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Bones of Contention – CPS Talk 12/11/13

By Penny Carmichael, on 2 December 2013

-Article by Jack Humprey

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This week the CPS went on a trip out – but just round the corner. The Grant Museum of Zoology is the only zoological museum in London. We were given a lecture on its history by the curator Mark Carnall.

The Grant Museum first started life as a teaching collection for Zoology students and was founded in 1828 by UCL’s first Professor of Comparative Anatomy, Robert Edmond Grant. In his long scientific career Grant worked with both Darwin and Richard Owen. His main interest was sponges and he was the first to identify them as animals. At the time of his death in 1874 the collection contained 10,000 specimens, which has since been expanded and reorganised by later Professors and now contains over 67,000 specimens.

The collection was intended for medical students as at the time comparative anatomy was part of the medical curriculum. With the advancement of molecular biology, zoology fell out of favour and universities and hospitals began to throw out their collections and they were eagerly accepted by UCL. In 1996 the collection went public as the Grant Museum. The museum moved to its present location in the Rockefeller Building in 2010, the entire move taking 8 months. It regularly holds educational workshops with schools and can be hired out for conferences.
 
Only 3% of the entire collection is on display at any one time. This includes the skeleton of a Quagga, an extinct animal similar to a zebra of which there are only 7 specimens in the world.  There is also a skeleton of a Tasmanian Tiger. Arguably the museum’s most popular specimen is its jar of moles – 18 moles to be precise, stuffed in a large glass jar. No one knows why so many moles or why they’re in a jar. But somehow they’ve captured the public’s imagination and have an internet following and their own twitter account (@GlassJarOfMoles). An innovative use of the large collection of microscope slides is the Micrarium, where a former office has been converted into a lightbox covered wall to wall in slides. My personal favourite specimens are the skeletons of a human, a gorilla and a orangutan standing side by side on the balcony looking down at the visitors. The museum is a fascinating place with so much to see, it’s definitely worth a trip!

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