It started with a tiny horse. The tiniest horse you’ve never seen. Probably because it died out 50 billion years ago and was actually a living fossil which pointed the way to a valley full of bloodthirsty dinosaurs ready to break out into the real world at the first sign of human intervention.

No, this wasn’t the latest breakthrough in genetic engineering; it was in fact the penultimate event in the Grant Museum’s Silly Season and the latest film to be given the “on the Big Screen” treatment.

Introduced by Dr Joe Cain (UCL Science and Technology Studies), The Valley of Gwangi is a moralistic tale of what happens when greed gets the better of us and makes us deaf to the warnings of slightly crazy, blind gypsy ladies and sends us off looking for things which shouldn’t exist. Think Jurassic Park with cowboys.

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Hanna Niczyporuk (UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies)

The symposium, Lessons for Global Health from India, held on Wednesday 20 June at the UCL Institute of Child Health was an occasion to discuss some of the latest research on India, and its implications for global health.

The event, organised by UCL Interdisciplinary Society for International Development together with the UCL Grand Challenge of Global Health and UCL Public Policy, gathered a collection of academic researchers, students, medical professionals and policy-makers, as well as think-tanks and NGO representatives.

Emphasis was placed on practical lessons that could be drawn from such research for addressing global health challenges and the implications for public policy at national, regional and global level.

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The subtitle of Dr Melissa Terras’ Lunch Hour Lecture at the British Museum on 14 June asked an intriguing question: why would anyone want to visit the virtual British Museum (BM) collections online? After all, surely the allure of the Museum is seeing the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles or the spectacular Great Court in person?

The answer, as Dr Terras pointed out, largely depends on who you’re asking. The average tourist would undoubtedly say that they’d prefer to visit in person – hence why the BM received 5.8 million visitors in 2011.

However, when you look at traffic to its website in the same period, it received 10.5 million visits and 60 million page views. So, why the discrepancy?

As Deputy Director of UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), Dr Terras is well versed in analysing this sort of online user data.

For this absorbing talk, she drew extensively on some analysis undertaken by two of her PhD students Claire Ross and Vera Motyckova, alongside colleagues at the Museum itself. They focused their study on the BM’s online collection database during the period 18 June 2009–17 June 2010.

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Who had the better body, the ancient Egyptians or the ancient Greeks? What do we even mean by “fit” exactly?  Is what we understand fit to be today the same as what it was in ancient times?

These are some of the questions that were brought up in the light-hearted discussion between Debbie Challis (UCL Petrie Museum) and Chris Naunton (Egypt Exploration Society) at the Petrie Museum on Tuesday 19 June. The talk accompanies the exhibition in the UCL Cloisters, entitled Fit Bodies: Statues, Athletes and Power.

Arguing his case first, for the ancient Egyptians, Chris Naunton brought up the very valid point, that even today the meanings of the word “fit” are numerous. One suggested meaning is, “To be the proper size and shape” – what is meant by “proper”, however, is fairly ambiguous.

Among the proposed definitions are: “To be suitable for a certain purpose”, as well as “To be physically sound, athletic, sporting” and lastly, the more colloquial, “To be sexually attractive”.

We learned that the human body as it is portrayed in ancient Egyptian art and sculptures differs with regard to the person being illustrated.

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