Category Archives for Using Collections

Unicorns and Baby Dolls: Narwhal Specimens in the Cole Museum.

Written by Amanda Callaghan, Curator/Director of the Cole Museum of Zoology at the University of Reading.

The narwhal Monodon monoceros is one of the rarest and oddest-looking whales. Cousin to the white Beluga whale, narwhal means “corpse whale” in Icelandic, (nar corpse and hvalr whale) a reference to its blotchy grey pallor1. Male narwhals (and a small number of females) have a canine tooth on the left-hand side of the upper jaw that grows through the upper lip into a long spiral “tusk.” The function of this strange tooth is unclear, but the horns are used for duelling or ‘tusking’ when the males compete for females.

From medieval times through to the 17th century, the legend of the mythical horned horse, or unicorn, was reinforced by the spectacular spiralling horns brought to Europe. Those observed live in the seas around Greenland and Iceland were known as “sea unicorns”2. Today, although we know they are not unicorn horns, there remains a fascination and high price for these rare and beautiful teeth.

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Making a Green Gallery – A Leeds Story

By Sara Merritt, Audience Development Officer at Leeds Museums & Galleries.

Us: We want to retro-fit a permanent gallery! As sustainably as possible! With £40k! In two months! And we want to keep the space open to visitors!

Them: Umm, are you sure that’s a good…

Us: Great! We’ll get cracking.

2022 saw us undertake the retro-fit of our permanent Life on Earth gallery at Leeds City Museum, with the aim of making it as sustainable as possible. The gallery required an overhaul to meet current visitor expectations, with innovative design ideas and production methods to reflect our greater understanding of climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and Britain’s colonial history.

Our objectives were threefold and carefully considered:

  • To manage and deliver a sustainable retro-fit with the addition of creating a carbon calculator to measure our C02 output
  • To ensure the interpretation was relevant, and that we had a strong idea of our target audience to attract visitors who were already engaged in making climate-positive changes.
  • To identify robust materials and production methods which would stand up to visitors pulling, prodding, and everything in between.

We were used to working with greener materials for temporary exhibitions and knew the implications around material availability, longevity of eco materials, and higher associated costs. We therefore needed to keep the project resource light and put our efforts into the interpretation, rather than dramatic object moves. We took the bones of what we had, large cases and great objects, and retold the story with the emphasis on using our objects to inspire our visitors to live more sustainably.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – May 2024

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Collections Moves Team Leader at the Natural History Museum.

Welcome to the May edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

Registration is now open for the 13th European Bird Curators Meeting, October 2024, in Liverpool.

The European Bird Curators Meetings aim to promote cooperation, dissemination of best practices and new techniques in the curation, management, and use of bird collections. Presenters in the scientific programme often include curators, collection managers, museum historians and ornithological researchers. These are friendly meetings and anyone with an interest is welcome to join us.

The meeting will include plenary and submitted presentations, discussion sessions, collections tour, conference dinner (optional – Tuesday 29th October) and field excursion (optional – Thursday 31st October). 

Please follow the ‘Tickets available here’ link from the event webpage to register. They have single day registration options and have kept costs as low as possible to encourage attendance by local natural history curators. 

If you have any questions, please email vertebratezoology@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk.

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Feeling Older than Your Age? The Importance of Museum Collections for Radiocarbon Dating, and a Request for Collections containing Bivalves Collected Before 1950 from the UK

Written by Rachel Wood, Associate Professor, Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford.

Radiocarbon dating is routinely used to work out the age of archaeological and palaeontological sites, and often pops up in news articles and TV dramas. But some substantial problems remain. One of these is the calibration process, which allows us to convert the ratio of 14C (“radiocarbon”) and 12C (the common stable form of carbon) to an age estimate. This is particularly challenging when we are trying to date marine shells or any animal that has eaten food from the marine system. This means that it can be difficult for us to get an accurate age for a sample that should be straightforward – for example, the skeleton of Medieval person or a Mesolithic dog.

The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit is starting a project looking for samples of marine shells to help resolve this problem (Fig. 1). Natural history collections in museums are key to its success, and we would be very grateful to hear if anyone has a collection of pre-1950 marine bivalve shells.

Figure 1. Marine bivalves, suitable for helping us to calibrate radiocarbon dates. Please let us know if you have similar material that can be analysed by sampling a small strip from the edge. (Photo Peter Ditchfield, Courtesy Oxford University Museum of Natural History)

The Problem

At school, we are taught that radiocarbon dating works because radiocarbon decays radioactively at a known rate. By comparing the amount of 14C to a stable form of carbon called 12C, we can work out the age of a sample (Fig. 2). This is true, but only partially so because the starting 14C:12C varies. To get around this problem, we need to calibrate radiocarbon dates. Most 14C is produced in the upper atmosphere, and is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis and then passed through the food chain. This means, that if someone is eating terrestrial food – they will have a similar 14C:12C ratio in their bodies as in the atmosphere.

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Divorced or Separated? Naming the Specimens on Display at the Zoologisches and Palaontologisches Museum, Zurich.

Written by Richard Crawford, who has just completed a PhD thesis at the University of the Arts London, entitled ‘Re-presenting taxidermy, Contemporary Art interventions in Natural History Museums’.

Do people read labels in museums? If they do, what do they learn about the object on view? It has been the custom to use labels to give factual names to the things on display in scientific museum displays, but Art curators have taken a different approach and put titles to works that suggest a particular reading of the artwork. These may be suggested by the artist. A good example of this style of labelling is Damien Hirst’s ‘Mother and Child divided’, an artwork that used preserved specimens.

For this work, Damien Hirst famously sawed a cow and a calf in half and exhibited the separate halves in tanks filled with formaldehyde, which he placed apart with sufficient space for a viewer to walk between the two halves of each animal carcass so that they could observe the internal organs of both cow and calf. When it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1995, it helped win him the Turner Prize. The title was ironic. Hirst’s work critiques romantic depictions of the animal as part of harmonious natural order, a place in which mothers protect and nurture their young according to supposedly universal maternal instincts. In place of natural harmony, he presented the viewer with the disjuncture and division brought about by human intervention that brought early death to these two animals, destined for the meat market.

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