Tag Archives for Historical collections

Scott Wilson’s Iʻiwi: Colouring the Past

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

Sometimes you come across something in the stores that catches your eye. Something a little puzzling, maybe something hiding in plain sight, or in a drawer you’d never had cause to open before. For me, the specimen in question was a bright red bird. Clearly historic by its beady glass eyes, but seemingly lacking any other provenance, and identity unknown. The appearance was striking, with bright scarlet feathers and a long, curved bill like a scimitar. This made identifying it the easiest step – an I’iwi (ee-EE-wi) one of the Hawaiian Honeycreepers, and a little surprising, given its rarity. It sat alone, without context, among a flock of other small birds, drawing your eye as a patch of scarlet amongst the browns and greys. A mystery, then.

NEWHM : 2016.H5 – I’iwi (Drepanis coccinea) collected by Scott B. Wilson 1888. All images credited to The Natural History Society of Northumbria.

A bit of digging in the archives began to shed some light. Two of a Honey-Eater from Keauhou, Kona – Presented per J. Hancock by Scott Wilson Esq. looked like a likely candidate. One of a pair, collected from the Big Island, Hawaii, reached us here in 1889. The Natural History Society of Northumbria were keen collectors of specimens from all over the world at that time, but this one seemed unusual. Who was Scott Wilson, and why might he have sent them here?

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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.

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The Curious Case of a Historical Seed Collection

Written by Hideko Yamamoto (former Volunteer, Natural History Museum, London) with input from Jovita C. Yesilyurt (Senior Curator, General Herbarium, Natural History Museum, London).

For centuries, a quiet corner of the Natural History Museum has concealed a secret: a previously undocumented historical seed collection. Hidden in locked cabinets, hundreds of small paper packets hold botanical specimens—and unanswered questions. This article offers a glimpse into this overlooked collection, the detective work behind its investigation, and the exciting possibilities that still lie ahead. The mystery remains unsolved—for now.

A Vast Botanical Treasure

The Natural History Museum’s botany collection contains more than five million specimens gathered worldwide over 300 years. These range from herbarium sheets and carpological (fruit) collections to microscopic slides, wet specimens, and seeds (Fig. 1). Ideally, each specimen carries detailed scientific and historical information, allowing researchers to reconstruct past ecosystems, track species distributions, and study evolutionary and climate-related change over time.

Figure 1: Tray with one of the sets of the seed collections

Equally important is the historical context: who collected the specimen, under what circumstances, and how it entered the Museum. Such information brings collections to life, revealing the people, motivations, and networks behind scientific discovery. Yet many specimens lack this documentation. Among them are seed packets stored quietly in locked cabinets of the herbarium.

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Dropping a Pin on the Salter Collection

Written by George Seddon-Roberts, PhD Student, John Innes Centre, work completed whilst on placement as a Curatorial Intern at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.

When accessing an entomology collection, there are a few things that a researcher can expect to find. Each specimen should be pinned with labels describing its species and information about where it was collected – two valuable pieces of information which can help researchers to trace the specimen’s origin geographically and in time. Knowing where and when a specimen was collected can help researchers better understand the historical landscape and ecology and make predictions into the future. However, when collections receive specimens from private collectors, this standard of labelling might not be met. As part of a 3-month internship at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, I aimed to transform one such collection.

The collection in context 

John Henry Salter (1862-1942) was an academic and naturalist, who spent much of his life as a lecturer at University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, where he would later be appointed as the first Professor of Botany. Outside of academia, Salter was a prolific collector of insects across several groups, most notably including coleoptera (beetles) and lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Salter’s collection contains specimens from across Wales, as well as England, Tenerife and south-east France; regions where he spent time during his retirement. The specimens, which amount to over 15,000 individuals, were meticulously recorded in field logs by Salter, which were also donated to the museum with the collection.  

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Rediscovering the Hancock Coelacanth

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

For as long as I’d worked at the museum, there’d always been a Coelacanth. People referred to it in passing, pointing out the large tub of orange tinted spirit where it lurked. I’d always rather taken it for granted; an interesting but rather mundane specimen, and I’d never been curious enough to fish it out of the murky liquid and examine it.

That is, until 2018, when staff at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall got in touch about an exhibition they were putting together called Monsters of the Deep. They’d asked us about Coelacanth fossils and I mentioned the Coelacanth in the fish collection, which was greeted with some surprise. A real one…Would we consider a loan? And as I thought about this, I came to realise that I knew very little about the Coelacanth at all.

There was next to nothing in the catalogue about it, so I decided, firstly, to get a better look. This was easier said than done. The Coelacanth is over a metre long and weighed over 20kg, sitting in a container of tea coloured alcohol bigger than a bathtub. Reaching in, I ran my gloved fingers over its flanks, which had the texture of coarse sandpaper. Lifting it out was like wrestling an alligator, but eventually it emerged, a gaping mouth with small sharp teeth, a ragged tear through the flesh of its head, and the huge eyes of a deep-water dweller.

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