Museum FAQs – Page 2 – More Than A Dodo

By Duncan Murdock, research fellow

Whether it’s the Physeter macrocephalus (Sperm Whale) whose jaw greets our visitors, the Apus apus (European Swift) which spend the summer nesting in the tower, or the Raphus cucullatus (Dodo) on our Museum’s logo, all animals, plants, fungi and microbes, living and extinct, have scientific names – or at least once they have been properly described in a scientific paper they do. Usually found tucked away on specimen labels, scientific names carry much more significance than just a convenient means of reference.

The jaw of the Sperm Whale (*Physeter macrocephalus*)

The scientific name, also known as a binominal or Latin name, consists of two basic parts, and should be written in italics. The first part is the genus (the plural is genera), which refers to anything from one to thousands of kinds of creature that are more closely related to each other than anything else. Genera are always capitalised, such as Panthera (big cats).

The second part is the specific name, written in lower case. Together these define one species; for example a tiger is Panthera tigris. Sometimes, subspecies or varieties are written after the species name, such Panthera tigris tigris, which is the Bengal Tiger. They can also be abbreviated by replacing the genus with just an initial followed by a full stop, hence the ever-popular T. rex, or Tyrannosaurus rex.

Some binomials are pretty easy to decipher: no prizes for working out Gorilla gorilla*. Others can seem pretty cryptic or even positively confusing – Puffinus puffinus anyone? Yep, that’s right, the Manx Shearwater**. Nevertheless, once translated they are often enlightening as to the appearance, distribution, behaviour, or history of the critter in question.

Here are a few examples. Ailuropoda melanoleuca, meaning ‘black and white cat-foot’, describes the appearance of the Giant Panda pretty well; Megaptera novaeangliae, or ‘giant-wing of New England’, alludes to both the anatomy and chequered history of the humpback whale; and while Pteropus vampyrus, or ‘wing-footed vampire’, is a bit of a misnomer for the flying fox, which is a large fruit-eating bat, it does reflects our changing understanding of the animal.

Some names are elegantly concise: Pica pica, the magpie. Some are tongue-twisters: Phalacrocorax carbo, the Great Cormorant. And some, such as Synalpheus pinkfloydi, are entertaining. But they are all more than just names; they are the most visible aspect of the science of taxonomy.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) first formalised the system we use today, which has allowed us to divide all the many species into not just genera, but a nested hierarchy of ever-more inclusive groups.

With this system we can not only be sure we are using a common language to precisely refer to the right species, but we can also then ask questions about how the staggering diversity of life that we see evolved. And from this we start to build ‘a tree of life’. But this will be the subject of a future article…

* Bonus points for knowing it’s the Western Gorilla, as opposed to Gorilla beringei, which is the Eastern Gorilla.

** Common Puffins, by the way, go by the delightful name Fratercula arctica, the ‘little friar of the north’.

3 October 201720 October 2017

More than a Dodo2 Comments

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 hides a complexity of answers.

In this FAQ mini-series we’ll unpack the ‘Is it real?’ conundrum by looking at different types of natural history specimens in turn. We’ll ask ‘Is it a real animal?’, ‘Is it real biological remains?’, ‘Is it a model?’ and many more reality-check questions. Here’s your final installment…

There’s nothing like standing under a huge T.rex skeleton, staring up at its ferocious jaws, to get the blood pumping. Visitors often ask “Is it real?” and look rather deflated when they find out it’s a cast. So why do we include casts, models or replicas in our displays, if they don’t have the same impact as the real deal? The truth is that they’re valuable additions to museum displays, allowing the public to engage with specimens that would otherwise be hidden behind the scenes.

Please touch! A cast of the famous Oxford Dodo helps visitors explore this fragile specimen.

On any visit to the Museum, you’ll come across labels that tell you the object you’re looking at is a cast. It could be a dinosaur skeleton, a brightly coloured fish, an amphibian specimen or even the head of the Oxford Dodo. But what is a cast? Casts are made by taking a mould of bones, or sometimes whole animals, then filling that mould with resin, plaster or fibre glass to make a copy. They can be incredibly accurate or lifelike.

It’s extremely rare to find whole dinosaur skeletons, and very difficult to mount heavy fossils (weighing tonnes) onto large armatures. Our Tyrannosaurus rex is a cast of the famous Stan, found in South Dakota, USA, and one of the best preserved skeletons of its kind in the world. But the “real” Stan is kept at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, so the only way we can offer the breath-taking experience of standing beneath a T. rex here in Oxford is by using a cast.

The Dodo Roadshow in 2015 would have been a lot less fun without our life-size dodo model

Even Stan has some bones missing, so sometimes casts are made up of several individual skeletons. Copies can also be made to give the impression of a more complete skeleton. For example, if a left bone is missing, a mirror of the right hand bone can be created. We call these specimens “composites”.

Animals such as fish and frogs aren’t easy to taxidermy; their skins shrivel, dry out, lose their colour and crack. Painted casts are a good way to show what these animals look like.

A model allows us to show the intricate scales of this Blue Morpho butterfly up close.

Models, such as the giant insects on the upper gallery and the Archaeopteryx in the Evolution of Flight display (at the top of this post), are very clearly not real. These are made by model makers to show something that can’t be seen or shown with real specimens. The giant insects are a way of showing the detail of very small creatures. The palaeontological models show what we think extinct animals might have looked like in life. They’re hypothetical models based on the latest scientific research, which can change very quickly, and always have an element of artistic assumption or speculation in the details.

In this series we’ve talked about taxidermy, skeletons, fossils and more, but these are just a few of the kinds of specimens we have on display. There are also nests, plastinated models, microscope slides and dioramas, which all have a mix of real and non-real elements. When you are looking around the Museum try to think about which specimens are real and which aren’t… and how does that make you think about the specimen?

Read the other posts in the Is it real? series here.

9 August 201714 August 2017

More than a Dodo2 Comments

Is it real? – Fossils

This time: Fossils, by Duncan Murdock

Whether it’s the toothy grin of a dinosaur towering over you, an oyster shell in the paving stone beneath you, or a trilobite in your hand, fossils put the prehistory into natural history collections. Anyone who has spent a day combing beaches for ammonites, or scrabbling over rocks in a quarry will attest that fossils are ‘real’. It is the thrill of being the only person to have ever set eyes on an ancient creature that drives us fossil hounds back to rainy outcrops and dusty scree slopes. But fossils, unlike taxidermy and recent skeletons, very rarely contain any original material from living animals, so are they really ‘real’?

Fossils are remains or traces of life (animals, plants and even microbes) preserved in the rock record by ‘fossilisation’.

This chemical and physical alteration makes fossils stable over very long timescales, from the most ancient glimpses of the first microbes billions of years ago to sub-fossils of dodos, mammoths and even early humans just a few thousand years old. They can be so tiny they can only be seen with the most high-powered microscopes or so huge they can only be displayed in vast exhibition halls, like our own T. rex. Among this is a spectrum of how much of the ‘real’ animal is preserved, and how much preparation and reconstruction is required to be able to display them in museums.

Trace fossils include footprint trackways like these, made by extinct reptile *Chirotherium.*

Generally, the more there is of the original material and anatomy, the rarer the fossils are. Among the most common fossils found are ‘trace fossils’: burrows, footprints, traces, nests, stomach contents and even droppings (known as ‘coprolites’). Most ‘body’ fossils also contain nothing of the living creature, rather they are impressions of hard parts like teeth, bones and shells.

This ammonite fossil, *Titanites titan*, was formed when a mould was filled with a different sediment, which later turned to rock.

When an organism is buried the soft parts quickly decay away. The hard parts decay much more slowly, and can leave space behind, creating a fossil mould. If this later gets filled with different sediment, it forms a cast.

These sediments are buried further still and eventually turned into rocks. Alternatively, the hard parts can be replaced by different minerals that are much more stable over geological time. Essentially bone becomes rock one crystal at a time.

3D reconstruction of 430 million year old fossil, *Aquilonifer spinosus*. Found in Herefordshire Lagerstätte, which preserves ancient remains with superb detail.

Very rarely the soft parts of an organism get preserved, but in the most exceptional cases skin, muscles, guts, eyes and even brains can be preserved. If buried quickly enough an animal can be compressed completely flat to leave behind a thin film of organic material, or even soft parts themselves can be replaced by minerals, piece-by-piece. These mineralized fossils can be exquisitely preserved in three dimensions, even down to individual cells in some cases. This is about as ‘real’ as most fossils can be, except the few special cases where the remains of an organism are preserved virtually unaltered, entombed in amber, sunk into tar pits or bogs, or frozen in permafrost. The latter push the boundaries of what can really be called a fossil.

The final step in the process, from the unfortunate demise of a critter to its eventual study or display, involves preparation. In most cases the fossil has to be removed from the surrounding rock with hammers, chisels, dental tools and sometimes acids. This preparation can be quite subjective, a highly skilled preparator has to make judgements about what is or isn’t part of the fossil. The specimen may also need to be glued together or cracks filled in, so not everything you see is always original.

As with modern skeletons, there are often missing parts, so a fully articulated dinosaur skeleton may be a composite of several individuals, or contain replica bones. This is, of course, not a problem as long as it is clear what has been done to the fossil. This is not always the case, and there are examples of deliberately forged fossils, carved into or glued onto real rocks, or forgeries composed of several different fossils to make something ‘new’, like a ‘cut n shut’ car.

So, if you see a fossil that looks too good to be true, then it just might be worth asking, “is it real”?

Next time… Models, casts and replicas
Last time… Skeletons and bones

21 July 201725 July 2017

More than a Dodo2 Comments

Is it real? – Skeletons and bones

This time: Skeletons and bones, by Mark Carnall

Them bones, them bones… They are all over the place in most museums of natural history: suspended above you, parading around you, or towering menacingly over you in the case of the attention-grabbing Tyrannosaurus rex. When it comes to skeletons you might think the ‘Is it real?’ question is pretty easy to answer; the bones are there, tangibly real, right?

Bones are only found in fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Other animals possess hard parts which can confusingly be named using similar language, such as the cuttlebone of cuttlefish, or the ‘skeletons’ of corals. These hard parts may resemble bone but are formed in different ways to true bone like the ones we possess.

Unlike taxidermy, discussed in the previous instalment, on the face of it bones are less easy to manipulate and so less likely to be subjectively represented. But individual bones did not exist individually in life, and articulated skeletons, where bones have been attached together, have been manually reassembled to illustrate the shape of the whole animal. The accuracy of an articulated skeleton can depend on a number of things, including the skill and knowledge of the person doing the assembly, the completeness of the bone material, and even the preparation of the bones themselves.

The skeleton of an Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, on display in the Museum

In life, the skeletons of the bony animals are also supported by hard but spongy cartilage and tendons which are not so easily preserved after death. Yet it is the support of the cartilage and tendons, and the form of the surrounding muscle tissue, which gives an animal its natural appearance.

Some articulated skeletons do not account for this non-bony connective tissue. For example, all of the vertebrae in an articulated backbone may be touching each other, whereas in life there would actually be a disc in between each vertebra. Articulated skeletons are often positioned so that parts of the skeleton can be easily seen and accessed, even if the positioning is not realistic or even physiologically possible.

The Museum’s parade of articulated mammal skeletons – no cartilage or tendons in sight…

There are also lots of smaller bones which often aren’t preserved as they are too fragile or don’t attach to other bones in life. Examples include clavicles, or collar bones, penis bones, and the hyoid, a bony structure in the neck that supports the tongue. Some skeletons are composite specimens, so they may be made up of bones from multiple individuals to replace missing or damaged parts. Other parts of skeletons on display in museums may have been reconstructed with plaster or filler.

The way that a specimen is ‘skeletonised’ – the processes used to prepare a skeleton from a carcass – can also have a huge effect on the size and shape of bones, altering the size by up to 10 per cent, which can introduce errors in bone measurement, especially for small-boned bats, rodents, lizards, frogs, and fish.

So while there’s a tendency to assume that skeletons are more ‘real’ than other kinds of preserved specimens, they too have their biases. The next time you look at a skeleton try to imagine what is natural and unnatural about its construction, and ask yourself – is it real?

Next time… Fossils
Last time… Taxidermy

4 July 20176 July 2017

More than a Dodo3 Comments

Is it real? – Taxidermy

First up: Taxidermy, by Mark Carnall

Taxidermy
The Museum is well-known for its touchable taxidermy. As of today, we have two large bears, a Black Bear and a Brown Bear, greeting visitors as they enter the main court, as well as taxidermy specimens on our Sensing Evolution touch-tables. For children and adults alike, this close encounter with a taxidermy animal prompts the question – is it real?

Taxidermy, or ‘stuffed’ animals, are specimens that have been specially prepared, preserved and posed to show what the creature may have looked like in life, but real and not real here is tricky. The animal itself is, or was, a real animal – there are no taxidermy unicorns, for example. But the biologically real parts may only be the skin, the skull, and the skeleton inside the paws and feet, depending on the type of animal.

The touchable taxidermy Brown Bear greets visitors to the museum.

Inside taxidermy specimens there may be sculpted statues over which the skin is stretched; for older specimens, a wire and wood framework with paper, wood wool, straw and seeds may be used to fill out the skin. The animal’s squishy parts, which are not easy to preserve –such as eyes, lips and tongues – are normally made of glass or plaster.

Animals that have skins and skeletons that are relatively easy to preserve – including mammals, reptiles, and birds – are generally better suited to taxidermy. Marine mammals such as whales and dolphins, amphibians such as frogs and salamanders, and fish are all less common as taxidermy because their skins are harder to treat and keep stable.

Dogfish and piranha taxidermy which have been painted and varnished in an attempt to make them resemble the living animals. Note the comedic eyes on the shark.

The hard parts of skin, such as crests, wattles and skin patterns in reptiles, are susceptible to discolouring and fading in light, so these areas may be repainted to show what the animals look like in life. This introduces another ‘non-real’ element: paint.

So although there are certainly real parts used in taxidermy, there’s yet another complication in answering the question: the animals are usually posed by a human, so even their posture and appearance could be considered ‘subjective’ and perhaps therefore not quite ‘real’.

In fact, some of our older taxidermy may have been prepared by taxidermists who hadn’t ever even seen a living example of the animal they were working on. This can lead to inaccurate positioning and posing, as in the taxidermy kiwi on display in our main court.

So, is it real? You decide.

Next time… Skeletons and bones

Category: Museum FAQs

What’s in a name?

Is it real? – models, casts and replicas

Is it real? – Fossils

Is it real? – Skeletons and bones

Is it real? – Taxidermy