In a lecture in 1884, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin described a ‘plague-wind’ darkening Britain’s skies. After decades of looking closely at weather he believed that the atmosphere itself had changed, and that the smoke and ‘filth’ of industrial society formed part of the cause. His argument was urgent:. Under the title ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ he described changes in the appearance of the sky and its relation to the pollution and industrial modernity of his time.
Ruskin was hugely involved in the building of the Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Its Neo-Gothic architecture and ornate pre-Raphaelite decoration was chosen to relate to a purer time when people were more in tune with the beauty of what was seen as an unspoiled nature. The Museum’s huge, airy, glass-roofed central court allows light and air to suffuse the building, offering a view of the changing skies overhead. It was a reaction to – and rejection of – what Ruskin viewed as the insidious march of Victorian industrialisation.
With current concerns about climate change, extreme weather events and environmental pollution, Ruskin’s lecture seems remarkably prescient and his work continues to stimulate conversations today.
The Museum of Natural History main court
On 24 October 2026, in the same lecture theatre that Ruskin used for his 19th century talk, we hosted Dr Tom Payne of the Sheffield Creative Industries Institute at Sheffield Hallam University. Tom brought Ruskin’s lecture back to life with a public performance called Storm-Cloud: Observations of the Sky as part of an event in partnership with IF Oxford, the annual science and ideas festival. Part research project and part provocative performance, ‘Storm-Cloud’ melds Ruskin’s original lecture with projected digital artwork created by Jake Goodall, enriched by a soundscape by David John Brady.
Prior to the performance itself visitors were able to see prints of Ruskin’s paintings of his observations of the skies (thanks to the Ashmolean Museum for the loan of these). In these pictures, Ruskin had visually documented the environmental changes he was seeing.
Prints of Ruskin’s paintings of the sky were on display for visitors / Image: Becky Payne
Museum staff also presented specimens from the collections to talk about how scientists can use them to demonstrate human-caused changes to nature over time. These included Bernard Kettlewell’s famous Peppered Moths, which showed how the smog of industrial Britain had influenced natural selection in a species, and feathers from Victorian birds that can help us feed better information into climate change models and understand changes in pollutant levels today.
Museum Education Officer Chris Jarvis shows visitors Peppered Moths from the collections / Image: Becky Payne
I think John Ruskin would have thoroughly approved of this powerful blend of art and science. The event highlighted how museums are still places of public debate, provocation and discussion, and how the millions of natural history specimens and the data they hold can be used to inform us about environmental change today.
Each summer the Museum runs its Undergraduate Bursary Scheme to give university students hands-on experience working in a museum of natural history. The scheme accepts applications from students from underrepresented backgrounds who are ordinarily resident in the UK. Here, Helena Rowlstone tells us about her time on the Scheme investigating mammalian limb evolution and scanning bones from the Museum collection.
The structure and shape of different mammals can vary hugely. Consider the differences between dog and a whale, one a land mammal, the other a marine mammal. One of the most dramatic shifts in mammalian evolution originates from the transition from land to water, where some animals evolved flippers and paddles rather than a typical leg. Over six weeks at the Museum, I had the incredible opportunity to explore this aspect of evolution, working on Dr Julia Schwab’s research into the anatomical adaptations of mammals.
During the project I learned how to process CT scans to create digital 3D models in software called Amira; how to use a surface scanner to make 3D models from physical specimens; and how to use programmes such as 3D Slicer and R for analysis. In total, I processed CT scan data for 86 limb bones from species in the Mustelidae family, which includes weasels, combining the information with pre-existing models for other mammal species to allow comparisons to be analysed.
Prior to the placement I was already considering pursuing a career in museums. I believe that they play an important role in educating society about Earth history, current biodiversity, potential future climate change, and information to support and promote conservation – all things that I feel very passionate about. After six weeks here, I am even more confident that this is the pathway I will follow – the community aspect being such an inspiring feature at the Museum. All the staff were incredibly welcoming and gave me so much advice and guidance. Seeing their respective niches and interests has let me experience all aspects of museum life and it is inspiring to see their dedication to their work.
From an academic perspective, this placement has been invaluable. I have developed skills in data collection, processing and analysis, understanding of software, as well as experience in a longer-term research project. These are all qualities that will significantly enhance my future research career and provide me with expertise that I cannot get in the classroom. I have high hopes that this is only the start of my research career, and I sincerely hope that I can one day return to work in this museum. I cannot thank Julia, Hannah and the wider Museum enough for this bursary scheme and all their advice and guidance they have given me.
Are you an undergraduate student in the UK and interested in our paid Undergraduate Bursary Scheme? You can learn more on our website.
By Ella McKelvey, Web Content and Communications Officer
A few days ago, I was working from home when a delivery driver arrived with a strange parcel – a cardboard box stamped with the letters FRAGILE that seemed to be producing a peculiar, scratching sound. Tentatively, I opened the cardboard box and pulled out a plastic punnet filled with newspaper, old egg cartons, and… wait! Was that an antenna?
The parcel turned out to be a box of locusts, ordered by my housemate who uses them to feed her pet reptiles. I set the punnet down beside me and tried to continue with my morning’s work. But over the next few hours, the locusts grew increasingly restless, bouncing against the walls of their punnet like hot, microwaved popcorn. The sight and sound of the insects began to return memories of the infamous locust swarms of 2020 — one in a series of near-apocalyptic events that befell us that fateful year. Worryingly, climate change is set to make locust swarms increasingly common, with Sardinia currently facing its worst locust swarm in thirty years.1
Left: A poster for The Beginning of the End (1957) about a fictional invasion of giant, mutant locusts in Illinois. Right: A real-life locust swarm near Satrokala, Madagascar (2014).
Throughout history, locusts have been widely understood as symbols of maleficence and misfortune. One of the oldest written references to locusts is, of course, the Biblical story of the ten plagues of Egypt, in which locusts were sent as a punishment from God. Since then, these infamous insects have been featured in art, books, music, and films as harbingers of destruction. Americans of the mid-twentieth century were somewhat obsessed with giant locusts and grasshoppers which were featured everywhere from cartoons to postcards. 1957 saw the release of the movie The Beginning of the End – a schlocky Hollywood sci-fi tale about a swarm of giant, mutant locusts invading Illinois. The film’s principal Entomologist describes locusts as “deadly killer[s]”, both “intelligent and strong”. Real-life locusts are, indeed, very strong for their size, with back legs that can catapult them up to a metre from standing. This means that it would be feasible for the human-sized locusts in The Beginning of the End to jump as far as forty metres — a terrifying thought!2
While The Beginning of the End is ridiculous both in premise and execution, I can’t deny that I find the concept of giant locusts pretty nightmarish. Earlier in the week, I sent an email to the Life Collections team to enquire about the possibility of looking through our pinned locusts and snapping a few photos of the biggest and grisliest specimens. As I walked upstairs to entomology, I braced myself for an encounter with some fearsome insects. But what I found were a few drawers of modest-sized locusts that looked about as benign as garden grasshoppers. Many of them were even stuffed with wool; more like teddy bears than agents of Armageddon.
Left: Anacridium aegyptium or Egyptian Locust from the Collections at OUMNH. Right: Underside of a locust specimen showing cotton wool stuffing.
According to Collections Assistant Rob Douglas, stuffing large insect specimens with cotton wool used to be a common entomological practice. Insects with fatty insides, like locusts, must be gutted to ensure good preservation. Following the removal of the insects’ insides, cotton was often used to return their abdomens to their usual size and shape. Locusts’ ample fat stores contribute as much to their physical prowess as their powerful hind legs; sustaining them through migrations of up to 310 miles a day.3 Such migrations occur when locusts are exposed to a dry spell followed by wet weather, allowing for the sudden regrowth of vegetation. These conditions will cause locusts to switch their solitary lifestyles for gregariousness, coming together to chomp their way through crops and vegetation at a density of 80-160 million insects per square mile. A large migrating swarm of locusts has been estimated to need as many calories in a day as 1.5 million human males, explaining why even ordinary-sized locusts are capable of causing agricultural annihilation.4
If it weren’t for government and international interventions, the 2020 locust swarms in East Africa could have caused up to $8.5 billion in economic damages by the year-end.5 But locusts can do much worse. One of the most notorious locust swarms on record was that of the Rocky Mountain locust in the USA between 1874 and 1877. According to some accounts, the swarm caused damages to agriculture equivalent to $116 billion in today’s money, leaving behind piles of locust carcases up to six feet high.6
When it comes to protecting crops from locusts, prevention is better than cure. Likely locust outbreaks can be pre-empted by studying weather patterns and using satellite imagery to keep an eye on vegetation growth.7 Once a (potential) locust swarm has been identified, traditional methods of locust management involve the use of pesticides to wipe out the insects as soon as possible. Back in the 1950s, this meant dowsing locusts with DDT. But as the drawbacks of synthetic pesticides become increasingly apparent, chemical interventions are being replaced with the application of naturally occurring ‘pesticides’ like the fungus Metarhizium acridum.
Our understanding of locusts has come a long way since the release of The Beginning of the End. One of my favourite news stories of the past month was the announcement by a laboratory at Michigan State University that locusts have been successfully used to ‘sniff out’ mouth cancer.8 It turns out that locusts no longer just spell danger for humanity — they can smell danger for humanity too! These cancer-detecting locusts are, in my opinion, far more ‘sci-fi’ than the giant bugs imagined by scriptwriters of the 1950s, reminding us that, when it comes to science, the truth is often stranger than fiction. Reports like these demonstrate that scientific research has the power to transform our relationship with the pests that have tormented us for thousands of years.
[5] Dominy, Nathaniel J., and Luke D. Fannin. “The sluggard has no locusts: From persistent pest to irresistible icon.” People and Nature 3, no. 3 (2021): 542-549.
[6] Lockwood, Jeffrey A. Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. London: Hachette (2004).
[7] Zhang, Long, Michel Lecoq, Alexandre Latchininsky, and David Hunter. “Locust and grasshopper management.” Annu. Rev. Entomol 64, no. 1 (2019): 15-34.
In September 2021, the Museum initiated its first “Specimen Showdown” on Twitter and Instagram, where followers could vote on their favourite specimens from our collections. Over the course of the month, followers narrowed down their favourite among 32 specimens from four collections: The Library Legends, The Bygone Beasts, The Rock Stars, and The Birds and The Beetles. The final showdown was between the Connemara Column (found in the Main Court of the Museum) and the Pulgas Vestidas from the Library and Archives. In a nail-biting race, the Pulgas Vestidas narrowly beat the column with 53.9% of the vote.
But what are Pulgas Vestidas? And why are they so popular?
Dressed fleas, you say?
The delicate art of dressing fleas in tiny costumes, known as ‘Pulgas Vestidas’ in Spanish, flourished in Mexico for over two centuries. It is believed that the craft began in Mexican convents where nuns would fashion tiny pieces of clothing onto dead fleas. An important point to note is that the fleas themselves were not actually dressed — instead, they formed the heads of the figures. The individual fleas were set in matchboxes and decorated with elaborate human costumes, hats, shoes, and accessories. Sometimes the fleas were set in whole scenes, often as married couples in miniature dioramas of everyday life. The bride and groom sets were the most popular, with the bride sporting a long veil and the groom in his best suit. The nuns would then sell the fleas for a small amount of money to passing tourists. The trade was later picked up by the local villagers and Pulgas Vestidas were widely sold to tourists visiting Mexico in the early twentieth century.
Dressed fleas in a scene that reminds the editor of Don QuixoteA dressed flea marriage scene
Dressed fleas were popular with tourists until the 1930s when the art declined in popularity. An increasing awareness of hygiene meant that fleas were rapidly regarded as unhealthy. Many dressed fleas were consigned to the bin, and Pulgas Vestidas became a lost art as tourists’ tastes for memorabilia changed. Examples of these tiny curiosities are now rare collectors’ items.
Pulgas Vestidas at Oxford University Museum of Natural History
The Museum’s dressed fleas were collected in 1911 by American archaeologist and anthropologist Zeila M. M. Nuttall who specialised in Mexican history and culture. She sent the dressed fleas to her brother, bacteriologist George H.F. Nuttall. George formally donated a collection of 50 Ixodidae (ticks) to the Museum, and it is likely he also gifted the dressed fleas at the same time. The dressed fleas would have been considered more of a Victorian novelty, and so were not formally recorded or accessioned into our collections.
Although most of OUMNH’s dressed fleas reside behind-the-scenes, one example is on public display in the Upper Gallery of the Main Court. Sporting tiny clothes and a backpack, the flea is just visible with the help of a magnifying glass. Clearly, this one was born to flea wild.
Dressed flea on display in the MuseumDanielle will be presenting the dressed fleas at our Late Night event
OUMNH’s Pulgas Vestidas are definitely among the more unusual items in the Museum’s collections, and they were clearly head and shoulders above other specimens in the September Specimen Showdown competition, despite being no more than 5mm tall! Pulgas Vestidas may be small, but they certainly are mighty.
I’ll Flea There
The dressed fleas will be on display, with a flea-tastic craft, for the Museum’s free evening event ‘Late Night: A Buzz in the Air‘ on 27 May from 7-10pm.
HOW TO SOLVE A BIOLOGICAL MYSTERY USING MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND DNA TECHNOLOGY
By Rebecca Whitla, PhD student at Oxford Brookes University
The Black-veined white butterfly (Aporia crataegi) was a large, charismatic butterfly with distinctive black venation on its wings. Once commonly found in the UK, the species unfortunately went extinct here in around 1925, with the last British specimens collected from Herne Bay in Kent. It isn’t fully understood why the species disappeared from the UK, but climate change, predation, parasites, and disease have all been suggested to have caused its disappearance — perhaps with several of these factors contributing to its decline. Central to solving the mystery of the disappearance of the Black-veined white will be the collections of butterflies that are stored in museums like OUMNH.
Butterflies tend to be well-represented in museum collections, and the Black-veined white is no exception. While the species has now been extinct in the UK for around 100 years, Lepidoptera enthusiasts from previous centuries often captured wild Black-veined white specimens for their personal collections. The abundance of Black-veined white butterflies in museum collections, like the collections at OUMNH, serve as a valuable repository for scientific research — including my own!
Black-veined white butterflies in the collections at OUMNH
Between June and December 2021, I undertook a research project using OUMNH’s Black-veined white butterflies. My task was to extract enough DNA from the butterflies to use for ‘whole genome sequencing’ — in other words, I was attempting to extract DNA from butterfly specimens to decode their complete DNA sequence. Getting DNA sequences from the historical specimens that are kept in Museums is no easy task, as DNA degrades over time. Nonetheless, animal specimens from natural history museums havesuccessfully been used for whole genome sequencing and genetic analysis in the past, including species as diverse as longhorn beetles and least Weasels.
In order to work out how to extract DNA from the specimens, I had to try a variety of methods. This included experimenting to find out whether butterfly legs or abdomen fragments yielded more DNA, and whether non-destructive methods of DNA extraction were as effective as destructive methods. An example of a non-destructive method of DNA extraction would be a process like soaking a sample overnight and using the leftover liquid for DNA extraction, whereas a destructive method might involve mashing a whole leg or abdomen segment to use as a DNA source.
Preparing a DNA sample
Overall, I found that destructively sampling the legs of the butterflies gave the most reliable results, and also had the added benefit of not destroying the wings or abdomen of the specimens. Keeping the wings and abdomens of the butterflies intact will likely prove useful for conducting morphological studies in future.
Now that I have a reliable DNA extraction method, the next step in my research will be to analyse more Black-veined white specimens from a span of different time periods leading up to the species’ disappearance. I will then compare samples collected from each time period to calculate the genetic diversity of the species at each point in time, leading up to its disappearance. If I find a steady decline in the species’ genetic diversity over time, this may indicate a gradual extinction of the species. This is because we expect that, as numbers of a species decrease, inbreeding will become common, resulting in less diversity in the species’ DNA. However, if the populations of Black-veined white butterflies went extinct very suddenly, the decline in genetic diversity will probably be less pronounced. Learning more about the fate of the Black-veined White could not only help us unlock the historical mystery of the species’ decline in Britain, but will also help us understand more about the species’ decline in other parts of the world.
British Insect Collections: HOPE for the Future is an ambitious project to protect and share the Museum of Natural History’s unique and irreplaceable British insect collection. Containing over one million specimens – including dozens of iconic species now considered extinct in the UK – it offers us an extraordinary window into the natural world and the ways it has changed over the last 200 years. The HOPE for the Future project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players.
By EvieGranat, Project Officer Trainee with the Freshwater Habitats Trust and Museum volunteer
The Museum is lucky enough to house several specimens presented by Jane Willis Kirkaldy (1867/9 – 1932). They serve as a reminder of a passionate and dedicated tutor, and of a key figure behind the development of women’s education at Oxford University.
Jane Willis Kirkaldy was born somewhere between 1867 and 1869, and spent her youth in London with her parents and five siblings. After completing her secondary education at Wimbledon High School, Kirkaldy gained entry to Somerville College (Oxford) on an exhibition scholarship in 1887. She finished her degree in 1891, becoming one of the first women to achieve a First Class Hons in Natural Sciences (Zoology). However, since the University didn’t award women degrees in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t until 1920 that Kirkaldy received her MA.
Upon completing her undergraduate studies, Kirkaldy worked for a short period as a private tutor in Castle Howard before returning to Oxford in 1894. Whilst researching at the University, she produced two papers for the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, including an article entitled “On the Head Kidney of Myxine”. This study of the renal systems of hagfish was written with the aid of experimental work carried out by renowned zoologist Walter Weldon at his UCL laboratory. She also studied lancelets under the Oxford Linacre Professor of Zoology, publishing “A Revision of the Genera and Species of Branchiostomdae” in 1895.
Middle Devonian fossils from Eifel, presented to the Museum by Jane Willis Kirkaldy.
Kirkaldy’s achievements are especially noteworthy given how few women studied Natural Sciences at Oxford during the nineteenth century. In addition to her contributions to the scientific field, she also helped advance women’s education at Oxford University. In 1894, The Association of the Education of Women named Kirkaldy a tutor to female students in the School of Natural Sciences. The following year she ceased all research to concentrate fully on teaching, co-authoring ‘Text Book of Zoology’ with Miss E.C. Pollard in 1896, and Introduction to the Study of Biology with I. M. Drummond in 1907. She eventually became a tutor or lecturer at all of Oxford’s Women’s Societies, and a Director of Studies at all five of the women’s colleges. Amongst the many female scientists that came under her care was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.
Left: Page from one of our donations books listing Jane Willis Kirkaldy as the donor of a series of Middle Devonian fossils (from the Eifel) to the Museum in October 1901. Right: Chromite from East Africa, also donated to the Museum by Kirkaldy.
Beyond the Department of Natural Sciences, Kirkaldy was an important figure at Oxford — she served as a member of the Council of St. Hugh’s College for 14 years, and was made an honorary fellow of Somerville College in 1929. At the Museum of Natural History, she presented beetles from New Guinea (1890), Devonian Fossils from the Eiffel (1901), and Chromite from near Beira, Mozambique (1924).
Kirkaldy retired from the University in 1930 due to ill health, before passing away in a London care home in 1932. Oxford University subsequently dedicated the junior and senior ‘Jane Willis Kirkakdy Prizes’ in her memory, which still exist to this day.
