Tag Archives for natural science collections

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.

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A New Generation of Bolton Field Naturalists.

Written by Lauren Field, Curator of Natural History, Bolton Museum. 

In 1895 The Borough of Bolton Botanical Society was formed. This group concerned itself, as the name implies, with botany alone but eventually a feeling emerged among naturalists in Bolton that other aspects of natural history should be covered.

On February 7th 1907 a group of keen local naturalists met at the Chadwick Museum (Bolton Museum’s first building). The group included members of the Botanical Society as well as ornithologists, entomologists and others representing natural history from astronomy to geology – from the heights of the sky to the depths of the earth.

They soon settled on the name Bolton Field Naturalists’ Society.

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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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5 Top Tips on How to Decant your Museum

By Eimear Ashe, Collections Moves Project Manager, National Museum of Ireland

Having recently completed a major decant of Natural History collections in the National Museum of Ireland, I thought it a perfect opportunity to share my learnings with fellow NatSCA colleagues.

National Museum of Ireland – Natural History

Tip 1. Start with the staff!

  • What skills do you need to recruit in or increase capacity in?
  • Recruit new temporary staff. Training should be provided in the following areas: hazards in collections, manual handling, object handling, photography (if part of the workflow), condition assessment, object packing, transfer documentation procedures, integrated pest management (IPM), and the collections management system.
  • If you cannot recruit new staff, you will have to use existing resources. Agree with management that the permanent staff team will not be able to carry on their regular duties during the period of decant. You should also make the public aware of this reduction in capacity and service provision.
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