LDUCZ-Z2277 common dolphin skull (Delphinus sp.)

Hello! Will Richard here, putting fingers to keyboard once again to bring you the next instalment of specimen of the week. And this week I am going to make things easy for myself. I’ve had enough of subspecies versus species, questionable (mis)identifications, taxing taxonomy and chaotic cladistics. So this time I’m keeping it simple. A cut and dried case: the common dolphin. What could be clearer?

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There’s definitely an ebb and flow to university life that impacts the work of UCL’s Museums and Collections. During the teaching terms it is not uncommon to see curators carrying and trollying material about campus. Over the summer break, freed from the constraints of having to lecture students our academic staff switch to research mode and the number of researchers visiting the collections shoots up from undergraduates undertaking dissertation research through to professors working on papers, books and hypotheses. However, this isn’t my favourite time of the year. (more…)