirocassis benmoulae feeding on a plankton cloud in the sea approximately 480 million years ago. Aegirocassis grew to over 2 meters. Reconstruction by Marianne Collins, ArtofFact
Reconstruction of the giant filter-feeding Aegirocassis benmoulae feeding on a plankton cloud in the sea approximately 480 million years ago. Aegirocassis grew to over 2 meters. Reconstruction by Marianne Collins, ArtofFact

Aegirocassis benmoulae belongs to a group of long extinct sea-dwelling animals called anomalocaridids. These were fearsome looking things: segmented bodies with wide swim flaps, a head bearing large eyes, a circular jaw with sharp teeth, and a pair of large claws. Anomalocaridids first appear in the fossil record during the Cambrian Explosion, a major evolutionary event that saw the rise of all animal life in a relatively rapid period of time.

They were early ancestors of the arthropods, the animal group that today includes spiders, insects, centipedes and lobsters. When they first evolved, in the Cambrian, anomalocaridids were apex predators and the biggest animals around, reaching up to about 50cm in size, but Aegirocassis benmoulae is a very different breed indeed.

Side view of a complete Aegirocassis benmoulae fossil, showing the pointed ‘flaps’ on the animal’s back. Photograph by Peter Van Roy, Yale University.
Side view of a complete Aegirocassis benmoulae fossil, showing the pointed ‘flaps’ on the animal’s back. Photograph by Peter Van Roy, Yale University.

Most Cambrian anomalocaridids have one set of triangular swim flaps sticking out the side of the body, but the new Ordovician animal, Aegirocassis, shows us that the anomalocaridids actually had two pairs of body flaps. These two flaps correspond to the two branches of a limb that is characteristic of crustacea and represents an evolutionary stage before the two branches had fused. In other words, It allows us to trace the evolution of one of the key body features that made arthropods such a successful group of animals right through to the present day.

A side view of the fossilized spiny ‘net’ which Aegirocassis benmoulae used to filter its plankton food from sea water. Photograph by Peter Van Roy, Yale University.
A side view of the fossilized spiny ‘net’ which Aegirocassis benmoulae used to filter its plankton food from sea water. Photograph by Peter Van Roy, Yale University.

As if that wasn’t enough, Aegirocassis also had a very different ecology from most anomalocaridids. While the Cambrian forms were mostly apex predators, this animal was a filter feeder – it used fine comb-like spines on its head appendages to filter plankton from the sea water. Only one Cambrian anomalocaridid also used filter feeding, but it remained a relatively modest size, while Aegirocassis was one of the largest arthropods ever to have existed.

This combination of gigantic size and filter feeding evolved from a previously predatory animal group is similar to the type of evolution seen later in whales. It makes Aegirocassis a very important animal for understanding both ecology and evolution in the oceans 480 million years ago.

Allison Daley holds up an Anomalocaridid fossil at the Burgess Shale in Canada. This area has yielded many previous Anomalocaridid fossils. Photograph by Parks Canada
Allison Daley holds up an Anomalocaridid fossil at the Burgess Shale in Canada. This area has yielded many previous Anomalocaridid fossils. Photograph by Parks Canada

Allison Daley – Research fellow You can also listen to an Oxford Sparks podcast with Allie, where she talks about the Cambrian Explosion, in the player here.

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A drone’s eye view

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If you saw our recent day-in-the-life film you may have noticed the lovely opening shot, where the camera swoops down from above the Museum’s tall tower and comes to a rest directly outside the main doors. In the photo above you can see the impressive drone that captured this footage.

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The drone checks out our Iguanodon
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Mark Wynne, director and pilot at SkyQuad, keeps his eye on the drone

The drone was operated by Mark Wynne of SkyQuad, a specialist aerial photography and video company. The sequence in the film is just one snippet of a bunch of footage that we shot for a digital project that we’re working on with Hunts and Oakley Mobile. The project is to develop new mobile app content for the Museum, revealing more about our collections and building. More on that to come later, including some amazing flybys of the T. rex inside the main court.

In the meantime we thought you might like to see a few shots of the two drones in action. The larger drone captures 4K, or ultra high-definition video, while the small drone was more maneuverable and safer to use inside. Here’s a little clip of the bigger one hovering around outside the Museum.

 

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‘A thoroughly unhousewifely skill’

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For International Women’s Day, the Museum of Natural History celebrates the life and career of Dorothy Hodgkin, one of its most eminent researchers. Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964, and is still the only UK woman to have been awarded one of the science Nobels.

When the Museum of Natural History was designed in the 1850s, the building was intended not just to house a museum but also the burgeoning science departments of the University. The lettering above the doors facing the court continues to record these early affiliations: ‘Department of Medicine’, ‘Professor of Experimental Philosophy’, and so on.

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Dorothy Mary Hodgkin (1910–1994) Image: Nobel Prize

As individual departments grew they moved into their own buildings across the science campus. One of the last research groups left in the Museum was the Department of Mineralogy & Crystallography, which, from the 1930s onwards, was the research home of the outstanding X-ray crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964.

The Daily Mail famously celebrated her success with the headline ‘Oxford housewife wins Nobel’, but The Observer was no more enlightened, commenting that Hodgkin was ‘an affable looking housewife’ who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for ‘a thoroughly unhousewifely skill’.  That socially disruptive ability was an unparalleled proficiency with X-ray analysis, particularly in the elucidation of the structure of biological molecules.

Hodgkin undertook her first degree at Oxford from 1928 to 1932, initially combining chemistry and archaeology but later focusing on the emerging technique of X-ray crystallography. Her undergraduate research project was carried out using this technique in a Museum laboratory within what is now the Huxley Room, the scene of the 1860 Great Debate on evolution between Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley. She then journeyed across to Cambridge for her PhD before returning to Oxford in 1934 and resuming her association with the Museum.

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Model of the Structure of Penicillin, by Dorothy Hodgkin, Oxford, c.1945, in the Museum of the History of Science

Back in Oxford, Hodgkin started fundraising for X-ray apparatus to explore the molecular structure of biologically interesting molecules. One of the first to attract her attention was insulin, the structure of which took over 30 years to resolve – a project timescale unlikely to appeal to modern research funders. Other molecules proved more tractable, including the newly discovered penicillin, which Hodgkin began to work on during the Second World War, and vitamin B12.  It was for the determination of these structures that she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Dorothy Hodgkin’s new X-ray laboratory was set up in a semi-basement room in the north-west corner of the Museum.  The room is now a vertebrate store but was once also the research home of Prince Fumihito of Japan, when he was based in the Museum for his ichthyological research (and It is still the only room in the Museum with bulletproof windows).

Initially, Hodgkin’s only office space consisted of a table in this room and a small mezzanine gallery above, which housed her microscopes for specimen preparation. Once prepared, she then had to descend a steep, rail-less ladder holding the delicate sample to the X-ray equipment below. Later, Hodgkin had a desk in the ‘calculating room’ (now housing the public engagement team) where three researchers and all of their students sat and undertook by hand the complex mathematics necessary after each analysis to determine the crystal structures of organic molecules.

Paul Smith – Director

If you would like to learn more about Dorothy Hodgkin and her work, then read Georgina Ferry’s excellent biography ‘Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life’ which has just been re-issued as an e-book and new, print-on-demand paperback by Bloomsbury Reader.

 This year’s Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture will be held in the Museum at 5 pm on Thursday 12 March, and is open to all. The lecture will be given by Dr Petra Fromme (Arizona State University) who is an international authority on the structure of membrane proteins.