Category Archives for Curation

William Thomas March, a Jamaican Collector, Naturalist and Early Pioneer of Biological Data Recording in Jamaica.

Written by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Figure 1. William Thomas March’s bird skins stored in the Vertebrate Zoology collection at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool © National Museums Liverpool (World Museum: NML-VZ T1134, NML-VZ T760, NML-VZ T5652, NML-VZ 1989.66.1279, NML-VZ T19525, NML-VZ T12817, NML-VZ T9981, NML-VZ T1128, NML-VZ T14037, NML-VZ T14031/ Olivia Beavers)

August celebrates Jamaican independence, so what better way to celebrate than to talk about a Jamaican collector from the 1800s whose contributions to understanding Jamaican biodiversity are not yet fully recognised. 

I recently finished the project stage of the Associateship of the Museum Association (AMA). My project focused on helping to tell untold stories of the collections held at World Museum. 

Through trial and error, I started to look through World Museum’s database and Google the names of collectors to see if we had collectors who had black or brown heritage – with a focus on collectors with specimens from the Caribbean. I ended up finding William Thomas March. Only two previous papers were written about him, both by Catherine Levy (Managing Director of Windsor Research Centre, former President of the Caribbean Birds, and of BirdLife Jamaica). 

To coincide with the research and my project, I created a new dataset titled ‘Bird skins from Jamaica in the collections of World Museums Liverpool’ – now available on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) website. It includes specimens from William Thomas March.

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Preparing Collections for a Big Move

Written by Ellie Clark (Collections Move Team Lead) and Lizzy Devenish (Collections Move Team Lead Digitisation), Natural History Museum, London.

Introduction

The Natural History Museum is in the process of preparing 38 million specimens to be moved, 28 million of which will be rehoused to a new Science and Digitisation Centre at Thames Valley Science Park (TVSP) in Reading – the largest move of natural history specimens globally. Part of NHM Unlocked, this is an ambitious programme to secure the future of our irreplaceable collections, accelerate scientific research and enhance the Museum’s public offer. 

As part of this process, new workflows are being developed to ensure the safety of specimens before, during and after the move. Below, Team Leads Ellie Clark and Lizzy Devenish discuss a couple of ways this is currently being accomplished.

Physical Interventions Survey

It is important to gain a good understanding of the condition and housing needs of specimens before they move to TVSP. To do this, the NHM Unlocked Moves Team are currently undertaking a Physical Interventions Survey across the Palaeontology Collections to better understand these needs. The level of preparation needed varies from specimen to specimen depending on several factors including current storage, specimen condition, size of specimen and collection type. The ultimate aim of the survey is to provide an initial assessment for the time and resources needed for specimen preparation by curatorial and conservation teams to facilitate the safe movement of specimens to the new site.

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How a Giant Panda – possibly called Grandma – ended up at Leeds City Museum.

Written by Clare Brown, NatSCA Membership Secretary & Curator of Natural Science, Leeds Museums and Galleries, Leeds Discovery Centre.

On display in the basement gallery of Leeds City Museum is a stuffed Giant Panda. We’ve always known and referred to her as “Grandma”, the panda that died only a few days after arriving in London in 1938.

Photograph of a taxidermy giant panda at Leeds Museum.
‘Grandma’ the Giant Panda ©Leeds Museums and Galleries.

Grandma, named as she was the oldest of the group, and her compatriots Happy, Grumpy, Dopey and Baby (Snow White was released in March that year) were the first live Giant Pandas to arrive in the UK. They had taken a long and complicated journey out of central China. Trapped in the forests above Weizhou, Sichuan, the pandas were initially kept at Chengdu under the care of Elizabeth and Floyd Tangier Smith.

Over several weeks, paperwork was prepared and plans were put in place for moving six pandas across the country during a Japanese invasion. It was then Elizabeth who, leaving a poorly Floyd to catch a plane, navigated her way to the Hong Kong Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ Dogs Home, a journey of some 1400km. One panda died en route.

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Designated Status for Ipswich Museums’ Post-Cretaceous Geology Collection.

Written by Dr Simon Jackson, Collections and Learning Curator (Natural Sciences), Colchester + Ipswich Museums.

Ipswich Museums’ Post-Cretaceous Geology Collection, which includes our outstanding ice age collection, has been awarded Designated status by Arts Council England. The team here are delighted!

“OK, what exactly is Designation?” some of you may be thinking… Well, the scheme is administered by Arts Council England and identifies the pre-eminent collections of national importance held in England’s non-national museums, libraries and archives, based on their quality and significance. So, this award is a mark of distinction which is useful, for instance, in securing funding. If this has piqued your interest, and, for instance, you may be thinking “perhaps my collection is eligible for the scheme?” you can read more about Designation here: Designation Scheme | Arts Council England or my 2020 paper about the Tullie House bid I led on then, here https://www.natsca.org/article/2578 .

So, what’s been Designated at Ipswich? The Ipswich Post-Cretaceous Geology Collection includes c.30,000 specimens. The greatest strength of the collection includes Suffolk Plio-Pleistocene fossils, the remains of animals which lived during the Pleistocene ice age, and the warmer Pliocene before it. Suffolk has an outstanding Plio-Pleistocene record, with the only exposures of the Coralline Crag (Middle Pliocene) and extensive exposures of the Red Crag (the only exposed British deposit to document the transition into the ice age). The county’s deposits also document the dramatically changing environments of the ice age between warmer, wetter episodes (interglacials) and colder, drier episodes (glacials).  With pre-eminent collections covering this period, the collection now attracts international research, which, for instance, includes searching for the oldest mammoth DNA from Europe in c. 200,000 year old teeth from Suffolk – research led by the Centre for Palaeogenetics, at the Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and the NHM). You can read more about the project here: https://cimuseums.org.uk/mammothdna/

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Flora Explorer: Opening the Cabinets at Portsmouth Museums.

Written by Violet Nicholls, Assistant Curator (Herbarium), Portsmouth Museums.

Plants, lichens and fungi have captured the interests of collectors, scientists and artists for centuries, and I have discovered something about them for myself. As time passes from them being found in the field, they don’t get any less complicated, any less fascinating or any less beautiful. I am about 6 months into a two-year project working on the Guermonprez Herbarium called “Flora Explorer”, which is funded by the Headley Trust.

Image of lichen specimens in open trays
Fig. 1. Drawer of colourful specimens from the lichen cabinet.

The Herbarium

I have been cataloguing and studying the plant, fungi and lichen collections at Portsmouth Museums, and am learning a huge amount about past collecting practices, as well as taxonomy and the collectors themselves. There were so many! Sixty-two different names have cropped up whilst cataloguing the herbarium, with nearly 1000 plant specimens recorded on the database so far. There are around 10,000 plants in the Guermonprez Herbarium in total. How many more names will appear?

Henry Leopold Foster Guermonprez (1858-1924) was a taxidermist, ornithologist and “a botanist who should have been better known”.1 The herbarium is made up of plants collected by Guermonprez and members of his family, plants that were sent to him, and others that were purchased. The large collection was transferred from Bognor Regis Museum to Portsmouth Museum in the 1970’s. Many specimens were collected from West Sussex, where I have lived for most of my life.

“Flora Explorer” builds on work carried out during the “Wild about Portsmouth” project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The herbarium is organised into taxonomic order, stored in sealed herbarium cabinets, and the specimens are being catalogued using the relational database used by over 650 museums in the UK, Modes Complete. Digitising the collection has many benefits as it increases access for researchers, and for people who may need the data but can only obtain it remotely. Through the process I have also been updating the taxonomy where necessary, which adds further value to the collection.

Image of herbarium cabinets at Portsmouth City Museum
Fig. 2. Herbarium cabinets at Portsmouth City Museum, containing plant specimens arranged into taxonomic order.
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