Tag Archives for advocacy

Crispy, Brown and Far Too Delicate – Are Herbarium Specimens Just Too Difficult to Use?

Written by Clare Brown, Leeds Museums and Galleries.

Taking a walk through a forest, running through fields of wheat or even just gazing at trees, all a far-cry from dealing with the sheets of pressed, long-dead dried plants you come across in museum collections. Good taxidermy at least looks like the original animal.

Other problems with plant specimens include their need for low light, extremely careful handling and, occasionally, mercuric chloride. Despite being phenomenally important to researchers, for everything from tracking climate change to curing cancer, plant collections are not at the top of many people’s lists when it comes to exhibitions, events and workshops.

So, what public-facing engagement can you do with herbarium specimens? Here I’ve looked at a few great case studies where creative collections are delivering brilliant botany… Continue reading →

How to Foster Empathy with Endangered Animals: Developing a Creative Writing and Drawing Workshop Toolkit

Written by Dr Christina Thatcher, Lecturer in Creative Writing & Dr Lisa El Refaie, Reader in Language and Communication, Cardiff University.

With biodiversity declining at an alarming rate, we need to find ways of encouraging people to care about all endangered animal species, not just the ones with the most obvious appeal, such as pandas and polar bears, for example. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s ‘Red List of Threatened Species’, 27% of mammals are threatened with extinction, but so are 44% of reef corals, 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 21% of reptiles, and 12% of birds.

In 2023, we—Dr Christina Thatcher and Dr Lisa El Refaie from Cardiff University—met and discovered our shared interest in the expressive arts, metaphor, empathy and nature. We then designed a project which aimed to use the power of creativity to increase public awareness of, and empathy for, endangered animals, focusing on species that have few or no obvious human-like features. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account and ran from November 2023 until the autumn 2024, in collaboration with Natural History curators at the National Museum Cardiff. Continue reading →

NatSCA Digital Digest – July 2025

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Welcome to the July 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

Geological Collections Group – Dinosaur trackways field workshop

There is still time to register for the GCG Dinosaur Trackways field workshop, happening later this month on the 24th July.

This one-day field workshop will teach participants how to clean out large sauropod footprints and, take measurements of both isolated prints and entire trackways. This is a practical field workshop, with hands on experience of working with dinosaur trackways. For this reason, participants must be able to move across uneven ground unaided.

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Bark Tanning Skins into Leather for Taxidermy – A Sustainable, Natural and Non-harmful Alternative to Commercial Tanning Products?

Written by Jazmine Miles Long, Taxidermist.

When a taxidermy mount is made, the skin of the mammal (and in some cases reptiles and birds) is usually tanned. Tanning is the process of turning a raw skin into leather using chemistry. By turning the skin into leather, we are changing a fragile perusable material into something durable that can be sculpted into taxidermy and be more resistant to insect attack. Tanning the skin involves removing proteins in the skin and loosening the collagen fibres and then attaching tannins to these structures. Leather can be made with either the hair on or off the skin. When we are making taxidermy, we want the fur to stay attached to the skin and so the process is different to when the fur is to be removed. With hair on tanning, we want the pH to stay low to prevent the fur from falling out. The skin starts by going into a pickle solution of around pH 2 and after it has been through the tanning process it ends up at about pH 4.5 -5.

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A Hundred Feet Through the Door – A Chance Encounter with some Centipedes set me on a Curatorial Path…

Written by Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology, The Great North Museum: Hancock.

So, how did I get started in museums? Like perhaps many people, it began with a stroke of luck.

I’d decided to study Biology at university—I suppose I’d vaguely pictured myself at some point in the future, white-coated in the lab, pouring over spectrophotometer readings or agar plates. But by the end of the first year, I found myself staring out of the window during practicals. Nineteen-year-old me was slowly becoming disillusioned: Botany was biochemistry; Zoology was elegant mathematics; even Ecology was really an intricate forest of statistics, not trees. There was beauty in the numbers, but it was all a long way from my childhood passion for birdwatching, rock pooling and reading travel books. One day, peering at smudges on a petri dish and trying to work out if I’d just induced gene expression, I realised I might not be cut out for that imagined future. I was fascinated by the soul of the subject, but the finer points of its language were losing their magic.

Continue reading →