Tag Archives for practice

Taking a ‘Leaf’ of Faith: Managing a Forgotten University Herbarium

Written by Anna Robson, Graduate Intern Archaeology and Bioscience Collections, Durham University.

Background to the Collection

At Durham University, an herbarium of international scope has recently been reawakened revealing unique plant specimens and important stories about the Bioscience Collection as a whole. Over the past 18 months, the Archaeology and Bioscience Curator and Intern have undergone a process of conserving, managing, and researching the ex-teaching Bioscience Collection. Once part of the Bioscience Department’s teaching materials, this collection comprises of skeletal material, antler trophy heads, taxidermy, entomology, oology, a spirit collection and an herbarium.

To give a brief history to the collection, Durham University used to teach Zoology (established 1946) and Botany (established 1932), with Botany in the founding four departments of science in the University. The Department of Botany was spearheaded by Benjamin Millard Griffiths (1886-1942), one of the first readers in Botany who is described as a ‘true scientist’ and ‘inspired great affection’. As scientific advances changed from macro to micro to molecular, Durham’s Biosciences current department is an amalgamation of the former Botany and Zoology departments. Due to this shift, hands-on teaching using herbaria and animal osteological specimens gradually halted.

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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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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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Taxidermy and the Country House: Where Natural History Meets Social History – a review 

Written by Jack Ashby, Assistant Director of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.

Pat Morris is the authority on the history of British taxidermy, and there is arguably no-one better to write an exploration of the specific context of taxidermy collected for and displayed in private country houses. Although their materiality is identical, by their nature, these collections are often conceptually very different – the antithesis, even – to those in public museum. These differences are not the focus of the book, nonetheless this perspective offers great potential to help us consider more roundly the story of taxidermy and those that made and collected it.

The similarities museum and country house collections do share include their origin-stories, and of course the practicalities of preserving specimens. Like museums, these private collections trace their histories back to cabinets of curiosities. Preservability was fundamental to what could be kept, and Morris begins by explaining that early cabinets of curiosities in country houses were mainly items that required no preservation – dry materials like shells and bone. The only skins that were widely kept were those that could be simply dried without being prone to insect attack, which is why durable specimens like taxidermy crocodiles, hollowed-out armadillos and inflated pufferfish were commonplace in these early collections, rather than the birds and mammals which later became the norm.

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