Grant Museum Visitor Services Volunteer Nicole Barber answers a question often put to her by the museum’s visitors…

How did it get like that?

Surrounded by the Grant Museum’s many exciting specimens, it’s not often you think of the painstaking preparation that went into each one before they were put on display. (Or at least I don’t, I’m usually far more interested in what’s in the case rather than how it got there.) The process of preparing zoological specimens is a lengthy one, involving some complicated and often quite gory techniques. The specimens in our collection have been pickled, taxidermied, pinned, stained, disarticulated, and re-articulated to make them educational and interesting to both researchers and the general public. We’ve previously explored some of the more unusual display techniques such as staining with red alizarin, or (and don’t pretend you don’t know which specimen this is) cramming things into jars, but what about our more traditional skeletal specimens?

LDUCZ-Z2701 baboon skeleton

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LDUCZ-X1093 Rhamphorhynchus muensteri fossil

In my last post, I wrote about our ‘Zittel wing’ pterosaur cast and mentioned that I was doing a bit of research on another Grant Museum Rhamphorhynchus specimen. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period. They were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. While I admit to being biased toward our palaeontology collections, this second Rhamphorhynchus is a very special specimen – definitely one of the unsung highlights of the Museum. It’s rare, has a fascinating (if enigmatic) history and is a wonderful example of positive re-identification. Why it hasn’t been given the full SOTW treatment I. Just. Don’t. Know. Without further ado, this week’s Specimen of the Week is…

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Last week, my colleague Jack Ashby wrote in effort to promote the under-promoted in the animal kingdom –the non-superstars that do not, at first glance, appear to be particularly special or worthy of fame and fortune. This week I would like to advance this theme by highlighting an animal that is often overlooked as not only a superstar but a veritable animal superhero.

This week’s Specimen of the Week is… (more…)

Here at the Grant Museum, we have a large collection of documents, photographs, negatives and other ephemera which make up the archive of the collection. Part of my ongoing role as the curator of the Grant Museum is to ensure that all of this archival information is attached to the relevant museum specimens so we have as much as a history of possible of the lives and after lives of our specimens. This marks the first post in what will be occasional series highlighting interesting finds about the museum and the specimens from the archive.

This first post contains some rather grim imagery so the images are after the jump but whilst rifling through the archives I found images of a bactrian camel head which had been sent to UCL from London Zoo. POTENTIALLY DISTURBING IMAGES HERE ON IN.

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