Last week we kicked off the Grant Museum’s Humnanimals Season with one of our ever-popular film nights – Under the Caribbean (1954). Humanimals Season is all about the interactions between the lives of animals and humans, investigating human concepts in the animal world, and animals venturing into the human world. Dr Joe Cain, the stalwart presenter of GMZ film nights (and Head of UCL Science and Technology) had been insisting that we showed this 1950s underwater documentary for years.

I must admit, I hadn’t watched it, but my gut reaction was that our audience relies on us to show classic films, with a link to natural history that they will enjoy watching – many people enjoy the camp, slightly ridiculous productions like Tarzan and The Blob. “An out-dated documentary is surely a bit dry?”, I would say to Joe. He would tell me that it was ground-breaking for the genre and had heaps of never-before seen footage. “Hmmm”, I would say, “it’s just doesn’t sound silly enough”.

Boy, was I wrong. (more…)

If you come down to the Museum today you’re sure of a big surprise.

1000 specimens on the floor

Ever since we moved into our new venue last March we’ve been waiting for the time that we could undertake a very exciting construction project. The room we now occupy was built as a library, and the 39 book cases that run along the bottom row of the Museum’s walls didn’t have any doors on them. We were unable to commission new glass doors in time for the opening so we went with the temporary measure of screwing sheets of perspex in to protect the specimens on display. (more…)

I went to an absolutely excellent UCL Lunch Hour Lecture by a good friend of the Museum, Dr Anjali Goswami about how the way marsupials reproduce has impacted on their evolution. In any case, it’s my professional opinion that they are the best group of animals to have ever lived (take that dinosaurs).

The write-up of what she said, and the video of the whole lecture is on the UCL Events blog. It begins…

Every zoologist has their own favourite group of animals, and mine is marsupials. However, this group sometimes suffer a lot of stick from the more common type of zoologist who studies placental mammals. They say marsupials are boring, stupid, primitive, too few in number and are altogether inferior to “normal” mammals. I was hoping that the lunch hour lecture by Anjali Goswami (UCL Genetics, Evolution and the Environment and UCL Earth Sciences) would set some of these accusations straight.

Whenever I go to Australia to undertake ecological fieldwork I am struck with the diversity of the mammals there. You can travel 200km and find a different species of marsupial mouse doing a similar thing to the one you saw the day before, only in a slightly different environment. Go another 200km and you could find a third. However, the three species do look pretty similar. One of the major downsides of marsupials, from a biodiversity point of view, is that they haven’t evolved the range of forms that placental mammals have. While there is a semi-aquatic species of marsupial – the yapok – it could hardly be compared with a whale or a seal; there are gliding marsupials too, but they can’t do what bats can do. Marsupials and placentals have both been evolving for the same length of time – 125 million years – why did flying, swimming or event galloping never arise in marsupials? Anjali put it down to methods of reproduction.

Read all of it here

Last week we finished off Natural Mystery Season with a screening of what must be the gooiest monster movie of all time: The Blob (1958). These classic film screenings have become one of the highlights of our ever growing public events programme. The masterful Dr Joe Cain has now introduced 21 of these films, from The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933) to Inherit the Wind (1960).

It must be admitted that with our two films this term, The Blob and War of the Worlds (1953) we may have strayed a little far from natural history – we hope our visitors don’t mind. It’s definitely science, and mainly life science, so I suspect few people noticed. Next term we’ll be back to our roots with two very different must-sees: Under the Caribbean (1954) which I’ve described as a serious ground-breaking documentary that is very hard to take seriously (the ridiculous 1950s English dubbing, and the pretense that they try and make us believe they can talk to each other underwater reminds me of a cross between Eurotrash and Monty Python); and we finish the Humanimals Season with the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). These and all of next term’s events can be seen on our what’s on page.

Back to The Blob: the UCL Events blog gave us a jolly review. It begins:

Without a doubt, Film Night at the Grant Museum was the most entertaining event that I’ve attended at UCL. On December 6, they screened the 1958 sci-fi/horror cult classic, The Blob.

Dr Joe Cain holds court. A senior lecturer at UCL by day, he is an avid film fan by night. And possibly by day at weekends.

This is the first ‘On The Big Screen’ event at UCL that I’ve attended, despite this being the 21st showing. However, it’s clear that the event attracts a regular following, and by the time I arrive the large Darwin lecture theatre is almost full. All ages are represented in the crowd, and the mood is both jovial and excited.

Read the rest here.

Is ecotourism an answer to local environmental and biodiversity conservation?

That’s the latest question on our iPads for the QRator project. Have you ever done any ecotourism? How did it feel – was there an element of exploitation or did you feel it was doing good? (more…)

Last night I went to one of the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) excellent Wildlife Conservation Series. It was a series of short talks from conservation scientists working in China, under the heading “Conservation in China: Unique Challenges or Global Lessons?

Simply mentioning conservation and China in the same breath regularly causes people with an interest in the environment to raise their hackles. China is a land of staggering numbers; 1.3 billion people; 10 million square kilometres (and yet one of the highest population densities of any country); and only 23 Hainan gibbons. In a place where national parks are managed by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Construction, the human population is a huge sink for traded wildlife, however rare (for pets, food and Traditional Chinese Medicines) and with natural resources under so much stress from development, how can wildlife be expected to survive? Last night we were told that in the Great Leap Forward 10% of the country’s trees were felled in a month. (more…)

I think we know what our visitors will think about this latest QRator question on the iPads, but maybe some non-natural history fans will have different opinions…

Conserving cures?

Should we only be conserving things that have a potential human benefit? (more…)

Should species like red squirrels be protected in England when they are common in Europe?

This is the newest question we are asking in our QRator iPad displays.

There is a limited amount of money available for conservation. Not everything can be protected. How important is it if an animal goes extinct in one country if they still exist elsewhere? Some species, like red squirrels are common in Europe but declining in the UK – should they be protected here? Do local extinctions affect global biodiversity? (more…)

…is the latest question we are asking on our iPad displays. So far many living species have been cloned, for various reasons (just to see if we can and replacing lost pets being two of them. Resurrecting extinct species in this way has also been attempted, with very limited success. The question is, are they gone for good?

The technology may soon exist to clone recently extinct animals using DNA from museum specimens, but usable and complete DNA sequences are hard to find. Should we try and bring back animals that humans have driven to extinction? What would you do with a handful of cloned individuals? Would the money be better spent on animals we still have? (more…)

We have a few weeks to go for our current exhibition, co-curated with the Fish Facility here at UCL, exploring the role of zebrafish in scientific research. It’s in the Museum’s pigeon holes until we close for Christmas on 23rd December.

George Wigmore from UCL Communications came along to give a write-up of the installation on the UCL Evens Blog – it begins…

“Related to the much-maligned minnow, many are unaware that zebrafish are in fact one of the giants of the genetics world. While more-well known, and controversial, model organisms continue to dominate the limelight, the humble zebrafish continues to plod along in the background. But a current exhibition at UCL’s Grant Museum on zebrafish and their role in science aims to change all that.

Well-understood, easily observable, and with many similarities to mammalian physiology, it should be no surprise that zebrafish studies have resulted in such a huge number of advances in a plethora of different fields. Ranging from development biology, to toxicology and evolutionary theory, its composition makes it an ideal model organism for studies of vertebrate development and gene function.”
Read the rest here…

Image credit: Dr Paul Frankel, UCL Division of Medicine and Ark Therapeutics plc and Professor Paul French, Photonics Group, Physics Department, Imperial College London