This week’s blog is written by Lisa Randisi. Visitor Services Assistant at UCL Culture.

In my first month at the Grant Museum I learned that I, like many before me, had made a mistake. A rather… colossal mistake. Under a large glass bell near the flying lemur (which is neither a lemur nor can fly, but that’s a story for another time) lies a specimen that, for sheer size and improbability, I’d always assumed to be a fake. A plastic replica made for teaching, perhaps. Little did I know that I was actually looking at a real…

African bush elephant heart, LDUCZ-Z639

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Hello e-folks! Will Richard here bringing you another specimen of the week. A tall story with a lot of heart. That’s right folks it’s the…

Wild giraffes in Niger. Image by Clémence Delmas via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY 3.0

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Like all professional zoologists, I own several sets of novelty animal-based playing cards. One such set is “Dangerous Australian Animals”. This is a particularly good set as in addition to the usual playing card graphics (hearts, diamonds, etc), not only do you get a lovely picture of a Dangerous Australian Animal on each card, but you get a star rating, out of five, of exactly how Dangerous it is.

The manufacturers would have had to work pretty hard to narrow it down to just 52 Dangerous Australian Animals, given that most lifeforms in Australia are Dangerous.

Alongside the snakes, crocodiles, spiders, jellyfish, scorpions and paralysis ticks, there is a single bird Dangerous enough to get its own card. With a Dangerous rating of 0.5 stars out of five, this week’s Specimen of the Week is… (more…)

The dissected giraffe heart

No matter who you are or where you come from, you have to admire the giraffe’s heart. It manages to pump blood up arteries in a neck that can reach over two metres in length. It is helped out by a series of valves that prevent the blood from flowing back down again (except through the veins, in which it is supposed to flow back down again). The giraffe’s heart is, surprisingly, smaller than that of mammals of a comparative body size. The heart copes with the morphology of the animal by having really thick muscle walls and a small radius. The result is a very powerful organ. I wonder if that means giraffes fall in love really easily, or find it harder to get over their exes? (more…)