Tag Archives for natural history

NatSCA Digital Digest – July 2023

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Assistant Curator of Entomology for National Museums Scotland.

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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.

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Sector News

HOGG Conference & Field Meeting

There’s still time to register for the upcoming The History of Geology Group (HOGG) conference & Field Meeting. The event will be hosted at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and will take place between Tuesday 15th and Friday 18th August 2023 on ‘Aspects of the history and progress of geology in Ireland’. 

The programme includes the one-day conference and three days of field and archive visits, including a visit to the birthplace of modern seismology, and opportunity to look at material not often open to view.

Registration is €17 (£15) and can be completed through Eventbrite by clicking here. For more information, visit the event page or email duncan.hawley.hogg@gmail.com

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Unpacking the Unnatural History Museum (Season 1)

Written by Verity Burke, John Pollard Newman Fellow of Climate Change and the Arts, University College Dublin.

Blaschka Models. Image credit: courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland: Natural History.

We’re at a crucial historical moment, in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has announced a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported on the devastating trajectory of the climate crisis. Museums have an important role to play in communicating the value of nature. Yet nature is, necessarily, mediated in museums, through taxidermy dioramas and skeletal mounts; virtual tours and digital databases; image, text and film. While the natural world has always been mediated in the museum space, what does this mediation mean now for natural history museums and collections, and the natures they present?

These are some of the questions which drive my research into museum representations of the natural world, and was the inspiration behind putting together an event series called ‘The Unnatural History Museum: Mediating Nature in the Sixth Mass Extinction’ (part of the Irish Research Council-funded project ‘Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum’ at Trinity College Dublin). I was keen to make a space to have these conversations across disciplines and sectors (something which we get surprisingly few opportunities to do, despite often working on similar topics or issues), to allow us to share what we were doing and discuss why. This blog is a short overview of the topics that the first season of the Unnatural History Museum engaged with from September 2022 to April 2023, with some excitement about what arose in the first season, and in anticipation of continuing these conversations in a planned second season.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – May 2023

Compiled by Glenn Roadley, NatSCA Committee Member, Curator of Natural Science at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.

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. If you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

NatSCA Conference

The NatSCA annual conference and AGM was held at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th April 2023. The focus this year was So how do we actually do all this? Hopeful futures and turning theory into practice for big issues in natural history collections.

With 86 delegates present each day plus over 20 online, it was great to welcome everyone back to physical NatSCA conferences. A huge thanks to everyone that attended and to our speakers for the brilliant talks! For those that were unable to attend, we’re hoping to make the presentations available online in the near future.

SPNHC Conference

The 38th Annual Meeting of The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections is being held in San Francisco, California 28 May – 2 June 2023. Full details here.

SHNH International Summer Meeting

This year’s SHNH International Summer Meeting, ‘The Language of Nature’, will take place at Thinktank, Millennium Point, Birmingham on Tuesday 13 June 2023 (with visits planned for 14 June). This one-day international meeting will explore the language of nature in its broadest sense. Over centuries, different formats and mediums, stylistic approaches and classification systems have been used to describe and represent the natural world. These ‘languages’ influence how we conceive of nature, how we categorise it, how we wonder at it and who we credit with its ‘discovery’. This conference aims to bring new perspectives to the history of natural history writing and other expressions of nature, exploring not only the creativity and originality involved but also the limitations and biases that shape our understanding of the natural world and how it has been perceived throughout history. Full details here.

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Naturalis’ New Hall of Evolution

Written by Becky Desjardins, Senior Preparateur, Naturalis Biodiversity Center.

In 2019 Naturalis opened a new building with eight permanent exhibit halls. We are happy to announce that we have opened the ninth hall, Evolution. The exhibit designer, Marijke Besselink, told me that the concept for the hall was developed after she heard how visitors reacted to a stone that was in the former Naturalis prehistory exhibit. This stone came from Greenland and dates to 3.76 billion years ago. In this rock you can see layers that indicate the presence of oxygen that might have been produced by single celled organisms. It is one of the earliest signs of life on earth. One of the museum educators told Marijke how in the old exhibit, visitors were astonished that the rock was so old, and would touch it with awe. Now this centerpiece is in the front centre of the dark blue exhibit, and when a visitor touches the stone, it starts up a light and sound interaction which connects to other vitrines around the exhibit. This gives the visitor a feeling of connection, that everything on Earth is intertwined: we are all related.

© Henk Caspers

Around the stone we can find fossils from the Burgess Shale, a Canadian formation that includes more than 500-million-year-old ancestors of most modern animals. Marijke wanted to make it clear to the public what the animals preserved as fossils looked like as to the casual observer these small fossils sometimes look like a dark grey smudge! Projections help the fossil organisms manifest out of their slate beds and move across the vitrine and into an aquarium filled with creatures from the so-called Cambrian explosion. The aquarium, made with the Pepper’s Ghost technique, is one of the highlights of the hall. Besides being very cool looking, visitors see how these prehistoric animals moved, and see how similar they are to modern animals.

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Book Review: A Historical Directory of Taxidermists.

Reviewed and written by Jazmine Miles Long, Taxidermist. https://www.jazminemileslong.com, Twitter: @TaxidermyLondon; Instagram: @Jazmine_miles_long

A Historical Directory of Taxidermists: Bird and Animal stuffers, Naturalists, Beast and Bird Preservers in Southwest England and Wales. Early 19th C to Mid-20th C.

A directory complied by Kelvin Boot
Published by MPM Publishing
2022
ISBN 978-1-7397161-0-3
Contact – kelvinbootbooks@gmail.com

This book is a must have for any researcher exploring the lives and work of taxidermists from Southwest England and Wales during the 19th and 20th Century. 140 pages in black and white including some images of taxidermists trade labels.

The book is a thorough directory of the taxidermists trading in the area at the time, the introduction cites how the directory was researched, exploring printed documents, not only naturalists publications but newspapers, trade directories and census records where taxidermists may have been mentioned or advertised. Exploring what the life of a taxidermist may have been like and how just like today it was the ‘celebrity’ taxidermists that would have been more likely to be written about.

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