Presenting… Christmas Island
By Eileen Westwig, Collections Manager in the Museum’s Life Collections. About 320 km south of Java in the Indian Ocean lies Christmas Island. Although discovered and named on Christmas Day […]
Tag Archives: museum collections
Mammoth tusks and cocktail sticks
By Pete Brown, Move Project Assistant As part of the Museum of Natural History Move Project Team I have helped move and repackage tens of thousands of specimens since 2017, […]
Understanding beeswax
By Tuuli Kasso, PhD in Science Fellow at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen. Tuuli is a visiting researcher, who has used the Museum’s collection to help […]
From pin to paper
Katherine Child, image technician in the Museum’s Life collections, doesn’t just use photography to capture the beauty of specimens. She is also an artist and has been trying out innovative […]
Why do we need pinned insect specimens?
Since we posted about ten-year-old Sarah’s amazing beetle discovery, we’ve had lots of queries as to why the insect needed to be caught and pinned. It’s a question we’re often […]
Odd egg out
This is a great time of year to hear the distinctive call of the Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) as it spends the summer in the UK. Collections Manager Eileen Westwig recently […]
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 […]
High time for a check up
by Bethany Palumbo, life collections conservator This month marks three years since the completion of our ‘Once in a Whale’ project. The initial conservation undertaken in 2013 focused on the cleaning […]
Stories from the Stores
by Hannah Allum, Move Project Manager Museums are space-hungry places. There’s rarely enough room to properly house the collections we currently hold, never mind finding space for new material. Roughly 90% […]
Paint it green
In the process of researching or conserving old pinned insects, it’s common to find a green deposit clustered around the pin. This is known as verdigris and is a natural […]
