Adjusting to Anthropology

It’s been quite an adjustment over the past year, as a zoologist, to suddenly find myself working in an anthropology collection. I’d be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about the various cultures and peoples of this world, and would probably struggle to point to the places that many of our objects are from on a map.

But what I’ve discovered is that I love objects, no matter what they are. I may not always appreciate the anthropological significance of the objects we work with, but I love their artistry and ingenuity, being able to examine their construction and compare them with objects of a similar function from all over the world. Our collections are stored systematically by type rather than geographically, so I get to compare the incredibly varied forms of charms used to ward off sickness, and the striking similarity in the design of mole traps from different countries. It turns out there are many ways to fight disease, but only one way to trap a mole!

And my work is not completely divorced from my subject specialism; a huge proportion of our anthropology collection is made from animal materials, and I am learning a huge amount just from examining them under a hand lens. I can now confidently distinguish bone from ivory or antler, identify worked horn, claws, teeth, sinew and baleen (which I was surprised to learn was historically used quite commonly in North America to make fishing lines!), and I am constantly amazed at the infinite variety of forms these materials can take at the hands of a skilled craftsperson.

Plus, there can’t be many workplaces in which a debate about the best method of trapping a giraffe is considered perfectly normal staffroom conversation!

I love my job.

Fun With Fluids: Day Two

Today began with us checking our specimens in their baths of Decon-90. My harbour crabs were declared done and ready for fixation, but the tree frog was still rather stiff and unresponsive, so he went back on the hotplate to cook a little longer.

‘Fixing’ specimens involves bathing them in a fixative, in this case formalin (a dilute solution of formaldehyde dissolved in water), which stabilises tissues by binding to amines in protein, making them less soluble and mobile. Most specimens also need to be injected with formalin, to ensure that it penetrates the whole body and the internal organs don’t start to degrade. My crabs did not need injecting, as the formalin could get inside the carapace fairly easily to reach the tissues.

Here you can just about see the glass microscope slides being used to force my still floaty crabs beneath the surface of the formalin to make sure that it penetrates evenly.

While our specimens were busy fixing, we went for our morning’s lectures, which included information on the various jar sealants that have historically been used and which one is likely to come across in a museum collection, mounting pelagic specimens using monofilament wire and glass backing plates, and also information on dealing with fluid-preserved botanical specimens.

Next it was back to the lab, where my frog was finally supple enough to be fixed in formalin, and my crabs were ready for the next stage. Once fixed, specimens are usually then transferred into alcohol, which acts as a preservative and prevents them decaying over time. A solution of 70 – 80% Industrial Methylated Spirits (IMS) is used for this. But with specimens that have dried out completely in their jars (as mine had), they can’t be put straight into 80% IMS, as this would damage them. Instead, they need to be stepped up in gradual stages to 80%, starting with a low alcohol concentration.

But before my critters could go into their alcohol, they had to be treated for the air inside them that was causing them to float. This was done in a dessication chamber attached to a vacuum pump, which pulls the air out of the chamber, and removes air bubbles from the body cavity of the specimen.

Unfortunately, while quite a lot of air did come out of my specimens, they failed to sink totally, even after several treatments in the vacuum. As the frog will be mounted on a glass backing plate anyway, this isn’t too important.

While waiting for my specimens to work their way up the alcohol ladder, I also attempted to make a lid for the frog’s jar by cutting a circular piece of glass from a sheet…after three failed attempts, I resorted to a ready-cut lid! Which is cheating, but I did at least get the principle of how it should work, and why mine went wrong. I also drilled a hole in my shiny new lid, which can be used to top up the alcohol in the finished jar in the future if the level gets too low, without having to go to the hassle of removing the lid (which will be well sealed).

I also started a new project, which is this little chap:

He is a small monitor lizard (of the genus Varanus), and he has clearly been squashed into a jar that was too small for him, as he is rather hunched and his tail curls around quite a lot. His main problem, however, was that the fluid level in his jar was far too low, as you can see above. He was still fairly flexible, so I didn’t need to put him into Decon-90, but instead moved him into a nice, new, (and much larger) jar and doused him in his first batch of IMS.

Tomorrow I will finish moving the frog and the lizards up the alcohols, mount the frog on his backplate, and attempt to re-attach some stray crab legs. Can’t wait!

Fun With Fluids

So, this week I am attending an excellent course in fluid preservation of natural history specimens run by Simon Moore. Handily, it is also being held at the Horniman this time round, so I don’t even have to go out of my way!

Day one featured a morning of lectures on the various problems that face fluid preserved specimens, including drying out, lipid contamination, and incomplete fixation. There was a lot of information to take in, and a lot of chemistry involved – I haven’t studied organic chemistry since university so I’m a bit rusty, and I can’t say I took in all of the details of fixative formulae and chemical reactions! But the theory was followed by practical, which always makes things clearer.

The practical side of the course involves rehydrating some completely dried out specimens. The first step was to choose specimens – I managed to bag myself a small, rather mouldy tree frog (of the genus Rhacophorus), and a jar of three crabs (labelled as Portunus depurator, now called Liocarcinus depurator, the harbour crab).

My poor sad looking frog

A jar of dry crabs

The first step in rehydration is to bathe the specimens in a dilute solution of Decon-90 (which is usually used as a surface-active cleaning agent and radioactive decontaminant, but is also excellent for rehydrating dried tissues). I decanted the specimens from their jars into beakers, and placed them on hotplates to warm the Decon-90 solution slightly, which catalyses the reaction.

And in their baths they will stay overnight, as my specimens remain quite stiff and unreponsive so far. Tomorrow they will be treated in a mild vacuum to remove the air pockets that are causing them to float at the moment.

While waiting impatiently for our specimens to show signs of improvement, Simon showed us some techniques for glass cutting, which is important for making new lids for specimen jars, and also showed us how to drill holes in jars to top up fluids without having to remove the lid (which is often quite a chore if the jar has been well sealed).

Charlotte demonstrates how to drill holes in glass

By the end of the week I hope my little critters will look plump, healthy and lifelike again! I will keep you updated on progress…

Museum of the Week #5

So, this past weekend found me back at the Natural History Museum. I went with a friend to see this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, which, as usual, was excellent. I don’t agree with the overall winner (although the junior winner was definitely well deserved), but there were many beautiful and inspiring photos on display, and once again I found myself wishing I could take pictures that good.

While we were there, we also went on a free tour of the museum’s spirit collection (things preserved in alcohol (and ocassionally formalin)). The tour took us around the stores in the Zoology Spirit Building, which is part of the new (although I suppose it isn’t so new anymore!) Darwin Centre. The place is HUGE. There are whole floors filled with cabinets, stuffed with animals in glass containers of different sizes. We were allowed to see into a few cabinets, and were greeted by the watery stares of a bat, various rodents, and an upside-down tamandua.

We then moved into the tank room, which is the highlight of the tour. Here they keep all the really big specimens, including large fish, shetland ponies…and a giant squid (Architeuthis dux, nicknamed ‘Archie’ by The Sun newspaper apparently, despite the fact that the specimen is female!). The squid was really the main reason for our visit…having both read Kraken by China Mieville (a seriously weird, but very good, urban fantasy novel which features Archie herself and a cult of giant squid worshippers) we were really excited to see her. And she didn’t disappoint. Dominating the room in a giant glass tank, she is the length of a London bus. And she wasn’t alone – Architeuthis shares her tank with part of a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, an incomplete specimen of which mostly tentacles survive). While not much of the colossal squid was present, the sharply hooked tentacles gave a very good impression of the predatory prowess of this little-known deep-sea cephalopod. There is debate about which squid is actually larger, as both are known from very few complete (and mostly immature) specimens.

The giant squid may be the main attraction of the tour for most people, but I was just as excited to see some of the tank room’s other residents, especially some very old specimens of Monotremes from 1880 with original hand-written on their jars proclaiming that these specimens were sent to Dr Owen for examination…Dr Owen of course being Richard Owen, famed anatomist and founder of the NHM. And then I got about as near to a religious experience as an athiest evolutionary biologist really can, when we were shown a small locked glass cabinet sitting nonchalantly in the corner of the room, containing specimens collected on the Beagle by Charles Darwin. Many of them had their lids painted yellow, which indicates that they are the type specimens for their species (the specimen used in the original description of a species, which holds the name, and against which all other specimens are compared). In the lab next door we also got to see a jar containing a small octopus which Darwin kept as a pet.

The spirit collection isn’t just there to look pretty (although it could be argued that some specimens are somewhat less than pretty!). It is an important research resource, and is regularly used by academics from all over the world who are interested in anatomy, taxonomy, evolution, and a whole host of other topics.

The tours on the weekend are only half an hour long, and give a brief introduction to the collections, taking in only a very few highlights. During the week they run longer tours – I might have to do one of those sometime, as I just love poking around in museum stores, and they don’t get much more exciting than the stores at the NHM.

Photos weren’t allowed on the tour, but there are also specimens on display in the public lobby of the Spirit Building. Here are a few tasters of this wonderful collection:

Fun With Fungi

Well, it’s been a busy few months…we are making headway on the Anthropology collections review at the Horniman: the team (we should really think up a cool team name!) has nearly finished reviewing the museum’s accession registers and cross-checking them against the contents of our collections management database, and next month we will be starting on the physical review proper (looking at all the objects and measuring, marking, photographing, etc. as needed). I’m looking forward to it, I love collections work. We’ve also started a Tumblr page, which we’ve been filling with pictures of amazing stuff we’ve found in the registers. You can check it out here: http://in-the-horniman.tumblr.com/, it gets updated regularly with new and brilliant things.

I’ve also been using a break from my Museum Studies course to gain new skills, some museum-related, others not so much. In the ‘not so much’ category falls archery, which I start tomorrow – I’m doing a beginner’s course with a club in London Bridge, and should be able to give Robin Hood a run for his money by Christmas! Or maybe not. More work-related are the field excursions I’ve been on with the London Natural History Society, which I joined in the summer to learn new field skills, and improve my ID skills for a variety of wildlife. And just to have fun – I’ve always been something of a theoretical naturalist, and it’s nice to be out in the field actually observing species in the wild.

Last weekend I went on a fungus forage at Bookham Common. I confess I know next to nothing about mycology, having studied a very small amount in my second year at undergrad, and I was very out of my depth. But the experts on our walk were all very kind about my total lack of knowledge, and very helpful in getting me up to speed. It was a lovely day, for the most part, and only rained a little in the afternoon. We were extremely lucky all round – it’s been a terrbile summer for fungus, having been mostly wet but then turning dry at the end of the summer, and there were fears that we wouldn’t find anything at all. But by the end of the day our list contained well over 100 fungus species, and everyone seemed pleased with the results.

I took a lot of photos (many of which are rather out of focus because the macro on my compact digicam is a bit poor). I’ve tried to identify most of them from the notes I made on the walk, and my shiny new Collins Complete Guide to British Mushrooms and Toadstools. Apologies to any mycologists out there if I’ve got any of them wrong! Corrections are gratefully received.

I think this is a Mycena species. It’s a beautiful colour.

Russula atropurpurea

Probably tricholoma fulvum

Xylaria polymorpha (dead man’s fingers)

Agaricus nivalis (white wood mushroom)

A nice, recognisable fungus: Amanita muscaria (fly agaric)

Crepidotus mollis. The key identifying character is that it has a waxy skin, which you can peel off, and is slightly unpleasant.

Kuehneromyces mutabilis, and a species of Postia (bracket fungus)

Lentinellis cochleatus, which was an exciting find as it’s not very common at Bookham.

Lepista nuda (wood blewit), another pretty purple fungus.

Mycena pura, which is a lovely pinkish colour

Otidea onotica (Hare’s ear)

A very adorable little catperpillar (which I am reliably informed is Calliteara pudibunda (pale tussock) – thanks Justine!)

Not sure what these are, but there were lots of them!

Ditto

Parasols

Paxillus involutus (brown rollrim)

The wonderfully named Phallus impudicus (stinkhorn)

This one is Pholiota highlandensis, I think, a fungus that colonises bonfire sites.

I think this one might be Coprinus lagopus.

And this is possibly Kuehneromyces mutabilis.

Oxford Away Day

Last week our Documentation and Collections Management teams went on an away day to Oxford, to have a look at some of the storage at the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums in order to see if they have utilised any storage solutions that we can learn from for our own collections. We were givena tour of the Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art at the Ashmolean Museum, which opened in 2009 after extensive redevelopment. Their study centre allows visitors and researchers access to the collections, which are housed in very impressive  and shiny storage areas. We were all quite jealous of their honeycomb-shaped scroll cabinet and shiny sliding racks for housing panels!

In contrast, the stores at the Pitt Rivers are older and more along the make-do-and-mend lines that I’m used to from the small museums in which I’ve worked. But it was still all of excellent quality, and they had very clever padded mounts for textile samples that were very much coveted by our team.

After our tours, we had some time to explore each museums, as well as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which was obviously the highlight of my day! I will need to make another trip to Oxford sometime this summer, though, because we only had time to see little snippets of each museum, and they were all wonderful. Here are a few of my highlights:

Documentation Assistants in Space

…Storage space, that is. And my title is actually now Documentation/Collections Assistant. Which is a small but important distinction, as it marks the end of a long, desk-bound year, and the beginning of a three-year project in which I will actually get out of my office and finally see some objects! I’m so excited. So far I’ve only seen photos of most of the objects I’ve worked on, because my job has purely been data-tidying for the Collections Online project, the (mostly) impressive-looking results of which are available here. I’m particulaly proud of the Natural History records, because I worked bloody hard on them, as did our lovely curators, and we got them finished in a very short space of time (the 294 records for the Cooper Collection of skeletal mammal material were done in a week flat). I even enjoyed the three laborious days I spent poring over historical maps of Christchurch, Dorset, in order to ascertain the provenance of the various specimens in the Hart Bird Collection (a beautiful collection of bird taxidermy dioramas constructed by the eminent taxidermist Edward Hart in the 19th and early 20th century).

Now I get to sally forth into the collections for work on the ACE-funded Ethnography Re-Envisioned collections review. I even got to choose some steel-toecapped boots for myself last week (safety first), which I’ve never needed before because I’ve rarely had the opportunity to handle objects. The project is in its very early stages…we are currently compiling a comprehensive location list for all of our storage areas to ensure that they are all entered in our collections management database, and in a consistent format. This has to be done before we can really begin on the review, as we need to be able to produce object lists by their location in the store.

The next stage will be to cross-reference the database records with the original accession registers to make sure that we have all the available data for our objects (and that it is all correct), and THEN we will finally begin working with the objects themselves – measuring, marking, photographing, etc., hopefully with the help of some curators to check the identification and provenance of objects. Which is something I am obviously incapable of doing, as I’m a natural historian with a very limited knowledge of ethnography (i.e. none at all)! All the same, I am looking forward to exploring the ethnography collections of the Horniman, as we have some really fascinating objects which you don’t need to know anything about to appreciate for their beauty (or occasionally hideousness!) and the skill of their construction.

As an off-topic aside, while running (figuratively – never run in a museum, kids) around the building this week listing locations on my spreadsheet, I took my camera with me to capture some of the natural history areas that I’ve not really had a chance to see before, such as the spirit store and the taxidermy collection. Here are some of my favourites…

Museum of the Week #4.2

In contrast to Animal Inside Out, Brains at the Wellcome Collection is a very academic exhibition. The text is smaller, more extensive, and more technical. But they can get away with this because they don’t have to cater for children – Brains is aimed at those aged 14 or over, and they hand out cards at the entrance warning viewers that the exhibition contains sensitive and potentially disturbing materials (not only are there real human brains in jars, but there are also videos featuring surgery). Apparently they have had a few fainters, which may explain why two of the video screens weren’t working when I visited – there are notices on the screens saying they are out of order, but I suspect they may have been taken off because they were too upsetting for some members of the audience.

I don’t have problems with fainting, so I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition. The historical information on the study of brains, and how our knowledge of the working of the brain has developed over time, was fascinating – and I was particularly pleased to see some 19th century wax teaching models of brains from the collection of Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum (just because I used to work there and I have an abiding love for their collections!). The academic tone is softened by a section at the end of the exhibition discussing brain donation and harvesting, which is rather more emotive, as it includes photo portraits of people who have donated their brains to the Brain Research Trust (one of whom has subsequently died), and papers from a Nazi concentration camp in which the brains of children were harvested for research without the parents’ knowledge of consent. A model of Einstein’s brain is also included, along with a microscope slide section of his actual brain, although it is acknowledged in the text panel that Einstein did not want his brain to be removed after his death.

Unfortunately, I have spent so long writing (or not writing) this, that there are now only two days until the exhibition closes! But if you are in London and have time, I would strongly recommend it. I enjoyed it far more than I did Animal Inside Out; I found the academic tone of Brains engaging and the content fascinating, whereas I found myself feeling rather underwhelmed with the level of interpretation provided in Animal Inside Out, despite the superb production values and awe-inspiring specimens. But my preferences tend towards reading and facts, rather than just looking at things – Animal Inside Out provided lots to look at but little to read, while Brains was, to my mind, a much more successful exhibition because it offered both.

Museum-of-Every-Three-Months-or-So #4.1

I may have started this segment of the blog with the intention of visiting a museum/exhibition every week, but it didn’t take long for me to fail – mostly because my distance-learning Masters course has been eating up my weekends. Well, the first activity in the current module was to visit and critique three exhibitions, so I’ve had a busy weekend of museum-going! The idea behind this activity was to encourage us to start thinking about the assignment for this module, which involves writing a fictional exhibition proposal. As I intend to produce a natural history-related assignment, I wanted to visit sciency exhibitions. I chose Animal Inside Out at the Natural History Museum, Brains: The Mind As Matter at the Wellcome Collection, and the Kew North American Landscape garden at the British Museum. Considering that the first two of these are very large exhibitions, I was impressed that I managed to visit all three in under five hours! And I explored all of them properly, too, rather than just marching around in a business-like manner with an eye to the questions asked in the activity.

As they are large exhibitions, and I don’t often have time to visit museums (or write blogs!) these days, I will try to get at least two posts out of Saturday’s little adventure. First I will look at Animal Inside Out, the NHM’s summer blockbuster exhibition, produced by Gunther von Hagens’ workshop.

The exhibition is spectacular. The plastinated animals are all beautifully prepared and posed to show off their fascinating anatomy. A friend did criticise the stance of one of their running reindeer, but having found a BBC video of them in action, I can confirm that the gait was pretty accurate! The specimens on display are all amazing as examples of comparative anatomy, and also as spectacles. And even, some might argue, as art. Although I did find the exploded elephant somewhat comical – the parts have been expanded so that you can examine the different elements of the anatomy more easily. The result is a greatly elongated elephant, with normal-lengthed legs. Which makes it look somewhat like a giant dachsund!

It is refreshing to see anatomy displayed in this way, as it is very unusual in museums to see animals with all of the pieces still attached to each other – they are usually deconstructed, disassembled, with the skins displayed as taxidermy, the skeletons rearticulated with wires, and the organs in jars. Animal Inside Out provides a sanitised experience of an anatomy lab – the specimens are dissected expertly, but the process of plastination removes the unpleasant wobbliness and stench usually associated with dissection, giving anyone the chance to experience the world of the anatomist without having to get their hands dirty!

However, I did find the interpretation rather thin – the text panels are all very short and general. They lack the depth of detail that I would have liked to have seen, and while the texts do point out the important features of each specimen’s anatomy (with the latin names of muscles and everything), they don’t really draw comparisons between the specimens or different groups of animals on display, which is a shame in an exhibition purporting to examine comparative anatomy. Some of the texts also missed what I would consider to be important details – for example, in the case on brains and nervous systems, a small octopus sits next to the brains of several cats and a hare. The accompanying text panel describes the intelligence and problem-solving abilities of octopuses…without mentioning that they are able to do all this without actually having a brain (in the traditional sense – they do have a brain of sorts, but it does not control all of their motor functions).

Perhaps I’m nitpicking, but I did leave the exhibition feeling slightly underwhelmed. I was utterly overawed by the specimens (particularly the thin-sectioned full-height giraffe, which must be seen to be fully appreciated!), but didn’t really feel I’d learned anything much new (apart from the fact that the only real anatomical difference between sheep and goats is that goats have extra muscles that allow them to raise their tails).

Animal Inside Out is a true summer blockbuster exhibition: rather more style than substance. But I suppose that is the point…summer is the peak tourist season, and the time when most families visit museums. The national museums have a tough job to perform with their summer exhibitions, as they have to please a massively diverse audience. And certainly an exhibition with Gunther von Hagens’ name attached to it will attract a large number of visitors, simply because of the media attention and controversy that his work generates.

Occasional Book Review #1

Usually I try to read fiction in my spare time (sci-fi or fantasy for preference), because I spend all day in a museum and then most evenings studying about museums (I’m currently halfway through a distance-learning Museum Studies MA). However, occasionally a work-related book catches my eye and I make an exception. This week I read ‘Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy‘. Which, you will be relieved to hear, is not a how-to guide, but an exploration of the culture and history of taxidermy (particularly museum taxidermy), written by American journalist Melissa Milgrom. The book follows a number of top modern taxidermists, both museum workers and artists, and puts their work into historical context. Which is really much more interesting than I’ve just made it sound! The book if full of brilliant stories, anecdotes, and fun historical facts (for example, did you know that the 19th century butterfly collector Carl von Hagen was captured and eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea?). The author visits the World Taxidermy Championships (usually held in the US, although they are in Salzburg this year!). The WTC includes categories for novices and professionals, as well as a wonderful category called ‘Re-Creations’, in which the mounts cannot include any part of the species they represent (for example, a chicken mount made of bits of turkey). While the idea of taxidermy championships sounds bizarre, it is actually considered a good way of improving standards in taxidermy.

One of the most interesting chapters for me described the 2003 sale by auction of the Walter Potter Museum of Curiosities, which the author attended in the company of historical taxidermy expert Pat Morris. It was quite fascinating to read the inside details of the sale, as well as quite saddening. Potter’s museum was one of the most unique and pristone collections of Victorian taxidermy in existence, and it has now been dispersed to museums and private collectors across the globe. The majority of the collection was reunited in 2010 for a temporary exhibition at the Museum of Everything in London.

I read Still Life in only a few days, and really enjoyed it. It is written by an outsider to the world of natural history, but with great respect for the taxidermists’ work: it never attempts to mock or sensationalise, despite covering some of the wackier side of taxidermy, and has plenty of humour to soften the more gruesome aspects. I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in taxidermy or natural history!