A Quagga

128 years ago today, 12th August 1883, the last quagga died.

And so here I celebrate what we at the Grant Museum, if no-one else, call “Quagga Day”.

How rare it is that the date of the demise of the last individual of a species is known – such opportunities for commemoration should not be missed.

The quagga is no stranger to our blog – this is the third time we’ve written about it since the site was created in January. It is our most blogged about specimen. This is because it is the rarest skeleton in the world (though read our Curator Mark’s post about that claim). The Grant Museum houses one of only seven skeletons in existence. (more…)

I read a tweet this morning which said something along the lines of “hey BBC, the London Olympics being one year away is Not news.” What makes news and how to get hold of it has been in the news recently (metanews?) and that’s made me wonder, what makes interesting news from a museum?

I edit our monthly online newsletter, which has two or three short articles each month and a list of upcoming events. The newsletter goes to whoever wants it and a list of people who signed up at the student freshers’ fair. (more…)

Is it acceptable to sell natural history objects?

Several months ago I had a number of phone and email conversations with a researcher developing a new TV programme in which people sell unusual possessions to art dealers in a Dragon’s Den style format. She wanted my help in finding objects or people with collections that could appear on the show to be sold. I shuddered.

I explained that, according the Museums Association’s Code of Ethics, museums selling their collections into private is very much frowned upon. She changed tack – she had hit upon the entirely correct notion that people who work in museum are themselves extremely fond of collecting. As I say – this is true – we are terrible at throwing things away, and what’s more, being expert curators in our fields, we know what things are worth keeping (and I don’t just mean financially). In the end I told her that none of UCL Museums would contemplate selling things in such a forum, but eventually agreed I would send her email on to my colleagues “in case they knew anyone who had something unusual in a cupboard at home”. (more…)

Today has been a long time coming.

About a year ago we agreed to close the Grant Museum from 1st  July, something that had been in planning for quite a while. Today is the day we open up again.  Here’s what’s happened in the last eight and a half months…

(if you don’t want to read on here’s a video about the whole process:

(more…)

Last week Natasha McEnroe, the Museum Manager and I met with Maev Kennedy of the Guardian to show her around the new Grant Museum space.

One of the things she was most interested in was the unknown specimens that we had discovered when the collection was being packed up in our old home. Some of the new discoveries were rather disappointing but one exciting discovery was a box of dodo bones, and Maev has written a great piece about it in today’s Guardian.

This is actually only half of our dodo material – the other half having been on display for years. According to our records, there should always have been two boxes of bones, but none of the current staff had ever seen it and occasionally material has been documented twice in the past creating phantom duplicate specimens. We asked all the staff from the previous 20 years, and they confirmed its existence, but had know idea where it was. We feared it was lost. (more…)

To tell you how I found out about this story involves disclosing a private and guilty secret.

I watch breakfast television.

I would like to tell you that it’s just for the news headlines, the travel update and the weather report (which it is), but I must also admit that I find the bright colours and the glassy smiles of the presenters strangely comforting.

That and the fact that on occasion, they cover a news story that is actually interesting.

This time it was an interview with Boy George, the man who appears prominently in the soundtrack of my childhood and possibly the only living person whose eyeliner skills I envy. Mr. George has recently returned to its rightful owners an icon which he had bought in the mid 80s, and which turned out to be looted from church in Cyprus during the war in 1974. When he bought the icon, he had no idea where it came from, just that he appreciated it as a work of art. It was through a series of serendipitous events – who knew Bishops from the Church of Cyprus watched Dutch television? – that the Cypriot Church found out where their treasure had ended up and embarked on the process of getting it back. (more…)

Happy Valentine’s Day. Last week, Jack Ashby the Learning and Access Manager at the Grant Museum and I were invited along to one of the private views of the Natural History Museum’s latest temporary exhibitions, Sexual Nature. Private views are a funny thing in museums – they may be a practice borrowed from commercial art galleries or perhaps a practice carried over from classier times when everyone who worked in a museum had to wear top hats. Generally though they are a good event to get together with colleagues, drink some wine, eat some canapés if you are lucky, and very occasionally actually go and see the exhibition that is being launched.  Here’s what we thought of Sexual Nature:

FULL DISCLOSURE: We are pleased to continually work with colleagues from almost every part of the Natural History Museum, either sharing skills and skulls informally, or more formally through big public events and programmes. It is no lie that walking through the main hall for an early meeting before they open is a genuine thrill. There are only four museums with natural history collections in London and we stick together. Many of the curators at the museum are doing astonishing work, truly on the cutting edge of museum practice. However, that being said there is occasionally some resentment from small museums when large institutions get the lion’s share of attention. (more…)

Darwin as a modern scientist?

Last night the Grant Museum hosted an event discussing the merits of ‘old school’ science based on observation and studying real things against ‘modern science’ in the lab using computer models and the like. This is a gross simplification but essentially strikes at the heart of last night’s event. Annoyingly, the idea for the event and one of our speakers was poached for the Today Programme on Radio 4 broadcast yesterday morning, which normally we wouldn’t mind, we even helped put them in touch with some of our panelists but the museum didn’t even get a credit. We have a very small team here and I hope our learning and access manager, Jack Ashby doesn’t cringe when I say he works very hard to schedule some really great events. This is unfortunate because for better or worse, media coverage does go a long way to justifying our existence as a cultural institution but sadly not getting credited does happen with some frequency. Anyway, on to the event itself. (more…)