Life Collections – Page 14 – More Than A Dodo

John Barnie, one of our three Poets in Residence, reflects on claims that the future of life from Earth lies deep in the Solar System…

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, physicist Freeman Dyson speculates that in three or four hundred years it may be possible to seed promising planets and moons in the solar system with organisms genetically engineered to withstand their harsh conditions, eventually transforming them into environments which could support humans – fleeing, perhaps, from an irreparably damaged Earth.

297191main_enceladus_full — Does Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, offer a viable site for the seeding of life? Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one example he gives; geysers pierce its hostile icy surface, and Dyson hypothesises a warm sea hidden below. The process would be achieved by landing ‘pods’ of self-sustaining life forms – ‘Noah’s Arks’ he calls them. The rocket technology is well on its way, he argues, and will be perfected by small cost-effective space companies rather than lumbering giants like NASA. Biotechnology, too, will develop by leaps and bounds to produce, for example, ‘warm-blooded plants’ that would absorb energy – on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, say – concentrated from starlight and the distant rays of the Sun.

In the increasingly stressed and chaotic twenty-first century, it is impossible to predict what will happen in two or three years, let alone two or three hundred. In the meantime, while Professor Dyson elaborates his techno-fantasies, we are here, on the only Ark we have, and the only one, I’d say, we are ever likely to have.

asfas — John Barnie meets some of our live residents, the Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, during his residency at the Museum

My year at the Museum has been a fascinating and unforgettable reminder of this, the Museum itself forming an ark within an ark, celebrating the extraordinary diversity of multicellular life as it evolved over 650 million years. Many of its specimens, of course, represent extinct species, and they, too, are a reminder – of how life on Earth is fragile but also robust, endlessly reacting and adapting to changing circumstances. Life has survived at least five mass extinctions in the geological record, and will survive the largely human-induced one many biologists and naturalists, from Niles Eldredge to David Attenborough, think we are entering now – though our species may not be around to see what gets through the inevitable extinction bottleneck.

For techno-utopians like Freeman Dyson, the future is out there in space, not here where we evolved, where we have the grounding of our being. The new biotechnology, he argues, will have to be perfected on Earth first, filling ‘empty ecological niches’. They may, he suggests, ‘make Antarctica green before they take root on Mars’. There are so many things wrong with this it is difficult to know where to start. Luckily for us, the Museum of Natural History represents a very different vision of the Earth, its creatures, and our place among them.

4 October 201611 October 2016

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To The Palaeontologists

As part of the Museum’s Visions of Nature year in 2016, we have had the pleasure of hosting three poets in residence: John Barnie, Steven Matthews, and Kelley Swain. During the year the poets worked alongside staff in the collections and out in the Museum itself to gain inspiration for their writing. A small anthology of the resulting poetry is published at the end of 2016.

In this video Kelley Swain reads two of her poems To The Palaeontologists and Rorqual. Kelley is a poet, writer and editor.

You can meet Kelley at the Museum for National Poetry Day on Thursday 6 October 2016.

8 September 201627 September 2016

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Primate tools and the search for human behaviour

This is the second in a short series of articles to accompany the Stone Age Primates temporary display at the Museum, created with the Primate Archaeology group at Oxford University. Here, Dr Tomos Proffitt, Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Primate Archaeology, shows how the use of stone tools by modern primates might connect with our earliest human ancestors.

Over the past five years I have been fortunate enough to work with and study some of the earliest known stone tools, uncovered from archaeological sites at Olduvai Gorge, one of the most famous Palaeolithic archaeological sites on our planet. Olduvai Gorge seemingly appears out of nowhere as you drive down the dirt tracks of the north western slope of the Ngorogoro caldera and national park in Northern Tanzania.

The view from the top of Naibor Soit overlooking Olduvai Gorge. Photo Credit: Tomos Proffitt

It is here that the famous Louis and Mary Leakey uncovered evidence which proved that our evolutionary origins extended not thousands, but millions of years into the past, and over the years the site has provided a wealth of animal and early human, or hominin, fossils as well as tens of thousands of examples of the stone tools they made.

Two million years ago if you were sitting where I was in Olduvai, the most noticeable feature would have been a great lake surrounded by vast floodplains, occupied by a range of herbivorous and carnivorous animals taking advantage of the abundant grass, shrubs and fresh water constantly feeding the lake. It is in this setting that you would have found small groups of our hominin ancestors (Homo habilis) standing upright and walking across the floodplains in search of food.

Lake Ndutu located at the south western end of Olduvai Gorge. Early hominins would have occupied a similar lake environment. Photo Credit: Tomos Proffitt.

As a large part of my research involved closely studying and analysing the stone tools used by the hominins who once lived in this landscape my thoughts turned to how these individuals would have used tools for the different tasks they faced.

Once this hominin group had found a partially eaten carcass, possibly that of a Deinotherium (an extinct ancestor of the modern day elephant), they would have set about trying to make the most of this valuable resource.

By using quartz flakes with extremely sharp cutting edges, made by striking a quartz block with a round hammerstone cobble, they would have been able to cut the small scraps of meat that were still attached to areas of the carcass untouched by other predators, such as lions, hyenas, wild dogs and vultures. The hominins, would, however, also have been very interested in the leg bones because they contained an incredibly nutritious food source than not many other animals could easily get to – the bone marrow.

Examples of quartz anvils used by early hominins at Olduvai Gorge. Photo Credited to Mora and de la Torre, 2005.

After butchering the animal they would have carried the meat and bones back to another group, some of whom had been collecting various nuts and roots and were now busy preparing them to be eaten. They would be cracking open the nuts and pulverising the roots on a large flat quartzite anvil using rounded hammerstones. The group that had just arrived would have used the same tools to carefully open the elephant leg bones to access the marrow inside. A whole range of dynamic food gathering, eating, sharing, learning, teaching, tool making, communicating behaviour was taking place at this location.

Fast forward 2 million years: since that original meal, the site has been repeatedly buried in sand and sediment and eroded by flowing water and the only thing that remains from this location of vibrant activity and of the lives of these hominins are a few fossilised bones and a small collection of fragmented and broken stones. This is the type of material we were excavating in 2015.

Archaeologists use a range of methods to try and understand how stone tools were used and some of the most powerful insights can be gained through observing how stone tools are used today.

Chimpanzees using both a hammerstone and anvil to crack open nuts. Photo Credit: Haslam et al, 2009.

Transport yourself now to a small forest clearing in western Africa, where a group of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, are quietly sitting underneath a number of nut- and fruit-bearing trees. This group is taking advantage of these important food sources, and is doing so by using stone anvils and stone hammers not too dissimilar from the group of hominins at Olduvai Gorge, two million years earlier.

A hammerstone used by a capuchin, on display in the Museum

But it is possible to directly observe the chimpanzee behaviour, recording how the tools are being made and used, what waste is being produced, the learning processes going on between infant and adult, and the range of social interactions that are happening. This modern primate behaviour represents a valuable window into the types of activities that some of our earliest hominin ancestors may have also undertaken.

The Stone Age Primates exhibit at the Museum showcases these types of stone tools and how they are used by modern primates. By closely studying how our closest living primate ancestors, including chimpanzees, capuchins and macaques, make, use and discard stone tools it is becoming increasingly possible to better understand the dynamic range of early human behaviours behind similar types of hammers and anvils found at Olduvai Gorge and other East African archaeological sites.

26 August 20168 September 2016

Ellena GrilloLeave a comment

On a dung beetle’s trail

Thanks to the work of our Head of Life Collections Darren Mann, and the Dung Beetle UK Mapping Project team, the conservation status of the UK’s dung beetles, chafers, and stag beetles (Scarabaeoidea) is currently undergoing a comprehensive review.

Contributing to this effort, Jack Davies, one of our summer interns, has been on the trail of a species that has proven to be particularly rare in the UK…

I am on the hunt for Aphodius lividus, a dung beetle with a truly cosmopolitan distribution, being found across most of the globe, but which is rather rare in Britain. Since 1990 it has been recorded at only six sites, though historical accounts suggest it was more common in the past.

Most of these historic records are from the south east of England, particularly Kent and the London area, but there are several geographically isolated records from across England and Wales too. So might A. lividus, whilst being extremely local, actually be widespread across the UK?

During my time at the Museum I have been contributing to a comprehensive review of this species’ distribution by helping to verify these records. This has involved a thorough search of collections, journals and the Museum archives, a process which revealed that many of the recordings of A. lividus were almost certainly erroneous.

We were able to discount the only two Welsh records, as well as single records from Cheshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. Our reasons for doing so included a lack of supporting evidence, the unreliability of certain collectors, and the confirmed misidentifications of some specimens.

Jack Davies working on a collection of *Aphodius lividus*

The number of known localities for A. lividus decreased further when we realised that three of the reported sites in Kent most probably all refer to the same location. This is a common problem in this type of research, due to the very broad locality names found on Victorian specimen labels.

So it has become clear that this incredibly scarce beetle is even rarer than we first thought. But it’s not all bad news for A. lividus; our research has uncovered reports from localities in Devon and Northumberland in the old literature, which we found to be trustworthy records.

All the verified data from the project has been collated to produce this map of the distribution of A. lividus in the UK. Its very local distribution, and the very low number of recent records, confirm that this species should be classified as Vulnerable to Extinction in the UK.

Although it would be a shame to lose this species in Britain, we don’t believe it should be a priority for conservation efforts. Since Aphodius lividus has a strong preference for high temperatures, it’s likely that the UK is simply at the very edge of its range. It is also a very abundant species in many areas around the world, and it contributes little in terms of ecosystem services in Britain compared to many of our other dung beetles.

So conservation should instead aim to preserve the dung beetle ecosystem as whole, which supports a huge number of species and also brings many benefits to agriculture.

4 August 201626 August 2016

Ellena Grillo1 Comment

The bully bee

Young volunteers Genevieve Kiero Watson and Poppy Stanton tell the tale of the Museum’s resident Wool Carder Bee and their investigative bee work in our Life Collections…

A small guardian patrols its territory among the luscious bed of Lamb’s-ears that grow at the front of the Museum. This feisty critter, the Wool Carder Bee (Anthidium manicatum), is just one of the roughly 270 bee species that buzz around Britain. Having spotted this unusual hovering bee we seized the opportunity to identify, photograph and explore the species a little further.

The male of this solitary bee species is fiercely territorial, fighting off other males as well as any other insects it considers to be intruders. Techniques used in combat vary from skilful aerial hovering to ferocious wrestling. But perhaps its greatest weapon is a series of stout spines found at the tip of the abdomen. These are used to bully an intruder into submission, or even to kill it. In so doing, the male protects the precious supply of pollen for the smaller females which in turn collect it on stiff bristles on the undersides of their abdomens.

Females, being slightly less aggressive, are in charge of constructing the nests, which are built in existing cavities such as beetle holes. Hairs shaved off plants, such as the favoured Lamb’s-ear, are used to create the brood cells for the next generation.

Male Wool Carder Bee on Lamb's ear in the Museum's front garden — Male Wool Carder Bee on Lamb’s ear in the Museum’s front garden

The Museum houses many specimens of the Wool Carder Bee and our job was to pull out the data from each one to help with an ongoing online survey about this species. Although making friends with hundred-year-old bees was enjoyable, trying to comprehend the miniscule handwritten labels accompanying them was altogether more trying.

Every label explains where and when the bee was captured, who collected and identified it, and gives the reference for its current collection. All this on a slip of paper no bigger than half a stamp.

One of the Musuem's Wool Carder Bee specimens, circled, featured in a display of all 270 species of British bee in the Bees (and the odd wasp) in my Bonnet exhibition by artist Kurt Jackson — One of the Museum’s Wool Carder Bee specimens, circled, featured in a display of all 270 species of British bee in the Bees (and the odd wasp) in my Bonnet exhibition by artist Kurt Jackson

After recording data from 120 labels we began to find the grid reference of the location each was originally collected. This too was challenging as many place names have changed in the last hundred years. Ultimately, the information will be used by the Bees, Wasps & Ants Recording Society (BWARS) to improve the distribution map for the Wool Carder Bee.

Why not see if you can spot the Wool Carder Bee in your garden? Characteristics to look out for include small spines on the tip of the abdomen and lateral lines of yellow spots on either side of the abdomen. The bees themselves are about 11-13mm long for females, and 14-17mm for males. Good luck!

14 July 201620 July 2016

More than a Dodo1 Comment

Art of glass

Spotlight Specimens by Mark Carnall

From the comfort of our own homes, or even on a mobile device, we are accustomed to watching video footage from the most remote environments on Earth, and beyond. It is easy to take for granted this kind of visual access but we don’t have to go too far back in time to reach a point when the uninhabitable parts of the world remained much more mysterious. Then, the only windows into the nature of exotic locations were through drawings, paintings or collected specimens.

In museums, illustrations of nature were – and are – used in teaching to show what certain animals or environments look like. Along with our biological specimens, the Museum’s collections contain representations of animals whose natural appearance is not preserved after death, including a set of beautiful glassworks of British sea anemones.

These delicate models were created by the Blaschkas, a family which specialised in glasswork and ran a business spanning 300 years and nine generations. But it was only from the late 19th century that Leopold Blaschka, later to be joined by his son Rudolf Blaschka, turned his skills to making models of microscopic organisms and soft-bodied invertebrates for museums and universities.

Blaschka anemones still — The only Blaschka models at the Museum today form a series of British anemones, many of which are recognisable as the species and even individual animals illustrated in *British Sea-Anemones and Corals* published in 1860 by Philip Henry Gosse

Inspired by zoological specimens, scientific papers, and observation of living animals, as well as artworks showing colours and structures that were difficult to preserve or too small to show, the Blaschkas created thousands of glass models before they accepted a contract in 1886 to work exclusively at Harvard University on the Ware Collection of plant models.

historyofbritish00goss_0299 — Plate from Philip Henry Gosse, 1860. British Sea-Anemones showing many of the species in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History series. Public domain image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org

It is somewhat surprising that these incredibly fragile specimens made their way to museums and universities across the globe back in the 19th century and even more surprising that any have survived 150 years later.

Anemones tend to lose their shape and colour when preserved in fluid

Earlier this year the Corning Museum of Glass published an interactive map of marine invertebrate models showing the known locations of collections, or records of collections, of Blaschka glass models.

The models at the Museum, acquired in 1867, are thought to be some of the oldest surviving Blaschka glass models. Even though they are over 150 years old, and in some cases slightly inaccurate representations of species, they still show the vibrant colours and alien shapes of British anemones in a way that can’t be seen outside their living environments.

Category: Life Collections

The stars our destination?