UCL Museums & Collections Blog

No they’re flatworms. Boom boom. Apologies for the awful pun but worm based-jokes are thin on the ground unlike earthworms which are thin and in the ground. Oh dear. This post is a continuation of the occasional series highlighting objects from the stores and recently I’ve turned my attention to Flatworms. (more…)

This is the tale of two non-discoveries. More accurately one non-discovery and one discovery of something not sought.

I often dream of thylacines and I often dream of the Grant Museum, but only once have I dreamt of both together, and that was this week which is apt as it’s Australia Day today. On this occasion in bed I jumped sharply into consciousness as it occurred to me that a specimen labelled as a brushtail possum baby could in fact be a mis-labelled thylacine. Possums, though wonderful creatures in the wild, are the ubiquitous pest of Australian towns, playing a similar role to racoons in the US. Thylacines, on the other hand, are a much celebrated (at least by us) extinct marsupial carnivore – the difference in rarity of the two in museum collections is stark. I developed an image in my mind of the specimen in question and convinced myself that it had been mis-identified. The image in my mind was in fact a mental blurring of the famous pup at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and the specimen at the Grant Museum, pictured here. (more…)

Number 2 in an occasional series highlighting objects from the stores. The first one is here. Hmmmm, I  may need to rethink the title for these posts as after IT STILL COMES FROM THE STORES and IT DIDN’T NOT COME FROM THE STORES it might be hard to come up with the next title.

Just a quick one today reflecting on the kinds of questions that objects provoke curators to ask of the collections they look after. I’ve been working with our documentation assistant on the spirit collection and  I found this curious unidentified object:

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Friends of the Grant Museum will know that the last year was a tough year for the museum. Not only did we have to move the museum but our stores were plagued with floods. This has meant that our stored collections have been out of action for over a year. The turmoil hasn’t quite ended but recently the stored material became a little bit more accessible so myself and our new documentation assistant have been working through the stored collection reacquainting ourselves with objects and occasionally discovering material for the first time. The reason why we have material in stores  in the first place is partly because the collection is too large to put on display (currently, only about 5% of the collection is on display) and also because some material isn’t appropriate for display either because it isn’t Hollywood enough or because it is material that is better suited for research use. Being a university museum  a fair proportion of the collection was created for use in research. In this occasional series I hope to highlight some of the objects in our stores starting with these lovely objects I found last week. (more…)