Life’s big bang?
by Harriet Drage and Scott Billings You may have heard of the Cambrian Explosion, an ‘event’, starting roughly 540 million years ago, when all the major animal groups suddenly appear […]
Category Archives: Earth Collections
What is a tree of life?
A phylogeny? An evolutionary tree? A cladogram? We see the branching lines of these diagrams in many museum displays and science articles, but what do they tell us and why […]
Death, decay and fossilization
By Duncan Murdock, Research Fellow Our oceans, rivers and lakes teem with life of all shapes and sizes, and have done so for hundreds of millions of years. We can […]
Bound by blood
It may sound like we’ve stumbled into a script-writing session for Jurassic Park, but one of our research fellows, Dr Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, along with an international team, has […]
Seasonal sights
The Museum’s collections are on the move. For decades, a deconsecrated church has been used to house material from our Earth collections, but we now have a new and improved […]
Is it real? – models, casts and replicas
One of the most common questions asked about our specimens, from visitors of all ages, is ‘Is it real?’. This seemingly simple question is actually many questions in one and […]
The ancient mariner
Helen J. Bullard is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison whose research aims to tell the historical and cultural stories of the horseshoe crab. After visiting the museum, […]
