Category Archives for Using Collections

Meet the Taxidermist – A New Way to Engage the Public with Taxidermy

Written by Julie Griffith, Property Experience Curator, Calke Abbey – National Trust & Sarah Burhouse, Taxidermist, Birdhouse Taxidermy.

How to challenge negative pre-conceptions of taxidermy and facilitate deeper, positive engagement with the objects – this was the challenge faced at Calke Abbey, a National Trust property in Derbyshire.

Credit – National Trust/Julie Griffith

Julie – Calke Abbey

Integral to Calke Abbey’s identity, the natural history collection demonstrates the interests and collecting of several generations of the Harpur Crewe family. Most visible is the taxidermy, present in over 10 rooms of the house and ranging from high quality finished dioramas to unfinished mounts hanging upside down in overcrowded cases. In the Saloon, large cases of birds even obscure a painting of Harpur Crewe children, demonstrating the importance placed on these objects by their historical owners.

Continue reading →

An Inspired Approach to Tail Repair: The Conservation of an Arctic Fox Mount

Written by Madalyne Epperson, Assistant Conservator, Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM).

The Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), located in downtown Milwaukee, is Wisconsin’s natural history museum. It opened to the public in 1884 and houses more than four million objects. The Museum is currently undertaking a multi-year effort to pack its extensive collections and relocate to a newly constructed building, due to open in 2027. I joined the MPM team in September 2025 to prepare roughly two thousand objects for display in the new building, which will be called the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin. One of my first assignments was to stabilize a full body arctic fox and ptarmigan predation mount.

Continue reading →

Darwin and Marx in the Museum. A review of Joel Wainwright’s ‘The End: Marx, Darwin and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis’.

Written by Joe Rigby, Senior Lecturer, University of Chester: Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

‘Storehouses for dinosaur bones, mineral samples, and fading dioramas portraying early humans. Do such places have something to tell us about capitalism and the climate crisis?’ (Wainwright 2025, p. 8)

Attached cover image of Joel Wainwright’s The End

As readers of the Natsca blog will appreciate, the discipline of ‘natural history’ encompasses a wide range of what today have become institutionalised as more or less separate fields of knowledge, including geology, biology, geography, anthropology, and history. In The End: Marx, Darwin and the Natural History of the Climate Crisis Joel Wainwright argues that recovering this kind of knowledge of ‘the history of nature and the role of nature in history’ (Wainwright 2025, p. 8) is essential to help address the current climate crisis. Whilst Wainwright is hardly the first person to make such a claim about the importance of natural history today, The End makes a convincing case for the importance of drawing jointly on the ideas of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in order to do so.

Continue reading →

Liverpool, Natural History and Extinction: The Case of a Real Liver Bird

Written by John-James Wilson (Lead Curator of Zoology, World Museum), Jude Piesse (Senior Lecturer in English Literature, LJMU) & Alyssa Grossman (Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Liverpool).

The interdisciplinary public engagement project ‘ENLivEN: Empire, Nature and Liverpool: Investigating and Engaging with Natural History’, is a collaboration between University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and 14 city-wide partners. In this blog we bring together reflections from a workshop held at World Museum, Liverpool in October 2025, where we trialled approaches for the project with LJMU undergraduates. ENLivEN will develop further workshops on similarly evocative ‘catalyst’ specimens and objects held across participating institutions.

John-James Wilson (Lead Curator of Zoology, World Museum)

Spotted Green Pigeons are a species that became extinct at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In 1793, Dr John Latham noticed two unusual taxidermized pigeons in private natural history collections in London. He described them as a new species that he called Spotted Green Pigeons. One of the specimens is now lost but the other was bought by the 13th Earl of Derby. In 1851, the 13th Earl of Derby left his specimen to the people of Liverpool in his will. Because the specimen is kept at World Museum, this specimen became known as the Liverpool Pigeon.

The Liverpool Pigeon is now the only known Spotted Green Pigeon specimen in existence. Uncertainty about the status and nearest relatives of Spotted Green Pigeons continued for over 200 years. DNA analysis in 2014 convinced scientists that Spotted Green Pigeons were a genuine, extinct species. Spotted Green Pigeons were only very distantly related to Feral Pigeons found in Liverpool and cities around the world.

Continue reading →

The Life and Work of Botanist Catherine Muriel Rob – New Herbarium Exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum

Written by Anna Robson, Associate Collections Curator – Biology, York Museums Trust

A new foyer case exhibition titled ‘The Life and Work of Botanist Catherine ‘Kit’ Rob: An insider’s look at the Yorkshire Museum’s Herbarium’ is now on display at the Yorkshire Museum. This exhibition displays the herbarium in a new light, being one of the only times the museum has exhibited the dried plant specimens to the public. It is also a special exhibit of material from Kit’s personal paper archive which has been kindly loaned by the University of York’s Borthwick Institute for Archives.

The Yorkshire Museum’s herbaria contain thousands of specimens, with its origins in the Yorkshire Philosophical Society (YPS) which was founded near 200 years ago. The YPS herbaria was first catalogued by Henry J. Wilkinson, Honorary Curator of Botany (1892 – 1933), and is still used as a reference guide by researchers interested in the museum’s herbarium and by curators.

Continue reading →