Thylacine: A species that was alive within living memory

Picture this: an animal in a zoo dies of exposure one night because the door allowing it to return to the inside area of its enclosure was accidentally locked shut. It’s early Spring and southern Tasmania gets pretty cold – a wire and concrete cage is no place for a warm-blooded creature to be kept outside. Pretty awful, eh?

Well that’s what happened to the last known thylacine 75 years ago today. The neglect itself would be shocking for any individual, let alone the sole known member of a species – the only remaining taxon in an entire family of animals. That day, a whole branch of the tree of life fell off. Well, in truth it was cut off. (more…)

Part of my job is to be responsible for our visitors’ experience in the Museum, and this includes any labels, marketing or online content. In the interest of accuracy, avoiding typos, and indeed making sure that one person’s opinions (mine) don’t come across as fact or institutional positions, I always ask a colleague to read anything of importance before I publish.

That person is often Mark our Curator. Even though I’ve been doing it throughout my career, six years of which have been alongside Mark, he has started objecting to certain phrases that I use. I’m interested to know what you think.

Is this deer pickled or preserved in fluid?

He doesn’t like it when I say a specimen is “pickled” instead of “preserved in fluid”. Nor is he keen on “stuffed” instead of “taxidermy” or “mounted skin preparation”. The reason I use them is that they flow off the tongue a bit better, are shorter (which is crucial when writing labels) and people know what they mean. Certainly fewer people would know what I meant by a “wet specimen” or a “spirit specimen” – two other names for objects preserved in alcohol-filled jars. (more…)

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…)

On occasion, people like to send things to people who work in museums. You might guess that I’m talking about objects that people want to donate to the Museum – I’m not. This isn’t that common and for that we are grateful – we have a very strict acquisitions policy and are able to take on very few specimens from the public for ethical and administrative reasons.

My postcard

Instead, I’m talking about things specifically meant for me. Myself and a colleague have both received the Atlas of Creation in the past – a spectacular book that must have cost a fortune to produce. It is filled with stunning pictures of fossils, and text saying “Here is a 100 million year old fish fossil. We still have fish, so evolution is a lie”. And is filled with inaccurate and misleading “information” about what evolutionary biologists think, and how silly they are to do so. Similar “gifts” have included DVDs about creationism surreptitiously left on my desk after a school workshop about natural selection. (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…)

Natural history has always been a field largely populated by amateurs. This is one of its biggest strengths. Without the passion and interest of millions of people worldwide it would be very hard to get anything done – both politically and financially. And by referring to people as amateurs I’m certainly not suggesting that they can’t also be experts.

Ringing a bar-tailed godwit

Hard-core natural historians regularly fall into one of three groups – birders, mammal-tickers and herpos (those obsessed with reptiles and amphibians). A common trend among them (though not true of all members of each group) is the desire to “tick off” as many species as they can, and create a nice long list of everything they have seen. (more…)

In my last post I begun to talk about the Australian Wildlife Conservancy’s ecologists that I have joined for a month in the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia. It’s the dry season here and while most of the land isn’t underwater the annual ecological trapping survey is underway.

This involves trapping small mammals, lizards, snakes and frogs and doing bird and vegetation surveys to assess what lives in various different habitats here. A couple of major investigations are underway – the purpose isn’t just to create a list of residents. About half of the reserve has had cattle removed from it (because of seemingly bizarre land-leasing laws this conservation NGO is technically required to run their wildlife sanctuary as a cattle station), and one question is to ask what impact that has on the ecology. It’s easy to predict that the many small mammals that rely on grass seed would be affected by these massive grazers, and this is what the data are suggesting. (more…)

I’m writing from the Kimberley region of north-western Australia, where I’m spending a month or so trapping animals with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). This is how I spend my holidays, or at least as many of them as I can. This is my third trip to Oz over the past year, and I’ve spent about seven of the last 13 months doing fieldwork here.

This has caused several people to ask me why I keep coming back to Australia; it’s a big world out there and there are plenty of mammals to chase around the rest of the globe. Why I don’t I go somewhere else? (more…)

The wilderness can feel pretty wild, but this has been farmed for decades. Is it still natural?

A delayed account of zoological fieldwork in Australia – Part 15

For the past 14 weeks I’ve been writing the account of the five months I spent on ecological fieldwork in Outback Australia. This is the final post for that trip. I visited many of the world’s major ecosystem types – rainforest and desert, alpine and coral reef, moorland and woodland, heath and kelp forest, monsoonal woodland and swamp. I trapped, tracked, handled, spot-lit, sampled and photographed some of my most favourite animals. Not wanting to boast, but I had a frankly awesome time.

A few weeks back I wrote about what makes an animal wild. To finish this series I’d like to ask a similar question of the landscape. Over the course of those five months I barely went inside, or even saw a building for that matter. Sleeping in a tent, cooking on a fire, drinking from a stream and washing in a bucket certainly should make you feel like you’re living relatively wild. At least with respect to my London life. (more…)

A delayed account of zoological fieldwork in Australia – Part 14

From April 2010 I spent about five months undertaking several zoological field projects across Australia. I worked with government agencies, universities and NGOs on conservation and ecology studies ranging from Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease, the effect of fire, rain and introduced predators on desert ecology and how to poison cats. This series of blog posts is a delayed account of my time in the field.

Weeks Sixteen to Nineteen – part 3

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been describing the final field project on this trip, joining ecologists from the Australian Wildilfe Conservancy (AWC) on a full faunal survey of their sanctuary on the Arhnem Land Plateau in the Northern Territory. During this one month expedition I encountered more snakes than I had throughout my whole life previously. Snakes on field work is the topic of this week’s post.

Carefully handling a funnel trap containing a brown snake – trying to identifying without touching the snake.

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