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Archive for January, 2017

The Most Amazing Fossil Fish Ever Discovered*

By Mark Carnall, on 31 January 2017

Welcome to the most amazing fossil fish ever discovered of the month. For those of you who don’t know it, which is nobody because everyone reads this blog, MAFFED is a monthly blog about everyone’s favourite fossil fish. We only focus on the best fossil fish here, which everyone is always talking about. It’s kind of a big thing if you’ve never read it. This series is most definitely nothing to do with underwhelming fossil fish of the month which nobody reads anyway**. This month we’ve got the best fossil fish ever discovered. I know, I know I say that every month but this time it is really true.

I hope you’re strapped into your seat because this is going to be one hell of a journey! You won’t need to read ANYTHING ELSE EVER AGAIN. (more…)

Specimen of the Week 276: The Tarsier

By zcqsrti, on 27 January 2017

In a way the shelves are an encased tomb, shut and sealed away until periodically exhumed of their contents. Eddies scatter of rime-like dust now stirred as a looming hand reaches silently into the dark. Once sleeping, now disturbed, a lingering spectre awakens and begins its reanimated shamblings anew.

We have a spirit in our midst. Not just the liquid kind either, or even a trick of the light for that matter, but a pure dead spectre in the flesh…

LDUCZ-Z1542. Tarsius sp.

Preserved tarsier (Tarsius sp.) at the Grant Museum of Zoology. LDUCZ-Z1542

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Colour Vision Experiments in the Grant Museum of Zoology

By Dean W Veall, on 26 January 2017

 

A visitor using taking part in a lighting experiment

A visitor using taking part in a lighting experiment

Lighting in museums is a curious thing. It can make or break an exhibition. It can make a dismal space beautiful, or vice versa. At the same time, subtle changes in lighting can have a meaningful effect on the amount of time that we’re able to display objects before they deteriorate past the point of no return. An example of one such subtle change might be the colour of the light. A barely noticeable change in colour could have a drastic effect on the damaging power of the light depending on the technology being used. (more…)

Specimen of the Week 275: Mystery wax models

By Tannis Davidson, on 20 January 2017

In a departure from tradition, this week’s blog will focus on what we don’t know about a specimen, rather than what we do know. The reason being is that the specimen in question is rather mysterious. All of the usual pieces of information which can help identify a specimen are lacking  – no number, no entry in the accession records, no associated documentation and no taxonomic information.

A perfect candidate for some major research which is why it was ‘auctioned’ as a mystery object to this year’s students taking part in the Collection Curatorship class as part of their MA in Museum Studies at UCL. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the core skills of a curator : to understand objects and how to research them.  Luckily for us, the ‘natural history’ group chose this specimen and are about to flex their collective research muscles in order to help identify this specimen…

Grant Museum of Zoology Mystery wax models

Grant Museum of Zoology Mystery wax models

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Specimen of the week 274: the Greenland shark gut

By Will J Richard, on 13 January 2017

Hello computer-folks. Will Richard here, blogging again. And this time I’ve chosen a pretty amazing fish… or at least a bit of it.

Greenland shark

Greenland shark. Image by NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program; in the public domain.

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This Spring at UCL Museums

By Dean W Veall, on 12 January 2017

Focus on the Positive eventHello dear reader! Do you want to go behind the scenes at the Print Room at the Slade School of Fine Art? How about sitting in darkness surrounded by dead animals experiencing an audio cinema? Or maybe you fancy celebrating the trowel-blazing (see what I did there) women of archaeology?  Thought so! As luck would have it, here at UCL Museums we have all of that plus much more to keep you entertained over the next few months….

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The Top Ten Grant Museum Blogs of 2016

By Jack Ashby, on 9 January 2017

History will most likely look back on 2016 as a reasonably significant year – you don’t need reminding why. It’s probably fair to say that the activities of the Grant Museum will not feature highly in the list of major global events, but nevertheless we like to think we had a positive impact on the lives of our supporters and visitors last year, both physically and digitally.

Team Grant had plenty to cheer about in 2016: our two exhibitions were based on artistic ways of looking at scientific topics. First was Skullpture, when we invited the Sculpture students from the Slade School of Fine Art to takeover the museum with their responses to our collection and history. Then, with Natural Creativity: Sex and Trickery we displayed a collection of stunning drawings by Clara Lacy depicting the species that are being studied by biologists in the UCL Department of Genetics, Evolution and the Environment: the sexual preferences, sex determination and sexual selection in the animal kingdom.

In terms of our collections, we reached a giant milestone last year – we finally know where every single specimen stored in the museum space is, possibly for the first time in our 190 year history. We’ve also been focusing our conservation work on our collection of wet specimens, with Project Pickle. We’ve had a really ambitious events programme too, the pinnacle being the dissection of cheetah by a team of five reseachers in front of a huge audience of over 300… It was a busy year.

As a way of looking back, on Twitter over the past week we’ve been counting down the best of 2016’s blog – the Top Ten most viewed Grant Museum posts of last year*.

I’ve announced those ranking at 10 to 2 in the charts, and exclusively revealing here that the most popular post of 2016 is… (more…)

Specimen of the Week 273: The Narwhal Tusk

By Jack Ashby, on 6 January 2017

Happy New Year. It’s the start of January and we are all now staring face-first into the maw of 2017. Let’s hope it’s a good one. When the animal-owner of this week’s Specimen of the Week stares into anything, it has to do so at a distance. That’s because it has one of these giant straight tusks sticking horizontally out of the front of its face. This week’s Specimen of the Week is…

Narwhal tusk. LDUCZ-Z2168

Narwhal tusk. LDUCZ-Z2168

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