Clik here to view.
True and False Animals
When the language of biology meets common parlance there’s often a lot of confusion. Biological nomenclature (often called the scientific name, we are Homo sapiens sapiens* for example) is by and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Archaeopteryx a bird or not?
Just before Christmas I was inspired by a post by Jon Tennant on his blog, To bird or not to bird… about whether anyone knows whether Archaeopteryx lithographica is a bird or not a bird. Amongst...
View ArticleState of the Union! Natural History Museums 2014
Reposting of an article I wrote for the NatSCA website in my capacity on the #NatureData Coordinating Committee, summarising the ‘State of the Union’ for natural history museums following the SPNHC...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Strange Creatures: The Art of Unknown Animals opens today
Imagine that you are in a place no-one from your country has ever been before. You have just set eyes on an animal incomparible to anything you’ve ever encountered – it might as well be an alien....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Happy 79th Thylacine Day: What they knew in 1896
79 years ago today , on the night of 7th of September 1936, the last known thylacine died of exposure, locked out of the indoor part of its enclosure in a Tasmanian zoo. This followed a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How and why did these animals die?
Something which I get asked a lot by the Grant Museum’s visitors is “how did these animals die?” It’s an excellent question and one to which I wish there were a more comfortable answer. Or, at least, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Pokémon Go is a gift to museums
Pidgeotto on the loose in the Tanks at Tate Modern (C) Jack Ashby As a museum person and member of UCL’s Digital Humanities team, I was recently asked to make a brief contribution to an article in The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Curiosities from UCL’s Cabinet
Guest post by Rebecca Reynolds ‘Curiosities’ seem to be popping up a lot on TV, radio and the web recently – such as in Radio 4’s Museum of Curiosity, where guests donate objects to a vast imaginary...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Specimen of the Week 330: The taxidermy koala – The language of natural history
With generic terms like mankind and Homo sapiens (“wise man”), people of all genders are well aware that it is the masculine that has dominated the vocabulary of humanity. Not so in the animal kingdom....
View Article
