This is a short post about the surprise appearance of the Grant Museum in a story that was completely unrelated.

Before I start, there are some things you should bear in mind:

• We count the number of times the Grant Museum appears in the press as a measure of our performance.
• Unless it’s a press story promoting the Museum, we charge for use of our images by publishers, but we have allowed a couple of stock photo libraries to photograph the Museum in the hope that it will spread the word of our existence.
• For obvious reasons we try and keep track of journalists and photographers who come and visit.
• We have no control over the internet.

Every month I go to a meeting with all the other people involved with communications at UCL to look over major events and stories involving the University over the past month, and to highlight what’s about to come up. At the last meeting a story in the press concerning the possibility of UCL changing a statute which at present effectively offers academic staff permanent tenure – something the Unions are concerned about, was brought up. This didn’t appear to have much to do with the Grant Museum, until they opened the link on the projector… (more…)

As Manager of the Grant Museum I’m lucky because I get to work with what many people in the business would say is the best collection in London*, but also a team of very interesting staff. We have a window in the schedule of exhibitions in the Museum, so I decided to put these two bits of luck together and asked each member to select one object that they have made a discovery about to display.

The pigeon holes that once were

Previous visitors to the Museum will remember that by the door there was a row of pigeon holes from when the room was a library. When we moved in 18 months ago we were quite excited about these and the opportunities we thought they offered. In the main we thought we’d offer them up as one of the many spaces we have for exhibitions co-curated with academic researchers here at UCL (remember Art by Animals and Buried on Campus?). When there were no exhibitions on we could do something ourselves, like animal alphabets, or actually fill them with pigeons. (more…)

Very obviously science.

Before I start, just to be clear, I’m not one of those scientists who hates art, or is snobbish about the semi-defined/awe-and-wonder/expressive/cheeky-subversion/I-don’t-care-if-the-viewer-doesn’t-understand kind of thing that some artists get up to. Not at all. I think it’s great. In fact, I work hard to incorporate a lot of art into programmes at the Grant Museum.

Over the last couple of weeks two of the city’s biggest block-busters finished – Animal Inside Out at the Natural History Museum and Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern. They were both excellent.

Much has been written about the cross-over between art and natural history, particularly when traditional scientific museum practices are replicated in art. What makes one art and one science?
The obvious answers relate to the intentions of the artist and the interpretations of the viewer. (more…)

Another year has passed since the last known thylacine – one of the greatest icons of extinction – died of exposure. That makes 76 years today.

Thylacine: A species that was alive within living memory

We have celebrated the thylacine here at the Grant Museum for some time. We have some fantastic specimens – including one of the only fluid preserved adults (with the added bonus of having been dissected by Victorian evolutionary giant Thomas Henry Huxley), and skeleton from the early 1800s, which belonged to Grant himself. The only recent thylacine-based activity that happened at the Museum was for all our thylacine-geek colleagues to watch The Hunter together, a film about a bounty-hunter hired to collect the last individual for an evil bio-tech company. It was brilliant.

Here on this blog we have told tales of thylacine apparitions, potentially new specimens, the lessons of extinction and the thylacine’s own story, which ended so tragically on 7th September 1936. On 2012’s thylacine day I’m going to spread the net a little further. (more…)

Keen-eyed media-hungry readers may well have been seeing a lot of beautiful pictures of the Grant Museum on news websites this week. On Tuesday a photographer – Peter Macdiarmid – visited from Getty Images to shoot our collection, displays and store rooms in all their glory.

That very same day news sites started publishing the gallery of images across the world (strangely a large number of outlets in Washington and Texas seemed to love it). Closer to home the Telegraph, Daily Mail and Huffington Post published the full gallery, containing some of the best images I’ve seen of our beautiful specimens. Click on any of those links to take a peek, choosing your preferred purveyor of information. My favourite is the Huffington Post, which gives the best info about the Grant.

The Guardian and Wired also featured a pic in their respective Picture of the Day offerings.

Do have a look as they really are stunning. It will come as no surprise that the beloved moles feature, and the best looking worms I ever saw.

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

Since I was employed at the Grant Museum I have been looking for ways to celebrate what we call “Quagga Day”. Last year on the blog I described the lack of publicity that quaggas get and I heartily recommend you read what I said.

Also read it if you want to know more about what quaggas were, beyond the fact that they were a not-very-stripy-zebra. We never tire of telling people that we have the rarest skeleton in the world in the Grant Museum – and it is our quagga – but regular readers would probably tire of us explaining what they were and what we think about them.

This year we can celebrate in almost two ways:
1) Our quagga skeleton now has it’s very own website where you can learn all about it.

Almost 2) I thought I had discoverd a new specimen of quagga (which would rock the zoological world to its very core), but later discovered I hadn’t. Here’s what happened…

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One of our team of post-graduate researcher/engagers (see what that’s all about on last week’s post) has been talking about the connection between species in the Grant Museum and a nineteenth century mechanical replica, which was designed as a clinical tool.

It’s on the new Researchers in Museums blog, but to pique your interest here is how Sarah Chaney starts the post off…

“Leeches! Leeches! Leeches!”
So ran one particularly enthusiastic nineteenth century advertisement for the animal that has had the most enduring association with medical history. So much so, that one inspired individual decided to make a mechanical version of the creature. During my public engagement sessions in the Grant Museum, I’ve tried asking various visitors to guess what animal the fist-sized metal box was designed to emulate: no one has yet hit on the right answer, even though I usually stand right in front of the leech cabinet. Shiny, clean and angular, where the leech is squat, wet and slug-like, there would appear to be little comparison between the two.

Indeed, that was the claim of certain nineteenth century leech advocates, who deemed the miraculous little creature itself far gentler than lancet, fleam or scarifier (also called a scarificator: the “mechanical leech” in the illustration, left). The leech secretes a substance called hirudin, which stops the blood from clotting, meaning that one small bite will continue to bleed for around 12 hours after the leech has been removed. I know this well, for, in the pursuit of medical history, I have been leeched not once, but twice, and still have the (tiny) scars to prove it!

You can read the rest of Sarah’s post on their blog here: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2012/07/09/leeches-leeches-leeches/

When we go to museums we normally know the kind of information we’re going to be engaging with. In natural history museums it’s usually facts about species, minerals and environments; in social history museums it’s cultures and people; in archaeology it’s much like social history but older. At UCL Museums we’ve started an experiment that doesn’t fit this model.

We have employed a team of UCL post-graduate students to come to each of our spaces a couple of days a week to engage our visitors with their research. They have each found connections between our collections and their disciplines, but they aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. Their PhD’s range from epidemiology and the history of psychology to rhetoric – none of which spark an immediate link to zoology, for example, in most people. (more…)

Many of you will remember Roger Wotton’s excellent Grant Lecture at the end of last year. On 3rd July, Roger chose the Grant Museum to launch his new book Walking With Gosse: Natural History, Creation and Religious Conflicts, which is to be published in August. Philip Henry Gosse was an eminent Victorian Natural Historian and Roger outlined his achievements and the importance of his profound Christian faith in all he did. Henry believed in the literal truth of The Bible and, in a book entitled Omphalos, he tried unsuccessfully to resolve the conflict between geological time and the account of Creation in Genesis. The book was not received well by either the scientific or religious communities and it should not overshadow Henry Gosse’s many other fine books.

Most people know about Henry as a person from his son Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which details the painful relationship between the two men. Edmund did not share the rigorous religious approach to all things that Henry felt was essential and this led, inevitably, to conflict. Of the two, Edmund is the better known and he was knighted for his services to the Arts, becoming very much part of the Establishment.

Walking With Gosse examines the many contributions to Natural History made by Henry Gosse and his story is interwoven with that of Edmund and with autobiography. The book concludes by discussing the ways in which the issues presented have relevance to debates which are taking place today: on creation and on problems with religious differences. However, it also stresses that we can all share in the wonders of Natural History, whatever our beliefs.

So why launch the book in the Grant Museum? One of the admirers of Henry Gosse’s work was E. Ray Lankester, who succeeded Robert Grant and who further built up the Museum of Zoology. It was Ray Lankester who asked Edmund Gosse to write the first biography of Henry Gosse, before he produced the much later Father and Son. Roger began his talk by making this connection and it brought the story of 150 years ago to life. It’s what the book achieves.

Please visit http://cliopublishing.org/category/natural-history/ to find out more.

So far I’ve been very good at not linking activities at the Grant Museum to the Olympics. While I’m out here on ecological fieldwork in the remote northwest savannahs of northwest Australia, The Games have been very far from my mind. However, the phrase “new record” has been bandied about quite a lot here this month, and now I find myself writing a post that has nothing to do with the Olympics, but I’ve now already mentioned them three times. I appear to have jumped on the bandwagon of making a spurious link – something that everyone seems to be doing these days. Apologies.

I’m currently working with a small team of ecologists catching animals on wildlife sanctuaries and cattle stations to monitor the effects of cattle and fire management on the ecosystem. This year we’ve caught a fair few animals in areas in which they’ve never been seen before. The excitement of being part of these new records is definitely personally valuable, but I’ve also been thinking about how these single pieces of data are potentially more valuable than all of the other single animals we catch.

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