As you can tell from the adornment of our Red Deer, Christmas is upon us, so it’s nearly time to bid farewell to another year. It’s been another remarkable twelve months here at the Museum so here’s a little round up a few highlights from 2015…
As winter gave forth to spring News emerged of a heartwarming thing The Art Fund whispered in our ear
We were nominees for Museum of the Year!
Although eventual winners we were not
It mattered really not one jot
For in celebration we embarked
On the Dodo Roadshow – a tremendous lark
Back in April we’re pleased to say Another award came our way Goes to Town gave creatures free reign
And grabbed a gong for Marketing Campaign
But we weren’t always on the road
In our exhibitions many stories were told
Of evolution, geology and sensory powers
Science and research passed the visitors’ hours
Our doors were open without interruption
While out on the lawn was a volcanic eruption
University scientists had plenty to say
On a really Super Science Saturday
So to our schools, and families, and adults and more
Thank you, cheers, and thank you some more
Just over a hundred years ago the Museum acquired a collection of fossils from renowned 19th-century geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell is famous for his book Principles of Geology which provided a foundation for the modern study of the science of geology. On the new blog we will be documenting the digitisation of this collection.
Just over a hundred years ago there was great excitement amongst the staff at Oxford University Museum when they acquired the Charles Lyell Collection of Tertiary molluscs. In his 1903 Annual Report the Professor of Geology, W.J. Sollas, described it as one of the most noteworthy events in the Geological Department that year.
The collection contains over 16,000 fossil specimens, mostly molluscs (bivalves, gastropods and scaphopods) but also shark teeth and other vertebrate remains. Although some of the specimens are on display in the museum, few people were aware that we had the collection. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the collection was fully catalogued, and it has never been included in the Museum’s main collections databases.
Over the next 18 months we are planning to digitize the collection and create links to our archival material and Lyell’s publications. We want to make the collection…
Our head of research, Sammy De Grave, is the lead author of a paper published in Scientific Reportslast week. In this paper he and his co-authors propose to remove an entire ‘order’ of crustaceans. But just what is an order, and why would we want to get rid of one?
Biologists organise all life into ranked groups. The most familiar, and at the bottom level, are genus and species. These are recognisable in the format Homo sapiens, where Homo is the genus and sapiens is the species.
One of the higher groupings is called an order. For crustaceans, there are around 70,000 known species grouped into approximately 50 different orders. One of these orders is the subject of the paper mentioned above – it’s called Amphionidacea – and the odd thing about it is that it was created in 1973 for just one species, an enigmatic open-sea creature called Amphionides reynaudii.
Presumed adult female of Amphionides reynaudii (after Williamson, 1973)
Although the species has been known since 1833, relatively few specimens have been collected and almost none since 1973. Some larval stages have but recognised, but only three adult males have ever been found and no intact adult females have been collected. The reference illustration above is a composite of 43 damaged specimens.
Lacking good research specimens, the status of this creature has long been debated. Luckily, in 2011 Jose Landeira, a biologist on Gran Canaria, collected six specimens. As usual they were extensively damaged (you can see this in the photograph at the top), but a specialist genetic lab at National Taiwan Ocean University was able to extract some small fragments of DNA.
Building on earlier work by a US group, the sequences were analysed and the results show that Amphionides is not a separate order after all, but merely a shrimp. You can see where it fits in the taxonomic scheme of things by clicking the chart below.
Phylogram of the Decapoda order of crustaceans, which includes crayfish, crabs, lobsters, prawns and shrimp. The position of Amphionides indicated in red (click to enlarge)
In keeping with its oddball status, however, many questions remain unanswered. Amphionides larvae have been recorded across all oceans from the tropics to subtropics, but almost no known shrimp species have such a distribution as adults. And although the genetic analysis reveals a strong affinity to a single family of shrimp (Pandalidae), it remains unclear which genus or even species it could be the larvae for.
So Amphionides may be removed from its order, but the mystery of the little shrimp lingers yet…
On Saturday 28 November we held the first of our new Super Science Saturdays events – a mini science fair for all the family.
The first event was Earth-themed, and featured many stalls about geology, geography and the natural environment – everything from fossils to earthworms!
Visitors got the chance to chat to University of Oxford scientists, meet people from wildlife organisations, and get their hands on specimens from the Museum collection.
Super Science Saturdays is a souped-up version of our regular Science Saturdays events, where scientists from the University help visitors investigate natural history specimens.
We recently ran a second series of taxidermy workshops here at the Museum, run under the expert guidance of professional taxidermist Derek Frampton. Once again they proved very popular with participants, so we asked one of those budding taxidermists, Kit Collins, to give us a short write-up of the day…
As a child I was always fascinated by nature, finding adders, baby hares, grass snakes, slow worms, and watching dolphins, buzzards, and Red Kites, when they were much rarer. I even once skinned a mouse that had been caught in our mouse trap.
I have always wanted to try taxidermy and I now work at an auctioneers where I regularly see all sorts of taxidermy – skins, horns, and skulls, including a hippopotamus skull. So I was keen to know more about the process. This was the first taxidermy course I’ve seen so I jumped at the chance to try something new and learn from an expert taxidermist.
Derek Frampton puts some finishing touches to his partridge
During the workshop we were taken through each step of the process, first watching Derek demonstrating on his bird then copying these steps on our own Red-Legged Partridges.
Kit and his finished specimen regard one another
We could see the finished article that had been made in the previous day’s workshop, sitting watching us on a nearby windowsill. Unfortunately, our specimens looked nothing at all like this at the start and as the morning went by it looked less and less likely that our piece of wet skin and feathers with a few bones attached would end up looking anything like a real bird again…
However, with the help of a blow dryer the feathers regained their soft, striking plumage. We then spent the afternoon piecing the bird back together using a kind of packing straw to recreate the shape of the body, and wire, clay, false eyes, and car body filler to do the rest.
We each ended up with a beautiful bird to take home, as well as the memories of a fun and unusual day out (and anatomy lesson) at the Museum. I would love to do it again.
Just over a hundred years ago there was great excitement amongst the staff at Oxford University Museum when they acquired the Charles Lyell Collection of Tertiary molluscs. In his 1903 Annual Report the Professor of Geology, W.J. Sollas, described it as one of the most noteworthy events in the Geological Department that year.
The collection contains over 16,000 fossil specimens, mostly molluscs (bivalves, gastropods and scaphopods) but also shark teeth and other vertebrate remains. Although some of the specimens are on display in the museum, few people were aware that we had the collection. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the collection was fully catalogued, and it has never been included in the Museum’s main collections databases.
Over the next 18 months we are planning to digitize the collection and create links to our archival material and Lyell’s publications. We want to make the collection accessible to a wider audience (i.e. you) through an image-rich online database including lots of contextual information.
At the same time, we will set up a new framework for digitizing palaeontological specimens using the KE EMu collections management system. This will pave the way for the migration of all our current palaeontology databases into KE EMu, joining records from the archives and other specimen collections. These records will all be available on our new Collections Online site.
Books by Charles Lyell in the Museum Library
So who was Charles Lyell?
Charles Lyell (1797-1875) is best known for his book Principles of Geology, in which he popularised one of the key concepts of geology: “the present is the key to the past”. This book combined his own research in geology with ideas developed by the geologists around him, and provided a foundation for the modern study of the science. Lyell kept updating this book as new discoveries were made and his own ideas changed; in fact the last volume was published posthumously.
Lyell read Classics at Oxford, where he also attended the geological lectures of William Buckland. He was a trained lawyer but spent much of his time pursuing his interest in geology, and after 1827 took this up full time. Throughout his life Lyell travelled extensively in Europe and North America, observing geological phenomena, collecting specimens and lecturing to the general public. He was a close and influential friend of Charles Darwin, and Lyell’s Principles was one of the few geological books that Darwin took with him on his voyage on HMS Beagle.
On this blog we will be sharing what we discover in the course of this project: about the collection, the digitization process, and Lyell himself.
