Hello everyone! I’m very sad to say that this is my last Specimen of the Week post because my internship finishes at the end of July. My final specimen is a carrion crow, and it was collected from a road on the Isle of Anglesey, Wales in 1993, and then donated to us in 2008 by the Museum of London. The purpose of the donation was “to fill a gap in the bird teaching material”. Read on to find out more about this magnificent bird…

Taxidermy carrion crow, Corvus corone LDUCZ-Y1533

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Do you having any burning desires to have something explained by someone on the inside? This blog series is a How To Guide for the museological musings of a Museum Assistant. The third along this (hopefully) long and happy blogging path is…

How To: Tell Your Heroes From Your Villains

When I was a child I was watching some gangster film or other with my Dad when he commented to me on how bad guys always drove black Jaguars. From that day on, for quite a while, I couldn’t fathom why the Metropolitan Police didn’t roam the streets of London arresting everyone who drove a black Jaguar. As it turns out, your personal moral code doesn’t have such stringent influence over your choice of vehicle and subsequently it is, in reality, much harder to tell hero from villain. The same is true of Museum goodies and baddies. They come in all manner of shapes, sizes, and with various numbers of legs (they aren’t all human after all). The way I see it, at the Grant Museum there are three main categories of creature that have influence over the state of the Museum; humans, babies, and things that fly. Not that I am insinuating that all babies aren’t human. Some are. (more…)