Natural Sciences Collections Association

Last night a contingent from UCL including colleagues from Museums and Public Engagement, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Heritage Without Borders headed down to the illustrious premises of 8 Northumberland for the 10th Anniversary Museums and Heritage Awards. In total three UCL projects had been shortlisted; the move of the Grant Museum for Project on A Limited Budget, the Grant Museum’s QRator project for Innovations, and Heritage Without Borders for The International Award. Did we bring home the silver (glass)? Well from the title of this post you can gather we did but you’ll have to hit the jump to find out more..

We won the Innovations award for QRator: Visitor Participation Through Social Interpretation. Here’s what the award looks like, complete with our grubby finger prints from last night. Some of them may even be comedienne and broadcaster Sue Perkins’ who presented the award.

There’s a whole raft of people who need thanking and who were instrumental in the QRator project. In no order they are: Andrew Hudson-Smith and the original team behind Tales of Things from UCL Centre for Advance Spatial Analysis, Steven Gray from CASA who developed the QRator app and has been our 24/7 helpdesk ever since, Claire Ross from UCL Digital Humanities who worked with me originally in trialling QR codes in the Grant Museum and who has been instrumental in researching, supporting and spreading QRator, Melissa Terras and Claire Warwick also from Digital Humanities who have given continuous feedback on the project as well as share the burden of the numerous published papers on the project, Susannah Chan from UCL Museums and Public Engagement for inventing the mounts for the iPads, Grant Museum Manager Jack Ashby who writes the content and designs the displays for QRator, Grant Museum colleagues Emma-Louise Nicholls and Simon Jackson who moderate the content day in and day out, UCL Public Engagement Unit for their funding and support of the project, Sally MacDonald Director of UCL Museums and Public Engagement who has been a huge driving force behind the project and key to realising it and of course the visitors of the Grant Museum who interact with QRator and interpret the Grant collections. Without them this project would literally be nothing.

Here’s what Director of Museums and Public Engagement, Sally MacDonald, has to say about the project:

“Museums are traditionally rather passive places where visitors read labels written by curators. Even museum interactives are usually pre-programmed with set responses. We wanted to experiment with putting public dialogue at the heart of the museum and QRator has helped us do that in a way that could transform the way museums work. What’s even better is that it’s been such a great collaboration with a group of really creative researchers across several UCL disciplines. Already it’s leading to new projects”

We’re not bitter about not scooping the other awards, getting shortlisted was achievement enough, especially as there was a wide range of really impressive projects from a sector that has been hard hit with cuts, you can see the full list of winners, commendations and the full shortlists here.

UPDATE: The Digital Urban blog post about the award. Clare Ross’s thoughts on the evening over at her blog.

UPDATE 2: Now with Flickr gallery. Warning some images may depict slight inebriation/elation.

When in Africa a couple of years ago, I looked high and low for these gorgeous animals. I mean EVERYwhere. When we finally caught up with a clan (clue), another tourist in our jeep attempted to ruin the moment by harping on about how disgusting they were. Sadly, for an unfathomable reason, this animal does appear to generally induce an upturned nose amongst the general public. Which is so UNFAIR!! This animal is amazing and I am going to set the record straight on why. This week’s specimen of the week is…

**!!!THE SPOTTED HYENA!!!**

1) Hyenas are highly misunderstood, intelligent and beautiful animals. Yes… they are. Although dog-like in appearance, they are more closely related to cats, come on- we all love cats. Ok so the high shoulders, sloping down to the bum that is much lower, does give the hyena a slightly ‘interesting’ appearance, but really it just gives them character.

2) The spotted hyena is actually the second largest carnivore in the whole of Africa, only beaten to the gold medal by the lion. They are extremely powerful animals that possess one of the strongest bite forces of ALL mammal species. So they should at least get the respect, if not the love, right?

3) Ok they are scavengers, but firstly- so?! I’ll have you know that scavenging is actually an extremely energy efficient way of life, thus, in this day and age of climate change and global warming, the hyena should be the template for a model citizen in terms of its eco-friendly ways. Secondly- in reality scavenging is very widespread. EVERYONE does it! Lions, tigers, bears… So why do hyenas get such a bad rep? Never been to a carboot sale? (You really should, they’re great).

4) You’ll like this one. Clans have a strict hierarchy. Once a male has bitten, growled, and clawed his way up through the clan to be the most high ranking male- he is still subordinate to the absolute lowest of the low ranking females. (Snigger.) Female hyenas are way more aggressive than males and can weigh up to 14 % more, to keep them in line.

5) Hyena cubs are born with a full set of gnashers, and their eyes already open. Within minutes of bursting forth into the African sun, hyena cubs fight each other for milk and it is here that the hierarchy begins to be established for later life. No pressure then.

On display we have two spotted hyena skulls, one striped hyena, and a cousin of the three hyena species- the aardwolf. What is also very exciting is that we now have an official Specimen of the Week plaque- YAY! You will find it currently sitting proudly in front of the spotted hyena skull, which seems to have a bigger grin than normal today.

Last week the Grant Museum hosted Call My Bluffalo, a panel event in the format of the popular game show Call My Bluff albeit with a zoological twist. The panel was made up of Dr Ian Barnes (Royal Holloway Univeristy), Dr Anjali Goswami (UCL), Professor Kate Jones (UCL, Institute of Zoology) and Dr Victoria Herridge (Natural History Museum). The star-studded panel do what they do best had to put in a lot of effort to contrive science lies and to try to dupe each other into believing made up etymologys of a range of zoological names. A task made difficult by the fact that sometimes the truth is far stranger than fiction. The event went very well judging from the audience reception (and of course the evaluation forms) but we ended up not using a round of questions we had planned. Rather than waste the effort putting them together we thought we’d put them up here for our readers to have a go themselves.

Have a go at guessing the right answer in the comments. Obviously, this task is made slightly easier with the internet at hand but try not to ruin it for others. I’ll be posting the correct answers in a week’s time for those that can wait.

1) Venatosaurus is a dinosaur genus named by a palaeontologist, and Star Wars fan,  after the Venator-class Star Destroyer,also known as the Venator-class Destroyer,  Republic attack cruiser and later Imperial attack cruiser, which was also one of the ships used extensively by the Galactic Republic during the later parts of the Clone Wars.

2) Venatosaurus is one of the fictional genera of dinosaur created for the 2005 King Kong movie as director Peter Jackson was keen to create a realistic fiction to explain the presence of dinosaurs on the movies Skull Island

3) Venatosaurus is the name of a sauropod dinosaur that has been misappropriated at least seven times since the 1980s. Originally it was proposed as the name of one of the world’s largest animals but the material was found to be misidentified and belonged to an existing genus. Over the next ten years the name was revived for new discoveries only to find that material was wrongly identified, highly dubious and in one instance applied to a chimera specimen (material from two individuals mixed together) the name is currently orphaned.

1) Notamacropus is a subgenus of Macropus, the genus that includes kangaroos, wallaroos and wallabies. Notamacropus is the subgenus for wallabies and was coined as in ‘Not A Macropus‘ in reference to the common confusion between Kangaroos, Wallaroos and Wallabies. .

2) Notamacropus is a genus of Jerboa a hopping rodent in reference to the similarity between the two groups of hopping animals

3) Notamacropus is a genus of giant fossil marsupial dunnarts. The genus is so called because two palaeontologists argued for many years  over the identification of some partial fossil material, one insisting it was Kangaroo and should be in the genus Macropus and the other certain it was a carnivorous marsupial. Upon the discovery of further remains the animal turned out to be a Dunnart and in spite the scholar who was correct forever enshrined the error of the other by naming it Notamacropus.

1) Epitoky is the behaviour seen in crabs that live around deep sea vents. The crabs of various species gather around small smoke outlets and appear to take in the smoke as if it were a hookah. It is probably a behaviour to scald of epiparasites in the hot water that comes out.

2) Epitoky is the behaviour observed in some Neobatrachian frogs when males present females with a bundle or ball of partially masticated insects as a gift to persuade them to allow mating.

3) Epitoky is a form of reproduction observed in polychaete marine worms where the worms undergo a partial or complete transformation into an epitoke, a small ‘shuttle’ capable of sexual reproduction.

1) Nessiteras rhombopteryx is a new species of caddisfly described in 2011 from two specimens that got caught in the camera lense of a probe sent up to the edge of space by the Near Earth Space Surveilance Initiative (acronym NESSI). Due to the insects getting trapped on the camera the exact altitude these insects were caught at was 50km above the Earth in the stratosphere. In honour of the fortunate encounter, the new genus was erected.

2) Nessiteras rhompbopteryx is the scientific name erected for the Loch Ness monster by Peter Scott in 1975 as only officially named taxa are able to be added to a British register of officially protected wildlife.

3) Nessiteras rhombopteryx is the largest known species of dragonfly from 300 million year old deposits in France. With a wingspan of 2 foot (60cm) it has been proposed they fed on other insects and even amphibians

Suggestions, thoughts and bluffs of your own in the comments please!

We’d also like to thank Mark Isaak’s wonderful Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature which has been a staple bookmark since my undergraduate days and a great source of inspirations for questions and suggested bluffs for our event.

On the basis of the wonderfully, hot, sunny, and bright bank holiday weekend we are having (I really hope you’re not the kind of audience that doesn’t appreciate extreme levels of sarcasm) I thought we should celebrate one of the most summery animals known to Britain. Never seen in winter (unless it is having a really bad day), this species is furry, beautiful, and is most often seen enjoying the flowers in the sunshine of summer. This week’s specimen of the week is…

***!!The bumble bee!!***

1) Bumblebees don’t drink alcohol, smoke, or eat fast food, yet sadly most of them only live for a year. The queen kicks the annual cycle off in the spring when she begins construction work on a new nest. She then flies around stockpiling pollen and nectar, before laying her first (of many) batch of eggs.

2) Once the queen has laid her eggs she will sit over them and ‘shiver’. Not solely because British summers are so cold, she does this to incubate the eggs. Rapidly contracting and relaxing her muscles produces enough warmth for the eggs to develop. The fetching white grubs that hatch, eat the stockpiled pollen and nectar before pupating and transforming into the more aesthetic buzzy bee stage of its life that we all know and love.

3) The newly hatched bees are workers and immediately set about continuing the queen’s building plans by expanding the nest. They also gather more food to feed the next wave of hatchlings. By mid-summer, the nest can contain more than 400 worker bees. Not bad going Ms Queen.

4) So, it is all going well, and then the end of the summer comes. As we pull out our umbrellas and wellies (no need to dust them off as we probably used them both the week before), the female workers fly off as newly graduated queen bees. The males and the original queen however, will die by Autumn. Ooooh. Sad face.

5) Due to their tireless efforts of pollen collection, bumblebees are integral for the pollination of flowers and subsequently extremely important to our ecosystem. Within the last 70 years however, two species of bumblebee have become extinct within the UK, and sadly, other species are currently in dramatic decline. So if you are looking for a new hobby, bee-keeping would be a good’un and given that most of our food is grown, or eats things that are grown, it is not just the marketers of Valentine’s Day that would thank you.

A favourite in my household when I was growing up, these South-Pacific mammals are pleasant once you get to known them despite their bad reputation, only really fight when it comes to women or food, and don’t reach maturity until they are almost middle aged. This week’s specimen of the week is…

***!!The Tasmanian Devil!!***

1) The Tasmanian devil gets its common name from the terror it struck into the hearts of early European settlers that were kept awake at night, cowering under their hammocks, by the nocturnal screeches that the devils emit. You can hear one here.

2) Spinning around in a whirlwind, shouting inexplicable grunts, is a behaviour not yet observed in the wild. In fact, the devil is more shy than the ball of fury its reputation would have us believe. Whilst they are the largest carnivorous marsupial, they are only particularly aggressive if threatened, or in competition with other devils for food. A lifestyle I fully empathise with.

3) Although called the Tasmanian devil, historically they also inhabited mainland Australia. However, around 3,500 years ago, Aboriginals introduced the dingo to Australia which competed with the devil. Sadly, the devil lost the battle and is now extinct in mainland Australia.

4) Devils are solitary animals though a carcass can attract large numbers. At such social events, snarling and screeching creates order out of chaos and establishes a hierarchy.

5) The scientific name of the Tasmanian devil is Sarcophilus which means meat lover. Clearly, some of the early explorers of Australia were Italian chefs.

As part of the Petrie Museum’s A Fit Mind in a Fit Body season of events for summer 2012, we are encouraging you to explore Egypt in London. We have run walks in London for some time now; visiting cemeteries, factories, cinemas, parks and mausoleums in the search for Egyptian influences on London monuments, architecture and places.

We’d love to hear about any more places that you think are a bit of ‘Egypt in London’  – visitors have suggested the Homebase on Warwick Rd for example. Tweet pictures and places to @PetrieMuseEgypt.

Map of London and Egyptian places

Two years ago rumours spread quickly around UCL that builders working in the Main Quad on Gower Street had discovered human bones while they were digging an access trench. Lots of human bones. As would be expected, theories abound as to what the story behind such a discovery might be.

The police were immediately involved, and they consulted UCL’s own expert forensic anatomist, Dr Wendy Birch, and established that no foul play had taken place, and the remains were not of police interest. Since then, Dr Birch and her colleagues have been researching the remains and trying to piece together (often literally – many of the bones were highly fragmented) what they are and why they were buried.

This is the topic of the Grant Museum’s new exhibition, Buried on Campus, co-curated by Wendy Birch and forensic anthropologist Christine King, our immediate Rockefeller Building neighbours in the UCL Anatomy Lab.

I can’t imagine what went through the construction workers’ minds when they made the discovery, but working with the experts to put this installation together certain things have left me quite surprised. The very concept that human material could have been buried like this is obviously shocking. In all, over 7000 bone fragments were discovered. It goes without saying that today this would never have happened, and indeed the 2004 Human Tissues Act outlaws it.

The whole topic of displaying human remains has to be considered carefully and handled sensitively. I think university museums, like the Grant, are particularly well placed for an exhibition like this – it’s really important that the research that’s being done does have a public forum and the university is being open about the topic. One of the questions we asked our visitors last term on a QRator iPad was “Should human and animal remains be treated any differently in museums like this?” and the majority of the responses were in favour of humans being displayed, with the sensible caveats of consent and sensitivity.

Some of the items in the exhibition are really quite amazing – there is a leg bone that has a tree root growing straight through it along its entire length, in the channel once occupied by marrow. The researchers have also reconstructed some of the bones from tiny fragments. There is a femur that they have rebuilt from 27 different elements found in the soil – it shows some incredible detective work.

The major answer to the “what is this collection?” question is that at least some of it appears to have once formed an anatomical teaching collection, much like those still used to train medics today. Many of the specimens show signs of dissection, some have writing on, and many show signs of disease.

The key element in the installation is a composite skeleton laid out in anatomical arrangement. It is built from many different individuals from elements that the team excavated. It displays many of the things that can be learnt from studying skeletons, showing how to determine sex and age, for example, from various parts of the body.

The exhibition runs until 13th July – do come in and take a look.

The full news article can be found here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1204/120423-buried-on-campus

Behind each dig and archaeological display is a dilemma. Just how do we translate a distant and unattainable past into a recognizable product for present consumption? When somebody sees an object, their first reaction is usually ‘what is it, and what is it for?’ It’s our job to try and answer those kinds of questions.

Giving something a name is easy enough; its the second part that provides the challenge. To be perfectly honest, we don’t really know why figurines of fat naked women were all the rage in prehistoric Europe. Is there any real reason to argue for their use as ancient fertility symbols over pornographic aides, other than the desire to seem professional rather than voyeuristic?

The Venus of Willendorf. Perhaps the most famous fat naked female figurine of them all. Mother-goddess or the first mother-in-law joke?

There are no guidebooks to the past -  just supposition, inference, and sometimes plain guesswork. OK, so it’s not completely random – we base our ideas on present day material culture, and our understanding of how groups and individuals seem to function. But then comes the leap of faith, when we try to transpose this back onto past societies. Were they really like us? How much of their behaviour was dictated by what we think of as basic human emotions and needs, how much decided by cultural or environmental context? Can we ever really know?

With so much determined by how we think in the here and now, it is hardly surprising that archaeological theories experience a periodic ebb and flow. Academic thought has its own fashions, and archaeologists are regularly swamped by scientific tsunamis, where a new approach upsets the old guard, leads to some lively conferences, and ultimately rewrites our interpretation of the past. This is of course a good thing, and stops everyone becoming insufferably smug. But it can leave the public behind, when museum displays fail to keep pace with changes at the pointy end of the discipline.

So put the ‘ritual object’ down on the floor, step away from it slowly, don’t make any sudden suppositions and keep your arguments where we can see them. You never know what trigger-happy new ideas might be waiting in the wings.

Ever heard of the chicken frog? What about the tiger shark? If I asked you what these species plus, say, the turtle dove and the spider monkey had in common, what would you say? Well, there are probably quite a few things when you dig deep (they all have eyes, for example), but superficially, it’s all in the name. Or nameS, as it were. This week’s specimen of the week has an equally split personality, as it is…

**!!!The Monkey-Faced Bat!!!**

1) Every single species of monkey-faced bat is found on one or more island within the island chain of the Solomon Islands. Writing it like that makes the Solomon Islands sound like a big place. It isn’t. They are found nowhere else in the world. Monkey-faced bats… not islands.

2) Picky about countries, and picky about habitats. Monkey-faced bats are found in all types of rainforest but are less impressed by agricultural land which is unfortunately sweeping over the rainforest in a Fern Gully (great film for the weekend) style large-scale conversion of forest habitat by humans.

3) Two of the five species of this bat group were only discovered in the year 2000.

4) The monkey-faced bats (that makes me smile each time I write it) are hunted by local folk for food. Unfortunately however, the locals tend to use an aggressive hunting technique that involves burning the trees down. This smokes the bat out but also destroys the roosting sites for other bats.

5) Monkey-faced bats belong to the bat subgroup called Megachiroptera. This group have large eyes and small ears as they use sight to find fruit, their main food type. The other group is the Microchiroptera which have small eyes and massive ears. This is because they are predators that hunt using echolocation. These species also have a nose leaf of varying sizes and shapes. If I were a bat, I would have an epic sized one like this yellow-winged bat for example. Just FYI.

Our MFB lives with our other bats in cabinet 18.  Come brave the rain and say hey!

Guest post by Rachel Farmer

Ever wondered how much work goes into conserving a single object? Ever wanted to try a bit of conservation yourself? A new exhibition at the Petrie Museum looks at the work done on Petrie objects by Conservation students at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.

The small pedestal case was chosen as a great place to put on exhibitions about the work that happens behind the scenes at the Petrie Museum. To start the ball rolling an exhibition on conservation has been installed which also highlights the close relationship between the Petrie Museum and the Conservation students from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. During the Conservation course at the Institute the students are given objects from material groups and over a number of years many groups of students have been given glass vessels from the Petrie Museum’s collection to work on.

The glass vessels come to the students in multiple fragments, often extremely thin and badly weathered. The task of putting all the pieces together is sometimes far too similar to recreating a light bulb someone has dropped on the floor. Their task is to create a stable object which can be handled and researched as well as stored safely. Having the glass vessels in the conservation laboratory also provides an opportunity for the objects to be analysed. Often there are grains of sand or unknown foreign material on the fragments and the students can use analytical equipment such as a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to establish what the material is which could provide information on the context in which the vessel was found or Petrie’s excavation techniques.

Materials used in the conservation process

The exhibition is located in the reception area of the Petrie Museum and contains examples of conserved glass vessels as well as materials that can be used in conservation treatments. Pictures and text have been put into an iPad in front of the case so that you can be taken through the whole treatment process or find out more about the materials on display.

By Rachel Farmer, UCL Conservation Intern at the Petrie Museum

No they’re flatworms. Boom boom. Apologies for the awful pun but worm based-jokes are thin on the ground unlike earthworms which are thin and in the ground. Oh dear. This post is a continuation of the occasional series highlighting objects from the stores and recently I’ve turned my attention to Flatworms.

Worms are an amazing ‘group’ of animals although once again common names clash with scientific classification as there’s more than one way of being a ‘worm’. In fact there are ‘worms’ that are more distantly related to each other than we are to fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles. For example, ribbon worms and arrow worms are more different than all animals with a backbone are from each other. It turns out that having a wormy body plan is a relatively successful way of being an organism but confusingly humans have the habit of calling any organism that is thin and long a worm. Further adding to the confusion is that there are a lot of animals which aren’t thin and long but are still worms. I won’t go into the minutiae of worm taxonomy, handily there’s this very useful wikipedia page about it for those of you keen on knowing your worms from your worms.

Most recently I’ve been working through the flatworms AKA Platyhelminthes. It is a very diverse group of organisms that occupy virtually every niche from free living predatory terrestrial and marine species through to the parasitic flukes and tapeworms that are more familiar to most people. Just over half of all known flatworm species are parasitic and as with all parasitic species have phenomenal, if somewhat morbid, existence. There’s not enough room here to cite every amazing example but parasitic flatworms undergo a dizzying array of techniques and often have to move from three or more completely different host species as they mature from eggs through to adults. Take for example, the giant intestinal fluke, Fasciolopsis buski which starts off as a free-living organism in water and then invades the body of one of a limited number of snail species and then becomes free living again to find a water plant where it then turns into a cyst until it is eaten by a mammal where it develops into a 5-8cm long fluke, lays its eggs which hatch in water. Such a risky life cycle surely sees the untimely death of millions of F.buski a year; if they fail to find a host snail, plant or mammal or if the eggs don’t make it to a water source. Their counter strategy to this risky business is that adults, safely attached inside the intestinal wall of a human or pig produce up to 25,000 eggs a day for a year in order to guarantee that some eggs survive.

The relatively small collection of platyhelminthes at the Grant Museum represents some of the range of flatworms both in terms of the different stages in the life cycles and also the surprising diversity of host species. A quick survey reveals that we’ve got examples of flatworms from python, dog, rabbit, mongoose, lemur, sheep, shark, horseshoe crab, cat, horse, mouse, salmon, great northern loon (a bird), bramble shark, cow and halibut. One specimen in particular (pictured in the centre above) raises some interesting historical and ethical questions as it is a specimen of the beef tapeworm, Teania saginata (labeled under the old name Taeniarhynchus, I know, I know I’ll get around to it) that had been taken from veal deliberately infected with the tapeworm. A further point of historical interest is that it was transferred to the Grant from the Royal College of Surgeons.

I doubt we’d know half as much about flatworms if it wasn’t for their detrimental effects on human and domesticated animal health. Flatworms can cause a wide range of problems in animals from a relatively increased appetite from gut parasites through to bilharzia, and even epilepsy from species that infect the central nervous system. Deliberately infecting livestock with parasites may seem cruel and morally objectionable to our modern sensibilities but back in the 1890s such research methods were key to understanding how best to prevent infection of humans and the animals we like to eat and keep as companions.

Well I’d love to go on and on about flatworms as part of my secret mission to lift the lid on animals which aren’t Hollywood enough but that’s perhaps best left for a future installment of dun dun dun IT CAME FROM THE STORES!

Up above the cabinet so high, like a reptile in the sky, this week’s specimen of the week is both solid and squishy, it’s both green but white, and it is extremely hard to get down without the help of our 6 and a half foot curator so if you want to see it, you’ll have to look carefully. But it’s well worth the effort. This week’s specimen of the week is…

**!!!The Siamese crocodile!!!**

1) Like most crocodile species, Siamese crocodiles inhabit freshwater. The only crocodile that regularly frequents salt water is the… want to guess? No? It’s the salt water crocodile. You really should have guessed.

2) This 3 m long reptile can be easily spotted as they are the only crocodilian species to sport a bony crest above each eye. No one is certain what the brow ridges are for, but the most popular theory by far (suggested by a fellow UCL staff member) is to stop water getting into their eyes when it rains. A clearly well thought out hypothesis given how much crocodiles hate water.

3) The Siamese crocodile is listed as Critically Endangered in the wild. However, whilst their wild counterparts are barely holding on by their claw tips, the captive population is booming. Unfortunately, the baby-croc-boom is not down to their epic sonnet writing skills, but because they are, sadly, extensively farmed for their skin.

4) To maintain wild populations, captive animals are frequently introduced into the wild. Genius plan, yes? Well… not when you consider that most Siamese crocodiles released into the wild are hybrid offspring of Siamese and salt water crocodiles. These species are cross-bred by crocodile farms to produce larger animals with ‘superior’ leather. So perhaps one day in the near future we will have to rename the Siamese crocodile, the ‘mongrel’ crocodile?

5) Except for their diet, which comprises amphibians, reptiles and small mammals (not often of the human variety), little else is known about their biology and habits. Sadly, we may not have a chance to find out before the pure species is lost and human meddling results in the hybrids taking over.

Come and see if you can spot our Siamese crocodile (a pure bred no less). If he eludes you, we will be happy to point him out as he is well worth a gander.

Researchers at UCL working on the ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ project are beginning a new programme of research funded by a Heritage Lottery award. The research, called ‘Touching Heritage’, aims to widen participation by taking museum objects out to healthcare communities that would otherwise be excluded from museum activities (e.g. neurological rehabilitation and psychiatric wards, residential care homes). One-to-one and group sessions led by facilitators will focus on the cultural, social and natural diversity of the objects in relation to participants’ own health and wellbeing. The experience will be enhanced by touching and handling objects traditionally associated with health and wellbeing, and by discussing how the objects feel, what they are made of or whether they resonate in other ways with participants.

An important aspect of this project is to train volunteers (including existing museum and hospital volunteers) to facilitate object handling sessions that maximize the potential to learn about health and wellbeing and widen participation in cultural and heritage activities. If you are keen to volunteer to work on this project and are happy to undergo training, or have any thoughts or comments, please get in touch with the project team – we’d really like to hear from you.

For more information about the ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ research go to:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/research/touch/heritageinhospitals

Or email:
Dr Helen Chatterjee, Project Leader: h.chatterjee@ucl.ac.uk
Dr Linda Thomson, Lead Researcher: linda.thomson@ucl.ac.uk

guest blog by Gemma Romain

Seated Male Figure by Ann M. Tooth, UCL Art Museum

Drawing over the Colour Line is a new project which started in January 2012 and is run by The Equiano Centre in UCL’s Department of Geography. We have been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to carry out a project over the next two years looking at the experiences and identities of Black people in London during the inter-war period by exploring their relationship with the art world. We are specifically focusing on the histories of people of African and Asian heritage who worked as artists and as artists’ models, and contextualising these histories within an examination of interwar political and social movements including pan-Africanism and anti-colonial activism and also histories of empire, migration, and diaspora. The end result of the project will be a public database documenting artworks in various locations, including public and private collections, which relate to Black artists and artists’ models.

We are working with UCL Art Museum throughout the project, researching the collections and carrying out various or co-hosting public events. The project explores some of the artwork created by students based at the Slade School of Fine Art during the 1920s and 1930s, many of which are now located at UCL Art Museum. For example, we are researching the drawings of models of African heritage which won Slade student prizes. Additionally, we will be working with the museum to explore these collections in greater depth by running a summer school for young people, a pop-up exhibition and contributing towards a research guide on Black history and the collections of UCL Art Museum.

Visit our blog and twitter for more details:  http://drawingoverthecolourline.wordpress.com/ and http://twitter.com/DColourLine .

For more information on The Equiano Centre visit our website http://www.ucl.ac.uk/equianocentre/

IT’S EASTER- YEAH!! I hope you are all suitably hyped up on excess chocolate from yesterday? I for one, had chocolate egg for dinner last night and breakfast this morning. I am going to give you absolutely no clues to today’s specimen because it is Easter and the blog is always topical (sort of) therefore the specimen requires no introduction. (I fear I may have just failed on both the ‘no clues’ and the ‘no introduction’ front.) This week’s specimen of the week is:

**!!!THE EASTER BUNNY!!!** (Pickled and stained red)

1) Contrary to popular belief, the Easter bunny does not require strong coffee and matchsticks for his eyelids, to deliver a trillion chocolate eggs over Easter. Rabbits are actually both crepuscular (active during dawn and dusk) and nocturnal. So, he can go all night long, and work through the following morning too. If he were a true wild rabbit however, he would be more likely to be diurnal (active during the day), as rabbits become more nocturnal when frequently disturbed by human activity.

2) The Easter bunny does not just eat chocolate eggs. Rabbits do not have a specialised diet and will feed on a wide variety of vegetation including grasses, tree bark, crops, and herbs.

3) The underground systems called warrens, in which the Easter bunny stores his chocolate eggs ready for Easter, are always dug by the female rabbits.

4) The Easter bunny may be a bossy boots, but he is only dominant over the other male rabbits. The female rabbits have their own, separate hierarchy.

5) Our Easter bunny has been stained red (see image above) with alizarin; an organic compound that acts as a dye. The point of the staining is not just to make the Easter bunny look pretty, it also allows for the study of bones and other tissues that contain calcium. Something us scientists like to do.

Happy Easter to you all from everyone at the Grant Museum!

The species that this week’s specimen of the week belongs to is huuuuuuuuuuuuge. The specimen we have in the museum however is teeny tiny, at least by comparison. It is a hatchling and ridiculously cute. The use of the word ‘hatchling’ to describe the juvenile of this species should have you wandering down the right taxonomic path, if still in a very vague direction. So let me help you out, this week’s specimen of the week is…

**!!!The Leatherback turtle!!!**

1) The leatherback turtle is the world’s largest turtle-tortoise-type-creature species, even beating the famous Galapagos giant tortoise, despite its boastful name. They grow up to 1.6 m and the heaviest on record weighed a ridiculous 916 kg. Unlike other turtles and tortoises, the shell is flexible rather than rigid, and has a thin layer of leathery skin over it, earning it the name ‘leatherback turtle’.

This image shows the inside of the throat of a leatherback turtle. Perfect for preventing slippery jellyfish from sliding out.

2) Leatherbacks eat soft-bodied animals. Jellyfish seem to be a favourite. Thousands of plastic bags get thrown/are blown/through-our-lazy-and-inept-disposal-techniques-end up in… the sea and unfortunately, to a turtle they look quite a lot like jellyfish. Resemble jellyfish they may, but taste like them they do not. Nor do they digest like them, and leatherback turtles are suffocating in such great numbers that they are now critically endangered. Take home message? Plastic bags = bad.

3) Reptiles cannot regulate their own body temperature and thus require external heat sources, such as the sun, to get them out of bed in the morning. Leatherback turtles however are exceptionally talented and can maintain a slightly elevated body temperature due to a blood supply system that is both complicated and genius. This genius idea of evolution’s allows leatherback turtles to swim in the colder waters found at depths of over 1,000 m where they hunt for prey.

4) Despite their enormous size, in order to lay their eggs female leatherbacks will only leave the water in the dead of night. They dig a deep hole with their rear flippers and deposit up to 100 eggs into it. As with crocodiles, the incubation temperature alters the sex of the babies. Warmer nest sites will induce females, whereas cooler nests produce all males.

5) The leatherback turtle inhabits waters as far north as Alaska and as far south as South Africa. They will only nest in the tropics however. Given that cold nests = male hatchlings, presumably nesting in colders areas would be detrimental to the species’ survival…

How do you do an overview of one of the most famous archaeologists responsible for 60 years of ground breaking techniques in Egypt, Palestine and Britain for a general audience in an hour? Well, last night’s The Man Who Discovered Egypt at 9pm on BBC4 did it pretty well. Of course, you can quibble and point out all the great things Petrie did, the people he knew, the sites he worked at etc etc, but it is difficult to get a documentary about Flinders Petrie, ‘a Victorian Brit of whom I’d [the Guardian critic] never heard’, right for the larger audience of television.

I will admit to having a vested interest in this documentary as a small section of it was filmed at the Petrie Museum and Institute of Archaeology, and obviously myself and the other colleagues involved in helping with photographs, information and more, want to see it succeed. Despite the title, which would annoy me if I was Egyptian, as a documentary explaining Petrie for the non-expert it did succeed.  It helped that the presenter was Chris Naunton, director of the Egypt Exploration Society and an archaeologist himself, who explained Petrie’s interests and discoveries with enthusiasm. The locations in Egypt and Palestine helped too and the cinematography was impressive. It was great to see Petrie’s work in Palestine given almost equal billing with his work in Egypt.

The range of experts involved also conveyed the scale of Petrie’s work; from our very own Stephen Quirke and Rachael Sparks to the Palestine Exploration Fund to the Quftis Omar and Ali to curators at the Cairo Museum and Rockefeller Museum and archaeologists in the field at some of Petrie’s sites.  The documentary did not shy away from Petrie’s eugenic thinking or the differences between him and his wife Hilda with younger archaeologists towards the end of their working lives. Overall it was a rounded picture of Petrie, the man and archaeologist.

And Petrie would so have an iPad if he worked in Egypt today and would have created an iMeasure app!

The documentary will be repeated over the next week but is also available to view on BBC iPlayer here.

I am currently in Egypt trying really hard, though probably failing, to see an Egyptian vulture. Why? Look at this, you’ve got to love this face. It’s yellow for starters, and has a mega cool feather hair-do for seconds. Brilliant. I decided of course to write this week’s blog on an Egyptian specimen but it seems we are somewhat sadly lacking in that area so my specimen is a tenuous link at best. In the meantime, this week’s specimen is of a species that was found in Egypt, though is now regionally extinct in northern Africa. It was also found in Europe once upon a time, which may surprise you. This week’s specimen of the week is…

**!!!The Hippopotamus!!!**

1) Hippos are in the top five largest land mammals in the world alive today (the caginess is due to a lack of clarity on how many species of elephant there are, and if all of them are bigger than hippos). But despite laughing in the face of weight loss diets with their 3,200 kg bulk, underwater they are very graceful swimmers.

2) Hippos spend around 2/3rds of their day wallowing about in water. The Ancient Greeks, having observed this habit, started referring to them as ‘river horses’ which became a nickname that                                                                                    stuck; their scientific name is Hippopotamus                                                                               amphibius .

3) Hippos mostly hang out in the shallow areas of rivers and lakes, standing on the substrate at the bottom. Evolution considerately placed their eyes and nostrils just above the water line, meaning that they can stand like this all day.

4) Hippos have been reported throughout the ages to sweat blood. Unfortunately, to the utter disappointment of vampire bats everywhere, this is not actually true. They do however secrete an oily substance through their skin that is in fact red, so you can perhaps see their confusion. It is thought that it acts as both a moisturiser and sunblock in the African heat, and may also protect against germs.

5) What do you think of great white sharks? Scary? Dangerous? Man-killers? Rubbish. More people get killed each year by coconuts. And, more contextually, hippos. They are actually responsible for more deaths each year in Africa than sharks, crocodiles, and big cats.

Sneaky fact 6) The Grant Museum of Zoology does in fact have a hippo from Egypt, albeit a fossil. So it wasn’t an entirely tenuous link now was it.

Marking objects with accession numbers

There is a legend that when every object in a collection has been given a unique accession number, its curators will be freed of the shackles of performance indicators and documentation plans and finally achieve a state of nirvana. There’s lots of self-help guidance out there, of course (deep breathing exercises optional) to help us achieve this goal, including information on how and when to number objects. The sensible way, according to the Collections Link’s subject factsheet, is to give objects a running number, or, if you must, a number representing the accession year and then a running number. So surely that’s what everybody does, right? Wrong!

The reality behind the ideal is that many collections were assembled a long time ago when standards were – how shall I put it? – somewhat looser than they are today. Curators have therefore inherited all sorts of interesting, not to mention inpenetrable, inconsistent and sometimes downright unworkable systems.  All of which are usually exacerbated by the fact that these older systems were rarely documented properly. So even figuring out how they are supposed to work can be a challenge in itself.

The Institute of Archaeology Collections at UCL are no exception.

There was some kind of accessioning system in place even before the Institute opened its doors for business in 1937. Whoever designed this system began it in a flurry of inventiveness. Lets make accession numbers useful. Let them record more than the cold, hard fact of the individual nature of an object. Let them speak, through their form, and tell us much more of their personal stories. From such idealistic beginnings, came creative encoding of all sorts of data into each accession number.

One of Kathleen Kenyon's accession cards. Have a go at reading the handwriting - I dare you!

So our first accession numbers begin with a nod to the geographic part of the world in which they were found. Actually, number is a bit of a misleading word here, as the first thing you get to read is a letter. The system was conceived as being truly global, so letters were assigned even to regions that weren’t represented in the collections – yet. Perhaps this speaks to the Institute’s ambitions – or pretensions. So we have E for Palestine, F for Syria, G for Mesopotamia and so on.

So far so good.

The next part of the number was designed as a code to represent the site. Very much in keeping with the tastes of the time, this was presented in the form of Roman numerals. Simple it wasn’t, but oh so very elegant. So now we can move to numbers in the form of EXI for Tell el-’Ajjul, EXIX for Jericho, EXXXVI for Tell Jemmeh and so on.

Of course, this got everybody thinking. If we can code in geography, then why not chronology? Why not also divide the numbers up to represent different periods at that site? Following this rule, this allows us to break up material from Tell el- ‘Ajjul, for example, into EXI (Early Bronze Age), EXII (Middle Bronze Age) and EXIII (Late Bronze).

A slight inconvenience of this system – not obvious to its designer – was that you have to be able to date an object before you can give it an accession number. Ever tried to date an unstratified burnishing pebble? Not something for the faint hearted.

I guess others came to the same conclusion, because this system only lasted a short time. After working through material from a handful of sites it was eventually abandoned in favour of the more pedestrian but practical one site = one code approach.

But wait; we’re not finished with our numbers yet! Two more parts to go.

The first of these is a single number representing a group of material within the designated site. On some sites, this meant everything from a single context, like a tomb. On others, to be honest, its not too clear what it meant. This was then followed by – at last – a straightforward running number.

Put it all together, and we might get something like EXII.33/1, representing item 1 from tomb 429, an Middle Bronze Age context from Tell el-‘Ajjul.

Rim sherd EXII.33/1. Just so you know what it looks like.

Are you still with me?

This beautiful coding does mean that I can pick up one of these old objects, read the number and four times out of five recognize the site it comes from. But sometimes our curatorial staff just got carried away in a riotous romp through the many possible permutations of letters, Arabic and Roman numerals.

Take the tragic story of basalt bowl fragment EIII.1iig/3.2.

Yes that’s right; a seven-part number this time. Not only lengthy (try writing that on a bead!), but also crying out to be misread and misunderstood.

So here we have The letter ‘E’, followed by Roman numeral ‘III’, then Arabic numeral ‘1 that looks frustratingly similar to the preceding Roman numeral, while being poorly distinguished from the following lower case Roman numeral ‘ii’ – after which we have a ‘g’, that looks very similar to the way some people write the number ‘9’, followed by a forward slash, that when poorly written is easily mistaken for a ‘I’ or a ‘1’. The last two numbers are probably fine, providing the ‘3’ is written clearly and doesn’t accidentally morph into an ‘8’, and the base of the 2 doesn’t wear off and make it look something like a ‘7’.

But now we are moving into the dark territory of differing handwriting styles, another thing that is sent to try us and which can no doubt be saved for another confessional.

After all this, if researchers then go on to record and publish our accession numbers incorrectly, how can we possibly complain?

These long numbers took their toll, and by 1937 (the ‘official’ opening of the Institute) a decision was made to abandon the whole system and replace it with – you guessed it – a simpler year numbering system. Even then, there was a period of transition in which the two systems overlapped, showing a reluctance to let the idea of coded data go completely. There was a phase in which somebody decided to go around and reaccession things with numbers in the new system (see below for why this is a bad idea); and another phase in which they couldn’t quite let go of the area letters, and so introduced a whole new series of letter codes, this time tied into the different teaching departments (somewhat oddly as F for Western Asia, Z for European, and S for Indian). But the dust settled, and as Britain entered into a bold phase of post-war optimism and modernity, the whole concept of letters and Roman numerals were for the large part left by the wayside.

So should we all tackle our obsolete numbering systems and start passionately renumbering everything? Hell no! That’s the worst thing you could do, according to Collections Link advice. If it works as a unique identifier, then however clumsy it might look, it still works and there’s no need to fix it. The quaint, elegantly awkward systems of the past are all part of the rich heritage of our profession. What we need to do is stop fighting, embrace the peculiarity of it all, and pass on this knowledge with relish to every unsuspecting researcher or student who comes our way. If only to see the incredulity/amusement/despair on their faces.

Ah well, nirvana schmana. I expect enlightenment is a bit like retirement; sounds great, but then you don’t know what to do with yourself afterwards.

It was the edge of the Amazon rainforest, and I was working at a sanctuary for injured animals. In the dead of night, the entire room lit up as lightening streaked across the sky and thunder boomed down the corridor. In the morning we discovered that a rescued ocelot had escaped from its enclosure and gone on a rampage, killing several birds and seriously wounding a monkey nicknamed Lucia.

The nearest vet was a six hour drive away. With serious gashes all over her tiny body, the manager and I rushed her to the nearest hospital and literally begged the staff for help. We went through three doctors before we found one who would perform surgery. As Lucia’s screaming quietened and her eyes began to close, the doctor started to carefully stitch up her wounds. Although she should now by rights be called Scarface, she healed and recovered. Although a free ranging monkey, Lucia is now a regular visitor to the sanctuary. In her honour, this week’s specimen of the week is…

**!!!The Capuchin Monkey!!!**

1) Capuchins are considered the most intelligent New World primate. They use their giant intellect to make tools with which they break into nuts and shellfish. Capuchins pass on skills via demonstration which is almost always as good as verbal explanations… Capuchins eat a certain fruit covered in hairs that cause skin irritation. They cunningly rub the fruit on branches to get rid of the hairs. Unfortunately, the point of this act was lost in translation on a few white faced capuchins in Costa Rica who thought the game of fruit rubbing would be improved by rubbing the fruit on their bodies. Ouch.

2) Capuchin monkeys are so named because a couple of their species have a vaguely similar appearance to the Catholic Friars; the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. Though at between 1.3 and 4.9 kg, they are more mini-monks than mighty men of the monastry.

3) The 23 subspecies of capuchin monkey are divided into two groups called tufted and non-tufted. These group names do what they say on the tin; some species have a ‘tuft’ of thicker, longer fur on the head. And some don’t (see right). Whilst a tufted species and a non-tufted species can have overlapping ranges, no two tufted species, or two non-tufted species for that matter, cohabit any part of the forest.

4) Capuchin monkeys are extremely mischievous. Scientists in Costa Rica working with black and white capuchins have witnessed them harassing howler monkeys, for fun. The much larger howler monkeys would be asleep on a branch. The naughty capuchin would sneak down the tree, onto the branch, and literally jump up and down to shake the branch and wake the howler monkey. Why? Because it is fun.

5) Capuchins form temporary groups with other species of monkey, such as squirrel monkeys, so that they can forage together whilst mutually benefitting from the increase in eyes and ears. However, they are very territorial when it comes to rival troops of the same species. In order to frighten off monkey strangers, they will bare their teeth, shake branches, and even throw things at intruders. Whilst wandering through the Amazon rainforest a couple of years ago I accidently got caught in the middle of a capuchin turf and *narrowly* missed having a small branch lodged in my skull. I’d like to think it wasn’t aimed at me…