Tag: museum collections

More than a DodoLeave a comment

Solving a prickly mystery…

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by Mark Carnall, Life Collections manager

Visitors to the Museum often comment on just how many things there are to see here, but in fact only a small percentage of the collection is on public display – less than 0.1%. The remaining 99.9% is held in storage for use in research, teaching and to loan to other museums and universities.

I receive hundreds of enquiries from researchers all over the world who are interested in many aspects of animal biology. In exchange for our information about the skeletons, skins, specimens preserved in fluid, nests, shells and taxidermy here, the Museum gets knowledge from world experts who are publishing new science.

Bramble Shark (Echinorhinus brucus)
Bramble Shark (Echinorhinus brucus). Image: Illustrations of South Africa / Wikimedia

One such recent enquiry, from researchers Dr Samuel Iglésias and Frederik Mollen, concerned the Bramble or Spinous Shark (Echinorhinus brucus). You may not have heard of the Bramble Shark – it’s an enigmatic bottom-of-the-sea dwelling species – but this is one of the reasons why the researchers are trying to track down all known specimens held in European institutions.

The characteristic brambles of the Spinous Shark, Echinorhinus brucus
The characteristic brambles of the Spinous Shark, Echinorhinus brucus

Bramble Sharks are so called because of the large thorn-like structures, called dermal denticles, that cover the skin. These sharks are thought to be once common in European waters but are now virtually extinct.

I checked the Museum databases and stores and found 14 Bramble Shark specimens in the collections: one taxidermy specimen; one set of jaws with skin; a section of skin; and 11 fluid-preserved dissections. Unfortunately, as is often the case in older natural history collections, the fluid specimens did not have data associated with them – information such as age, locality, who collected them, what the dissections were or who dissected them.

After passing images and this list of specimens to the researchers they sent through an 1875 paper titled The Brain and Cranial Nerves of Echinorhinosus spinosus with notes on the other viscera by Bruce Clarke and the excellently named Hatchett Jackson. This paper describes the dissection of two specimens at the University of Oxford, one of which was a female collected from Penzance on 15 February 1875.

Armed with this new information I was able to cross-reference this dissection with some of our archives to confirm that most of the dissected specimens actually came from this single female shark collected in 1875, which was dissected and the parts used in illustrations in a technical publication.

Section of skin previously identified as Bramble Shark but now re-identified as from a Porcupine Ray (Urogymnus asperrimus)
Section of skin previously identified as Bramble Shark but now re-identified as from a Porcupine Ray (Urogymnus asperrimus)

Another discovery came while photographing the skin specimen, and comparing it to the other dry specimens. It became clear that the thorns of the skin were very different to the typical Bramble Shark arrangement and it turned out that the skin was in fact from a Porcupine Ray (Urogymnus asperrimus).

The happy ending here is that the researchers now have better information for their publication and these specimens will be put ‘on the map’ in the technical literature for other researchers to access.

Although the Museum collections are effectively one Bramble Shark down (but up one Porcupine Ray skin), we do now have better information about the age, locality, relationship, identification, citation in the literature, and history of some these specimens. This makes them even more useful for research in the future.

Not all enquiries end with such a deeply satisfying result, but it is certainly nice when they do.

Ellena GrilloLeave a comment

Darwin, dolphins and a ‘Monkeyana’

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The Museum is home to a vast collection of natural history specimens but is perhaps less well-known for its substantial art and object collection. This material became the focus of Charlie Baker and Imogen Stead, two of our summer interns, as they spent six weeks researching, organising and curating it for the Museum.

The range and amount of material was formidable: numerous prints, non-scientific objects, paintings, photographs and sculptures from across the Museum, all coming together into a single organised collection for the first time. Here, Charlie and Imo unearth just a small sample of some of the items they catalogued during their time at the Museum:

Nautilus Imperialis
This beautiful print shows a fossil of the Nautilus Imperialis. It is one of the largest prints the Museum holds: measuring 48cm x 43 cm, it’s too large for the scanner! It has a small pamphlet of text stuck to it, just visible in the picture, and we speculate that this may have been promotional material for James Sowerby’s Mineral Conchology of Great Britain, the first volume of which was published in 1812, the same year as this print.

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Nautilus Imperialis print

Plate 60 from The Animal Kingdom
This is a plate from Henry MacMurtrie’s translation of Georges Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal, showing a few species of the genus Delphinus, or Common Dolphins. The Museums has 32 plates from this book in the collection. The publication demonstrates the intellectual collaboration between countries and the international appeal of Cuvier’s famous work. In fact, the collections holds plates from the original French and two different English translations.

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Plate 60 from ‘Animal Kingdom‘ (Le Régne Animal) by Georges Cuvier, 1829

Slide cutter
This tool was found in a chest of drawers in the Hope Library at the Museum. It initially baffled us, but staff identified it as a slide cutting tool. The circular blade scores the glass, and the notches are used to carefully break off the piece of glass. When cataloguing and storing it, we discovered the blade is still sharp enough to cut through a sheet of paper!

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Slide cutter tool

Photo of Charles Darwin
This framed photo of the great Victorian scientist is one of 22 pieces of art hanging in the Museum’s Hope Library. What makes this copy of the photo special, however, is the caption beneath it: “I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me.”

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Photograph of Charles Darwin with his annotations

Monkeyana Cartoon
One of the most bizarre items we came across was this 1828 satirical cartoon about lawyers. The collection has eight ‘Monkeyana’ cartoons, all by Thomas Landseer.

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Monkeyana Cartoon by Thomas Landseer, 1828

Ellena Grillo1 Comment

The bully bee

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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!

 

 

Ellena Grillo1 Comment

Beauty, strangeness and science

This year the Museum is playing host to three poets in residence as part of our Visions of Nature year. The poets, John Barnie, Steven Matthews, and Kelley Swain, have been working alongside staff in our collections and out in the Museum itself to gain inspiration for their writing over the past six months. In the autumn, they will take part in a number of events and activities to present their work, and will be publishing a small anthology at the end of the year.

Here Steven Matthews reveals what has inspired his poems during one of his recent visits to the Museum.

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Fossil in the Charles Lyell collection

I was struck strongly, during our early visits as poets-in-residence behind the scenes at the Museum, by one particular aspect of the research being undertaken. The history of the Museum collections, their vast reach, is being traced in several instances by the identification of the particular individual specimen which was drawn and lithographed as part of a key scientific paper, in the nineteenth- or twentieth-centuries. Out of the many thousands of specimens held at the Museum, for example, we were shown the exact fossil in the Charles Lyell Collection which had helped, when reproduced in a paper, confirm the geological record of part of the United States.

 

'Observations on the White Limestone and other Eocene or Older Tertiary Formations of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia' by Charles Lyell, 1845
‘Observations on the White Limestone and other Eocene or Older Tertiary Formations of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia’ by Charles Lyell, 1845

The history of the Collections, in other words, is the history not just of their remarkable beauty or strangeness, but of their usefulness in advancing scientific thought; just as it is the history of the individual people who have recognised something new to say from the specimens they were studying. There is a firm analogy between this activity and what the making of poems involves. Concise comparison is, after all, what poetry also seeks to attain, bringing the multifariously divergent elements of the world into intense and new combinations with each other.

In preparing to write poems in response to the Museum building and Collections, I have kept that history in mind, researched it. I have read pamphlets by Henry Acland and John Ruskin, Victorians key to the impulse behind the creation of a Museum here to Science, and to defining what the nature of a building on these principles should look like. I have re-read much Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poetry in order to steep myself in the kinds of language being used to describe Nature by poets at the time the Museum was becoming active. I have read in the work of scientists working at, or associated with, the Museum in its early days and subsequently.

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One of the capitals that adorn the Museum court carved by the O’Shea brothers

Out of this reading, but also out of the looking, the many hours spent with the Collections on public display or behind the scenes, have come what is a surprising variety of poems which reflects the wonderful and overwhelming reach of the items at the Museum. I have written about the O’Shea brothers who did much of the amazing carving of column-tops on the Ground Floor; there is a poem on the crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, whose lab I was privileged to spend some time alone in.

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Nonsense verses have arisen from contemplating the presence of Lewis Carroll here; the astounding collection of multi-coloured marble blocks, the Corsi Collection, has impelled me to create blocks of prose-poetry in their shape. There is a poem ‘voiced’ by an ammonite. The sadness of some specimens, posed in isolation (or in glass jars) far from their original contexts, has moved me; as has the shocked intensified awareness that the history of the Collections is a history of accelerating losses, as more and more of the species gathered in the Museum are extinguished from the world each day.