And now for something completely different...

Today, for some light relief, I give you:

Crappy taxidermy (click me. Go on, you know you want to)

Yes, folks, this website really exists. Some of it is not for the faint of heart, but the fur-bearing trout, mouse pope, and Utah werewolf are particularly enjoyable. And of course there are inevitably lots of pictures of the Brewdog squirrel bottles, and the ubiquitous assquatch. Have to say I am fairly dubious about the panda, it doesn't look real (thankfully).

Enjoy!

Bad taxidermy is always something I find quite sad (and sometimes downright horrifying!), because that animal has died for nothing...just to become a cautionary tale in how NOT to stuff something. I've seen plenty of examples in museums, particularly amongst the older specimens (there were lots of amateurs just stuffing dead things willy nilly in the 19th century). Monkeys must be unusually hard to get right, because I have seen many terrible examples. It's the face that seems to be the difficult part, because they often have the most terrifying grimaces. But then, I think I'd be grimacing too if I was shot and stuffed!

My favourite piece of crappy taxidermy that I have seen belongs to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and is a porcupine's arse mounted on a board like a trophy head. It just looks so comically pathetic. Unfortunately they don't seem to have the matching head, or I'm sure it would be on display, mounted on either side of a wall.

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane?...Oh wait, it is a bird"

So, after a few weeks spent helping some apprentices in the learning department of Bristol Museum catalogue and identify the learning and handling collection (which mostly consists of taxidermy), and feeling like a fairly useless zoologist at times ("Umm...it's a bird? Possibly a house martin?" (it wasn't, it was a sand martin, but I was damn close! My bird identifying abilities are somewhat patchy. I'm working on that - I even bought a monocular (never really got on with binoculars) and Bill Oddie's Birds Of Britain And Ireland (What else? The man was a Goodie, he's a living legend!) to be able to go out birdwatching)), I am now back to my usual routine of Tuesdays in the Biology department (wow, that was a long sentence! Possibly a record even for me).

And I get to do some real curatorial work! Not that most of the stuff I do at the museum isn't curatorial (there's always lots of cataloguing and ferrying around of specimens, moving things in and out of freezers, etc.), but I now have my very own project to work on: I (and one other volunteer) will be responsible for the curation and documentation of the foreign bird mount collection. This was started in 2006 by the previous curator and a volunteer, and despite the project plan having a time estimate of 3 months on it, 5 years later it is still unfinished, stuck in Museum Limbo along with many other projects started by one curator and never completed after their departure. This seems to be a common problem in the museum world, and I suspect in many jobs: when one person leaves, there isn't always a handover to the next person, or any documentation left to explain what they were working on and how far they'd got. It just isn't always possible. But it does mean that, when someone eventually comes to pick up a predecessor's work, they are left scratching their head trying to figure out what has and hasn't been done.

Which is what I spent most of yesterday afternoon doing! As it turns out, there is more work to do than we originally thought, but it is less daunting than it originally looked. Having found the MDA card catalogue for the collection, the relevant register book, and having looked through the cabinets to check the progress already made, I think I now have a workable system figured out for dealing with the documentation of the specimens. It's just a shame that I can't be at the museum full-time...it'll take months on only one day a week, but I could probably get it all done in a few weeks if I was there full-time! But never mind. It feels good to be able to do some work that will be of real, lasting benefit to the museum: in (hopefully) somewhat less than another 5 years, they will have a beautifully catalogued, photographed, and taxonomically ordered collection of foreign birds!

'New Dinosaur Fossil Hailed As Missing Link'

I know this topic has already been covered somewhat (and in a far more entertaining manner) by The Guardian writer Martin Robbins, but I thought I'd shove my own oar in, because it is something that irritates me almost every time I open a newspaper (you may notice that this blog is going a bit ranty at the moment...I blame this on Charlie Brooker (I've been watching 10 O'Clock Live and How TV Ruined Your Life lately) and Ben Goldacre (whose book Bad Science I am currently reading)).

Science is very poorly reported in the news, and even institutions that you would expect to take fact-checking and journalistic integrity seriously rarely seem to get it right. And the quality of the reporting seems to go rapidly downhill when they are discussing palaeontology in particular. I have seen new fossil finds hailed as the evidence 'that finally proves Darwin's 200-year-old theory of evolution' (excuse me? Finally proves?! This is a direct quote from a news piece I saw last year (although sadly I can't remember which particular fossil find they were talking about)), any number of 'missing links' which a) weren't missing to start with, and b) weren't in fact related to the species the journalist quoted them as being links between, and of course the perennial favourite: any and every fossil animal over 65 million years old being described as a dinosaur.

I am aware that the media have to aim their pieces at the general public who may or may not have a good grasp of science, and that they need to keep things fairly simple, but surely there is no need to call a pterosaur a dinosaur? Everyone can recognise a pterosaur when they see one, so just call it a pterosaur. Most people already think of pterosaurs as dinosaurs, and wrongly naming them as such in news articles just perpetuates this misunderstanding. But I see it all the time. And this is only one example of the level of factual inaccuracy that reguarly crops up in the reporting of biology.

Of course most science journalists are not themselves scientists, and seem to have a limited grasp of their own subject matter, so it's easy to see how these errors and misunderstandings can creep in. The answer is obvious: hire scientists who can write rather than writers who don't know science. Or just check your facts before sending an article to press. That is, after all, what Wikipedia is there for.

Fighting The Battle Of Who Could Care Less

The title of today's post comes from a Ben Folds Five song (entitled, funnily enough, Battle Of Who Could Care Less), mostly because it happens to be playing in my study at this exact moment, but it's also quite apt. I hate doing it, but I feel a rant coming on...

As an unemployed museums person on the bottom end of the museums ladder, I spend a lot of time scouring the internet for job adverts. And a trend is beginning to attract my attention: I have seen in the last year (last few months particularly) a lot of traineeships and internships aimed at getting young people into enty-level positions which would otherwise be denied to them due to lack of education/experience. Which is great - the museums sector desperately needs a crop of young people with experience, and outside of volunteering there are few ways to get the necessary experience. But what I'm not seeing advertised anywhere are the entry-level positions that these trainees/interns are supposed to be going into after they're done being trainees and interns. If there were any, I'd be applying for them myself!

Maybe next year there will a spate of entry-level positions advertised to accomodate these fresh, newly-trained museums professionals. But I doubt it. The museum sector as a whole was hit early and hard by the governments cuts made in the wake of the recent (and ongoing) financial crisis, and continue to be made. Where people leave or retire from a post, they are not generally renewed or readvertised, and new positions are very rarely being made. Especially, it seems, in the sciences. This may just be my bias because I pay more attention to what's going on the the world of science, but I'm not convinced. While science curatorships are cut, positions in the arts are still being advertised. Which doesn't surprise me, because while the general public is not as interested in art (see my post from a while ago discussing the results of a Museums Association survey on this topic), it is the art supporters that bring in the most money to museums.

So where does this leave our current trainees and interns? Sadly, I suspect it will leave them in the same position as me in a year or two - unemployed and bitter at the injustice of the world, with no use for their new-found knowledge and skills except to volunteer at their local museum, which will probably by then be run by an army of volunteers as the paid staff find themselves victims of yet more cut-backs. Ah, the Big Society at work.

Hey-ho. Actually, this week I've found a few jobs to apply for (some of which I'm actually qualified for!), and I've just applied for a job in the States, where the global financial fucktastrophe doesn't seem to have hit museums quite so hard. Fingers crossed!

Rabbits, Revulsion, & Repetition

There is always a certain element of worry involved when running a public event using handling objects. First, obviously, that the precious museum objects will be damaged, but there is also a concern over how people will react to them. Especially when using dead animals. Some people can find stuffed animals quite upsetting, and there is always a percentage of the audience that is just repulsed by wet-preserved specimens. But I have usually found that, the more worrisome we think a specimen is, the cooler children think it is. A good example would be the freeze-dried week-old baby rabbit that we (when I say "we" I mostly mean the biology curator. I'm just a volunteer!) used in a museum event in Bristol yesterday to celebrate the Chinese New Year (it's the Year of the Rabbit, in case you hadn't heard!). It is a cute little blighter, all curled up with its eyes closed almost as if it could be sleeping, but I'll admit there was a little curatorial worry that it might be a step too far. We were using a couple of stuffed adult rabbits, but dead baby animals are always a more tragic sight, and we debated whether we should actually have the kit on display. We needn't have worried at all: some adults found it mildly disturbing, but most children wanted to cuddle it and take it home! They were picking it up without a second thought, often to slightly queasy expressions from their parents, even after being told that it was a real dead rabbit. Their curiosity, and innate attraction to all things cute and fluffy, outweighed any worries they had about touching a dead thing. And of course the younger ones just thought it was sleeping. Aren't children wonderful?

The event seemed to be a huge success, judging by the number of people there, and now there are dozens (possibly even hundreds!) of Bristolian children who should be able to tell the difference between a rabbit and a hare (hares are larger, with longer ears, live solitarily above ground, and produce precocial (well-developed at birth) young rather than altricial (blind, naked and ugly!) young like rabbits), and between a rabbit and a rodent (lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) have 2 extra dinky teeth behind the top incisors, which rodents lack (anyone know why they have them? Wikipedia wasn't able to tell me that!)). I lost count of the amount of times I recited those nuggets of information to people, but that is the nature of public events: there is always an inevitable amount of repetition involved, because people want to know the important things. It did mean that my more interesting rabbit facts (well, I thought they were interesting!), such as that rabbits can only breathe though their nose and are incapable of vomiting, went unused, but you can't have everything I suppose!

Goodbye old Scotland, all covered in snow...

You may have noticed that I've not posted in a while, and that's because I've been too busy couch-surfing these last few weeks! My contract in Glasgow finished at the end of November, and I've since moved back down to sunny Somerset while I hunt for another job. But I thought I should write one last post about Glasgow, to try and sum up my wonderful museum experiences there...

I was thinking earlier about how much I've learned in the last few years, and this last year especially, about working in museums, and how far I've come since I first interviewed for a museum job 3 years ago (and embarassed myself horribly, I'm ashamed to admit - at that point I was in no way qualified for the job at hand!). I first started volunteering at my local museum because I didn't know what else to do with degrees in Zoology and Palaeobiology...I had to some extent educated myself into unemployability. Except in the fields I wanted to be in of course, because I lacked a PhD. So I started helping out at the museum for something to pass the time. And quickly fell in love with the place. It's a little hard to explain sometimes why I love what I do...I guess it always is with these things: if the person you're talking to doesn't share your interest, then it's hard for them to understand it. But I enjoy cataloguing and photographing and cleaning specimens, and knowing that with any luck my care will mean that the specimens will survive, complete with useful information, for many years, to be studied and cared for by future generations of nerdy museum people. And I love learning about the specimens. Just through documenting the mammal collections in my former museum I learned a huge amount about them, and their history, because I had to cross-reference old catalogue records, and perform endless internet and book searches to identify species that had been labelled wrongly or had been accessioned under old defunct names. And I love the physicality of the work, and the fact that there are so many different things to do - in one day I could be painting a specimen's stand, then cleaning a skeleton, feeding the live animals, putting some bird nests in the freezer and processing the ones that have come out, pinning insects...it would leave me exhausted at the end of a day, but immensely satisfied!

And from my wonderful experiences over the last few years, through volunteering and working with some lovely, patient, instructive curators, I think I have become a competent natural history curator myself. There is still a lot I can learn about collections care and conservation, and I can't wait to learn it, but I am no longer the terrified, unconfident girl who ummed and ahhhed her way through that interview 3 years ago. And hopefully I'll find a new position soon, because I can't imagine giving up on this career that I love and going back to a normal job. That would be far too boring!

Gideon Mantell: Pioneer of Palaentology

Since the blog's been a bit quiet lately, and I have little that is new and interesting to write about at the moment, here is a lazy post consisting of a transcript (with some minor editing and additions, and obviously much of the show-and-tell aspect removed!) of the talk I gave at the museum a few months ago about Gideon Mantell. Enjoy!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gideon Algernon Mantell was a county doctor with a practice in his hometown of Lewes, Sussex, where he was born in 1790. He was an excellent surgeon and midwife...at a time when up to 1 in 30 women died in childbirth in hospitals, Mantell lost only 2 patients in over 2000 births.

He was also passionate about the infant science of geology, having collected rocks and fossils from local quarries since he was a boy. At this time geology really was a very new science: it was only in 1654 that Archbishop Ussher used the chronology of the bible to date the creation of the world to the night before 23^rd Oct 4004BC, and this was for at least the next hundred years the prevailing view. It was only in the late 18^th/early 19^th century that people really began studying the rock strata, and realising that they must have taken much more than 6000 years to form (although they had no way of dating the rocks at all, since carbon dating wouldn’t be discovered for a couple of hundred years!).

Mantell acquired a huge fossil collection, largely relying on local quarrymen, who he paid to provide him with material. But after the publication of his first book on the Geology of Sussex word started to get around of the fabulous bones to be found in the Tilgate Forest quarries, and he suddenly had competition for specimens. He was much vexed when a local amateur collector began outbidding him for fossils, writing in his journal, “…Drove to Cuckfield, and endeavoured to obtain some fossils from the quarrymen who have been employed by me so many years; but the ungrateful scoundrels refused to let me have one, having found a customer on the spot…It is after all a very cruel affair: when there are thousands of quarries in England which would be equally productive and interesting if persons would but take the trouble to explore them, I must be robbed of the fruits of my industry and trouble!...”.

For many years Mantell was a successful doctor but a struggling amateur geologist; even after the publication of his first book he still struggled to gain recognition from the big names in the field. But amongst his collection he had pieces of bone from impossibly large extinct creatures, which he correctly recognised as reptiles. He took a tooth of one of these creatures to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The curator there showed him an iguana that had recently been brought back from the West Indies, and Mantell was impressed with how similar in form the teeth were. The creature was named Iguanodon (meaning ‘iguana tooth’). As it happens, the comparison with iguanas was rather oversold, as the teeth are actually only very superficially similar (as the anatomist Richard Owen took great pleasure in pointing out some years later). But because of the name, at the time Iguanodon was reconstructed to look very much like a giant iguana (see below. Note that the limbs are correctly positioned underneath the body rather than splayed out like a crocodile, although despite the fact that Mantell noted that the forelimbs were shorter than the hindlimbs, this was not reflected in most reconstructions of his time. Also you’ll note the horn on its nose, which is now known to be a thumb spike. And yes, I know I've used this picture in my blog before. But I like it).

Iguanodon was only the second giant reptile to be discovered; the first was described by William Buckland (an eminent geologist) in 1824 and named Megalosaurus. Mantell only very narrowly missed out on naming the first dinosaur...Buckland had been sitting on a specimen of Megalosaurus at the Ashmolean Museum for some years, afraid to publish a ‘giant reptile’ for fear of ridicule, but Mantell’s discoveries spurred him into action and he rushed out a paper shortly before Mantell published his Iguanodon. Of course, when first described Iguanodon and Megalosaurus were not called dinosaurs, because that term hadn’t been invented yet. It wasn’t until 1842 that the term ‘dinosaur’ was coined by Richard Owen. 

The discovery of Iguanodon made Mantell’s name as scientist, and he was admitted to the Royal Society on Dec 22^nd 1825. He was very proud of this, writing in his journal “This day I went to London, and at 8 in the evening attended at Somerset House to be admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society...It is with no small degree of pleasure that I placed my name in the Charter book, which contained that of Sir Isaac Newton and so many eminent characters”.

Mantell later discovered the bones of other dinosaurs: the primitive ankylosaur Hylaeosaurus, stegosaur Regnosaurus (known only from jaw fragment discovered by Mantell, pelvic fragment from Isle of Wight), and sauropod Pelorosaurus (a genus with a very confused history, having been given many names by many different people over the years!). He also collected many other fossils including plants, turtles, and ammonites.

Mantell moved his family to fashionable Brighton in the 1830’s, hoping to find a patron who would provide money for further collecting and research. He now had recognition as a scientist, but had yet to make any money from it. He turned his house into a museum, which was made a Scientific Institution and opened to the public in 1836. But it was a commercial failure (partly because Mantell would often kindly waive the entrance fee), and the museum bankrupted him. It was closed only 2 years after it opened, and Mantell was forced to sell his entire collection to the British Museum for the paltry sum of £4000. After everything was moved to the BM, only Iguanodon and Hylaeosaurus were put on display, to Mantell’s great disappointment.

The whole business of setting up a museum in their home, and then having it fail, was very stressful for his whole family, and it put a huge strain on Mantell’s marriage. Fed up of Gideon putting science above her needs, his wife finally left him in 1839.

Mantell spent the last decade of his life in a state of severe ill health. He thought he had a tumour on the spine caused by many years spent stooping over patients, but he in fact suffered from severe scoliosis (curvature of the spine), which left him partially paralysed, and may have been caused by a carriage accident in 1841. He continued to work during this time, visiting patients, conducting research, writing papers and books and giving lectures when he was well enough, but he was in constant pain, taking laudanum, aconite, ether, chloroform, opium etc. frequently (and often at the same time!) as painkillers. He died in 1852 of an opium overdose. At time of his death, Mantell was credited with the discovery of 4 out of 5 then known genera of dinosaur. After he died a portion of his curved spine was removed by Richard Owen and kept at Royal College of Surgeons (until 1969, when it was destroyed due to lack of space). 

These days Gideon Mantell’s name is one that commands great respect among palaeontological and geological circles, but he went without the recognition he deserved for many years, both before and after his death, due at least in part to a vicious smear campaign by a rival of his, the much more famous Richard Owen (a superb anatomist known mainly as the founder of the Natural History Museum in London, and for overseeing the building of the dinosaur models in Crystal Palace Park (a commission originally offered to Mantell, who turned it down due to ill health). If you’ve seen these fantastic models, you’ll know they’re hilariously inaccurate, but they were the best guesses based on the fossils that had been found at the time. They’re also now grade I listed buildings!).

Richard Owen was a very ambitious man, who was determined to be the most famous name in palaeontology. He had no qualms about sabotaging the careers of others to make this happen, and Mantell was just one of his victims. After Mantell’s death, an obituary was published in which he was rubbished as a poor scientist with an overinflated ego, and in which the discovery of Iguanodon was completely taken away from him and attributed to several other scientists, including Richard Owen. It was published anonymously, but it was widely believed to be the handiwork of Owen, an attempt to bury Mantell’s reputation with him. 

Owen’s ruthlessness eventually caught up with him, though, and he was denied the presidency of the Royal Society due to his ill-treatment of Mantell over the years, and was eventually voted off the councils of the Royal and Zoological societies, and the Royal College of Surgeons, over other scandals (including stealing other people’s work and publishing it as his own). In later years he was overtaken scientifically, as evolutionary theory developed and his ideas became outdated. Even the Natural History Museum, built as a temple to the wonders of God’s creation, was hijacked by Darwin and his bulldog Huxley, and it has become a temple to evolution.