Dean Veall here.  A very Happy New Year to all our readers. I thought I would start 2015 BIG, 26ft and 6in BIG to be quite exact. This specimen belongs to the group containing the biggest animals to have ever lived. It is also part of the BIGGEST ever fundraising campaign the Museum has ever run, Bone Idols: Protecting our Iconic Skeletons. 

The Bone Idols project involves a series of interventions on 39 of our largely uncollectable specimens which includes re-casing some, completely remonting others and  cleaning of these specimens that have been on open display since the 1820’s. This week’s Specimen of the Week is……

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Dean Veall here. This may be a very broad generalisation but Welsh, curly haired, zoology trained museum educators have limited knowledge about and skills in playing football, based on a recent survey conducted by me (n=1). This fact enrages and frustrates my four year old nephew as on weekends back in the Valleys when all he wants to do is run around Bargoed Park with a football. It hasn’t always been this way, there was a brief moment back in 2010 when the group that this week’s Specimen of the Week belonged to help me engage with the sport, that is, until it died.

This week’s Specimen of the Week is:

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Dr. Anjali Goswami out on field work

Dean Veall here. On Tuesday this week Team Grant celebrated what would have been Robert Edmond Grant‘s 221st birthday in the a suitably zoological manner raising a glass of sparkling cider (non-alcoholic, of course!).  The formal celebration of Grant’s life and his contribution to science is coming up next Tuesday 18th November with our annual Grant Lecture, now in its 18th year. This year we are incredibly excited and pleased to welcome Dr. Anjali Goswami, Reader of Palaeobiology at UCL,  to give the lecture and the following is a bit of profile/preview of the her and her lecture.

Anjali Goswami’s research revolves around the contrasts between the early evolution of placental mammals (e.g. humans, cats and whales) and marsupials (e.g. kangaroos, wombats, opossums).

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Guest blogger: Hilary Jackson

An unseasonably warm October evening found the Focus on the Positive team returning to our favourite host venue, the Grant Museum of Zoology. But who would win the audience’s heart (and vote)?

Grant Museum host Dean Veall and a devoted audience welcomed another four determined UCL researchers to pitch their ideas to make the world a better place.

The audience came from across London to pick their favourite project to win a prize of £2000. But with four inspiring ideas to choose from, who would be the winner?

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Dean Veall here. Over the last year I’ve been hosting our new lunch hour event series Show’ n ‘ Tell, with PhD students from across UCL sharing some of their amazing research and choosing just one object from our collection of 68,000 to tell the the assembled audience what they know about it. If you couldn’t make it to our last event, fear not, Irrum Ali from UCL Communications and Marketing came along and here’s what happened.

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Dean Veall here. My turn on SoTW has come round again and this week I have chosen a specimen that belongs to the group that is a favourite of museums to hang from ceilings, in fact one of my first museum memories was as a young curly haired child wandering around Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museums Wales (AC-NMW), National Museum Cardiff, and encountering one dangling from the ceiling. There’s a hint of my choice there, museums love to suspend things from the ceiling and the top favourites tend to be whales, seals and birds, (we like to break the mould here at the GMZ and have instead chosen to suspend our seal from the balcony). My specimen this week also comes from a group of animals that date back a phenomenal 220 million years. Some individuals of the group that this week’s specimen belongs to are the longest lived animals on the planet. You should be warned this week’s blog contains some cute images of young versions of this species. This week’s specimen is……..

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Dean Veall here. In my role as Learning Officer I am responsible for our exciting adult events programme, and I thought I would share our next event coming up this term, it’s the return of the brilliant Focus on the Positive. Focus on the Positive is an event developed by UCL’s Public Engagement Unit where UCL’s researchers pitch their ideas for projects to the audience in order to secure their vote with the successful pitch walking away with £2,000 prize money to make it a reality. Here at the Museum we jumped on the opportunity to host a Focus on the Positive back in February and the winners Philipp Boeing and Bethan Wolfenden are back to share with us how their project has been developing.

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Hello new readers, occasional fans and dedicated followers of Specimen of the Week. Dean Veall here. My other specimens here have been all about the underdog, the specimens that do not get much attention because they are of the invertebrate persuasion or are stuffed away in a drawer. But this week I am breaking away from this and going all out popular with a specimen that features heavily in our promotional material and one loved by our visitors, selling out, some might suggest. To those people I say no. No, I am staying true to my beliefs with this week’s specimen. This specimen although popular is very much a minority within our collection it’s  just one of only 73 taxidermy specimens we have in a collection of 68,000 and it is one that represents a group that has been terribly misunderstood taxonomically.

 This week’s Specimen of the Week is…

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Dean Veall here. Here I am again presenting my choice of the 68,000 specimens here in the collection. My previous choices have included the tiger beetle and the box jellyfish, so what have I gone for this week? Well, here are the teasers, this week I have chosen what I believe to be one of the showiest animals in the UK, was collected close to my Valleys home of Bargoed in Brecon and is a specimen that I came across whilst rummaging through the drawers of the Museum, which means it is not usually on display. This week Specimen of the Week is… (more…)

Dean Veall here. This year we have given researchers from across UCL the chance to rummage through our drawers and delve into our cupboards as part of a brand new series of lunch time events, Show’n’Tell. The researchers had one task, to  find just one object out of our 68,000 to show audiences and tell them all they know about it. Through these events we aimed to showcase the amazing research that is going on here at UCL and the passions driving some the people who work here. Some of the specimens chosen by researchers have directly related to their work whilst other have been a bit more left-field. As I get ready to host our last Show’n’Tell before the Summer break I thought it would be a good opportunity to look back on the specimens that we have had so far this year.

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