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Can museums lie?

By Jack Ashby, on 5 December 2011

Accuracy or Information?

Accuracy or Information?

Can we lie about what a specimen is or where it came from?

Would it make a difference to you if we deliberately mis-labelled a specimen? If we wrote interesting factual labels about common seals, but used a grey seal skull in the display, would you care if you found out? The facts would still be true. What if we said the specimen was from Britain when the specimen actually came from Denmark?

This is the newest QRator question we are asking through one of our ground-breaking iPad displays. It’s something we’re really interesting in hearing what you think, so please do get involved in the conversation. (more…)

How to Get a Head

By Jack Ashby, on 30 November 2011

Last night Curator Mark and I went back to the Grant Museum’s historic roots as a proper teaching collection and got out about 100 specimens to run a workshop called How to Get a Head: A Hands-On History of the Skull.

Everyday, university students use our collection as part of their courses, but we’ve never run an actual class with objects for members of the public teaching proper old school zoology. We’ll certainly be doing it again (Get a Grip: A Hands-On History of Hands is now open for bookings for February).

Here’s an impartial write up from one of the people who came along, and some of the things she picked up… http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/events/2011/11/30/how-to-get-a-head-or-what-your-skull-is-saying-about-you/

Is domestication ethical?

By Jack Ashby, on 28 November 2011

Necessary or Unnatural?

Much of human society involves domesticated animals, from food and transport to pets and clothes. Is it wrong to breed individuals together to select for desirable traits? Should we be interfering in evolution? Does it matter what the reason is? Many domesticated animals are now unable to survive without human intervention. If domestication is unnatural, is it wrong? Necessary or Unnatural? display

This is the newest question we are asking our (online and actual) visitors as part of the QRator project, whose main presence is on the iPads in the Museum.

The specimens we’ve displayed along side it raise these points:

DOMESTIC PIG
Wild boar are dangerous to hunt. However, in their domestic form, they provide a valuable source of food.

COW
Dairy cows are selectively bred to produce as much milk as possible despite subsequent health problems.

DOMESTIC DOG
Pekingese dogs can’t breathe properly and subsequently overheat due to their flattened faces, which are selectively bred for aesthetic reasons.

WHITE TIGER
White tigers can only be produced in sufficient numbers for zoos by inbreeding. This causes serious defects and 80% infant mortality.

What do you think? Get involved in the conversation on the QRator website, and come and visit to see the display for yourself.

In spod we trust

By Jack Ashby, on 25 November 2011

Today I would like to celebrate the spod. There are a couple of definitions for this term relating to over-users of online chat-rooms, but the spods I’m referring to here are those that Urban Dictionary defines as:

“A derogatory term used to indicate someone with one of the following:
1) A penchant for academic study, above and beyond the call of duty
2) Higher than average intellectual capabilities
See also swot, nerd, geek.
“You’ve already done your history homework? Dude, you’re a spod!”
“I hate that kid, he’s a bit of a spod!”

My aim is to dispel these derogatory connotations and praise them for their gumption, rejection of the norm and dedication to something that is important. I use here terms like geek and nerd to which I attach no negatives – and have to a great extent be “reclaimed” by people like myself, who do belong in these categories. Geek-chic is cool these days, as we all know, but I’m not actually talking about the fashion for being a geek-wannabe. Just dressing like what you think a geek dresses like doesn’t make you a geek. (more…)

Zoology and Mythology – Looking at Angels, Fairies and Dragons

By Jack Ashby, on 25 November 2011

Last week was the Grant Museum’s 15th Annual Robert Edmond Grant Lecture, in which the superb Professor Roger Wotton explored the world of mythical creatures. He applied Grant’s own science of comparative anatomy to see whether things like angels, fairies and demons could actually fly, biologically speaking.

The science was solid, and – SPOILER ALERT – the answer was no. UCL Events blog reviewed the event in full, so you can read all about it there.

Roger’s original article on the topic can be found here in the Telegraph

Under the skin

By Jack Ashby, on 23 November 2011

As visitors to the Museum will know, we have a load of iPads (we were only the second museum in the world to incorporate them into displays) asking our visitors to engage in some controversial or complicated conversations that we are genuinely interested in the answer to. These conversations can all also be found and joined online at www.qrator.org.

We’re starting to change all the questions over, the newest one is:

Do you find skeletons, taxidermy or specimens in fluid more interesting?

When we design our displays, we have to decide what type of specimen should tell the story we want to tell. Should it be a skeleton, a taxidermy mount, or something preserved in a jar? How does your interest differ between them? Does each option mean something different to you?

So what do you think? Get involved in this conversation on the QRator site, or on your next visit. You can also download the free Android and iPhone app “Tales of Things” and find the conversations there.

All the past conversation will be kept live online at www.qrator.org/past-questions

The whole QRator project is a ground-breaking process of visitor engagement, run in partnership with the wonderful UCL Digital Humanities and UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.

Why I like cryptozoologists – an UnConventional view

By Jack Ashby, on 17 November 2011

Big Foot crossing I am very fond of cryptozoologists. I’m not one myself, but I think they are great. I spent Saturday at the Fortean Times’ annual symposium, UnConvention 2011. This is a weekend of talks about all things paranormal, organised by the magazine Fortean Times (The World of Strange Phenomena), but cryptozoology is the reason I went. Well, the reason I went is because two dear friends of the Grant Museum were speaking and I rarely get to see them. One is Richard Freeman, Zoological Director of the Centre for Fortean Zoology (the world’s largest professional cryptozoological organisation) and the other is Brian Regal, an academic historian of science interested in the relationship between science and pseudo-science and the history of Big Foot.

Cryptozoology, for those who don’t know, is the study of hidden animals, or cryptids. The bread and butter of it is animals unknown to science like yetis, sasquatch and Nessie; but also includes animals that are considered extinct, like thylacines; and animals beyond their normal ranges, like big cats on Dartmoor. (more…)

After the flood – this month’s New Scientist blog

By Jack Ashby, on 14 October 2011

This time last year two of the museum storerooms flooded. A loose pipe meant that when the mains water supply was switched on in the floor above, high pressure water jetted into our space, soaking the cabinets that contained some 40,000 of the museum’s objects.

To add to our frustration, the storerooms had only been built a few months earlier. It had taken us two months to install the collection, carefully replacing the specimens’ old locations with their new ones in our database so that nothing would be lost. It took two hours to evacuate all the specimens, and there was no time to document them in our frantic rush to get them to dry land. In this flood, the animals certainly went in far greater numbers than two by two.

This is the start of my latest New Scientist Big Wide World blog post. It’s about the flood recovery, why no natural history museums know what they have in their collections, and things being misidentified in museums. Read the rest of it here: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/bigwideworld/2011/10/lost-information-and-misidentified-opossums-recovering-from-the-flood.html

Scientists let loose at the Natural History Museum

By Jack Ashby, on 24 September 2011

Last night I was at the Natural History Museum’s Science Uncovered event and these are some things I learnt*:

  • Female paper natuiluses have been known to leave their shells to climb into ones covered in glitter.
  • The NHM has the youngest skin prepratation of a thylacine.
  • Slipper limpets mate for life, and do so permanently sat on top of each other.
  • Black smokers are mostly made of metal (well, rich ores).
  • There probably aren’t any soft tissue samples of Stella’s sea cow.
  • A virus has been physically reconstitued from its genetic code in a lab.
  • Volcanic Kimberlites have brought diamonds to the surface at tens of kilometres an hour from the mantle.

It was an absolutely fantastic night because it was a unique opportuntity (apart from the same night last year) for the Museum to turn itself inside out: to bring the thing that is best about our national natural history collection – the back of house scientists and collections – out into the galleries. (more…)

Tweeting birds at the Grant Museum

By Jack Ashby, on 16 September 2011

The Grant Museum now has its very own Twitter stream: @GrantMuseum. We’ll be tweeting about things going on in the Museum, behind the scenes with the specimens, what’s on the blog, news and views about current events in the world of natural history and biology and other things you might expect of the most exciting zoology museum around. Please do follow us and show your support.

It’s also an easy way to get in touch and have your say about the Museum, ask questions and share information.

We will be continuing to use @UCLMuseums too, along with our colleagues at UCL’s other amazing museums and collections.