Here at the Grant Museum, we have a large collection of documents, photographs, negatives and other ephemera which make up the archive of the collection. Part of my ongoing role as the curator of the Grant Museum is to ensure that all of this archival information is attached to the relevant museum specimens so we have as much as a history of possible of the lives and after lives of our specimens. This marks the first post in what will be occasional series highlighting interesting finds about the museum and the specimens from the archive.

This first post contains some rather grim imagery so the images are after the jump but whilst rifling through the archives I found images of a bactrian camel head which had been sent to UCL from London Zoo. POTENTIALLY DISTURBING IMAGES HERE ON IN.

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Whilst wandering around the Museum (as Museum Assistants do) this week I noticed a bizarre bone growth on a skull on display. Any such bone growth is immediately looked for on the other side of the skull because that would indicate (though not conclusively) that it was a natural phenomenon. The left hand side of this skull had no such growth. Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuun. This is what we in the biz call a pathological specimen, i.e. something that is caused by or is involved in some way with disease. Having a weird fascination with disease, as most biologists probably do, the skull moved up on my list of which I like the most out of our 68,000 specimens. This week’s Specimen of the Week is… (more…)