Oxford University Museum of Natural History Blog
After almost a year posing beautifully on the Museum lawn, the Polar Dance sculpture by Tessa Campbell Fraser is leaving us. It was quite a sight to behold from my office window this morning – a flying, snowy polar bear!
Rachel Parle, Education Officer
On February 2nd we hosted for the second year the annual national beetle (Coleoptera) enthusiasts day, with the fifty attendees coming from as far as Cornwall and Lancashire. The day kicked off with proper coffee, tea and biscuits and then a series of talks, followed by a tour of the entomology department and a dung beetle workshop.
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| Helen Roy presenting her talk on beetle recording in Britain |
The workshop ‘Dung Beetle Identification’ was a bit of squeeze in our teaching area, with a few too many enthusiastic coleopterists wanting to know how to identify the small and often difficult Aphodius.
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| Darren Mann presenting his workshop on dung beetle identification |
However, using our digital video set-up and monitor we managed to get through the entire dung beetle fauna, giving tips and tricks on their identification and interpretation of the key couplets, the stalwart coleopterists continuing until 8pm.
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| Darren Mann using the video microscope to show characters used in the identification of British dung beetle species |
It is customary to launch into the digital realm for the first time with a tentative yet friendly ‘Hello, world’. A Hello World computer program is one that displays this simple message in confirmation of the novice programmer’s successful coding – “You’ve done it, you’re digital!” it announces.
At the Museum of Natural History in Oxford we have of course already made it on to the internet, and our Entomology team already have their very own bug blog, Hope You Like Insects. In fact,our previous writer in residence, Georgina Ferry, blogged about the Museum’s comings and goings during her tenure too, but this is our first fully in-house Museum-wide blog and so a tentative but friendly ‘Hello, world’ feels just about right to kick things off.
But it’s also a case of ‘Goodbye, world’, for this blog is conceived to document a year of closure to the public. As the Museum becomes clad in board and scaffold – rigged up to enable a painstaking repair of the glass tiled roof – it’s goodbye to the natural world that is normally on display in the courts and galleries: camels, reindeer and dinosaurs are foam-wrapped and huddled together in the south aisle like cartoon outlines of themselves, and many other specimens have been removed from display and placed in safe storage.
So is it a funny time to launch a blog? Hopefully not. We hope that this blog will give people a window into some of the work that is taking place in the Museum throughout the year, including the important cleaning and repair of the roof, but also of some behind the scenes activity in various departments. There are some special public things planned to make up for the closure too – more of that to come.
In the meantime follow the blog, tweet it, or stick it in your RSS reader and we’ll let you know what we’re up to. Right now, whale skeletons are being lowered for cleaning and conservation; our Education team is about to hit the road to visit schools in a resplendent new van; and we’re putting together a special exhibition with the Museum of the History of Science in Broad Street.
Which leads nicely to the last thing, the name of this blog. The building may be thrown into shadow by the large construction hoardings that are consuming the north aisle and central court, and there may be an unusual hush as families, children and other visitors make their way straight to the Pitt Rivers Museum, which remains open as normal, but there is still plenty going on. As we hope to reveal here over the next twelve months, we may be darkened but we are definitely not dormant.
Scott Billings, communications coordinator
By Katherine Child
Despite the prevalence of photography in scientific and technical books and papers today, there are still times when a scientific work will call for a more traditional approach. Drawing remains an important part of natural history illustration, and can often provide a more specific and flexible way of communicating information.
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| An example of the way key features can be highlighted and isolated to provide clarity in a drawn illustration. Cleidostethus meliponae Arrow, from the genus Cleidostethus Arrow, by Stanley Bowestead. |
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Anatis ocellata (L.) by Stanley Bowestead. White gel pen has been used to highlight the setae on the legs.
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| An automontage photograph of a scarab. Photographic equipment and image processing have advanced rapidly in the last 30 years and high quality digital pictures are now becoming normal in scientific publications. |
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Lebia chlorocephalaby Thomas Eccles. Worked in colour pencil with highlights picked out in white ink.
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The paper is available to download for free from the museum’s website.
Arocatus longiceps is in the insect order Hemiptera, commonly called ‘true bugs’ and is part of the family called Lygaeidae often referred to as seed bugs, due to their feeding behaviour on plant seeds. This species is not native to the UK and was first discovered in Britain during 2007 on plane trees in the grounds of the Natural History Museum, London. This appearance made the bug quite famous; it even featured on the BBC News in 2008 as a new, apparently unidentifiable species.
The species has mainly been recorded in the London area; but on the 30th November 2012 two specimens were found in the basement rooms at the Museum. This is a new record for Oxfordshire (Flanagan & Ryan, personal communication) and is probably the most Northerly record so far.
| Photographs of the Arocatus longiceps taken using the auto-montage system |
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A large number of Arocatus longiceps were found beneath the bark. They overwinter as adults in clusters.
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A species of Oil Beetle, Meloe mediterraneus, which was previously thought to be extinct in the UK, has been rediscovered as part of the on-going Oil Beetle conservation project being run by Buglife.
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| Female Meloe mediterraneus. Photograph courtesy of John Walters. |
The beetles were found at Bolt Head, a National Trust site in South Devon by a local naturalist who was carrying out a study for the Oil Beetle conservation project. The discovery was confirmed by Darren Mann who is a specialist in British Oil Beetles. It is the first record for this species in over 100 years and the first ever for Southwest England. It is currently the only site that this species has been found at but it is hoped that with further survey work more populations can be found in other areas of the county.
Prior to its rediscovery, the Mediterranean Oil Beetle was only known to have ever existed in the east of the country- in Essex and Kent. The beetle was last sighted in Kent in 1906 and was thought to be extinct in the UK until rediscovered this year.
One reason for Meloe mediterraneus remaining undiscovered was that the specimens were mistaken for the similar looking Rugged Oil Beetle, Meloe rugosus (previously blogged about by us here). The adult Mediterranean Oil Beetle is slightly larger than the Rugged Oil Beetle, and has a larger thorax. The Rugged Oil Beetle also has a crease down the centre of the thorax that is absent in the Mediterranean Oil Beetle.
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| Photograph to illustrate the differences between Meloe rugosus (left) and Meloe mediterraneus. Note the groove on the thorax of Meloe rugosus. Photograph courtesy of John Walters. |
The triungulins (larvae) are possibly even more distinctive, with those of Meloe mediterraneus being entirely orange whilst those of Meloe rugosus have an obvious dark head.
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| Triungulin of Meloe rugosus (left) and Meloe mediterraneus (right). Photographs courtesy of John Walters. |
In the news: Buglife, The Telegraph, WildlifeExtra
Mini guide to identifying Oil Beetles
