Good afternoon, everyone.
I am not Jack,
my name is Alice Stevenson,
I teach Museum Studies at UCL,
one of Jack's colleagues.
I'm here to introduce
the speaker this afternoon.
Author and zoologist, Jack Ashby,
is currently the manager
of the Grant Museum of Zoology
at University College London.
But only for a couple more days,
because after 14 years, Jack is moving
to the University of Cambridge
to be manager
of the Zoology Museum at Cambridge.
When he's not doing
all of those things,
he's trustee of the Natural Sciences
Collection Association
and the Society for the History
of Natural History.
You'll see him in blogs,
in the newspaper,
regularly writing around and commenting
on natural history museums
in all their glory.
In fact, one of his most recent
pieces of writing,
a little plug here,
there are copies for sale, I believe,
is 'Animal Kingdom: A Natural History
in 100 Objects',
a book that looks at the diversity
of the animal kingdom,
that explores mechanisms of evolution
and my own personal favourite bit,
giving insight into
the behind-the-scenes activities
of a museum of natural history.
That book is the basis
for the talk that you'll hear today.
His main zoological interest
is in the mammals of Australia
and he spends a couple of months a year
doing ecological fieldwork,
but he's here in the UK
and he'll be on stage just now,
so less from me,
and more from Jack.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for coming, everyone.
I spend my time poking around
a lot of natural history museums
around the country
and around the world
and what I've found there is the basis
for the book Alice mentioned,
but also the basis
for a lot of thinking I do
about how natural history museums behave
as windows onto the world of nature.
How natural history museums act
as a means to talk about nature
and display nature and convey nature
to the outside world.
What I'll say today is that the way
that we do that
isn't necessarily particularly
representative of nature.
It isn't particularly a natural way
of talking about nature.
Not all of these things are a criticism,
more of a critique.
I've spent my adult life working
in natural history museums,
I love them,
I think they're wonderful.
This isn't a chance for me to put down
natural history museums.
What I really hope is that
what I say today
will give people a chance,
when they visit natural history museums
which I recommend they do,
to start thinking about
why are these things on display
and not something else.
Why has the museum said this thing
about the objects here
or why has it chosen
to not say other things.
Why has it displayed them
in that way?
That's my hope here, because all museums
are not scientific, necessarily,
they are not apolitical.
They are the consequence
of the society and the politics
and the cultures
that they are embedded in.
As such,
they are quite interesting places,
but not necessarily scientific.
They're full of objects.
That's what I will talk about.
This is where I work,
the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL.
Just the other side of Regent's Park
and left a bit.
Do come and visit there.
They are unusual places.
The way you arrange them is not how
animals are arranged in the wild.
For example, you can't see much
in this photo.
But on the right
is a case of all the carnivorans,
the cats, the bears, the dogs,
the seals, the badgers .
Where else would you see
a lion and a walrus displayed together?
Museums strip away
a lot of the essence of being
of the animals themselves
and replace that information with
hard facts about how they are related,
which is interesting,
but not the only story behind them.
In this book and in my life,
I like to think about
what it is that objects can do,
what can natural history
museum objects do?
I have one with me today.
What can they tell us?
As Alice said, I spend a couple of
months a year on fieldwork in Australia,
and I think that the research
in the wild
with live animals,
is one pillar of natural history,
which tells us something different
to natural history in the museum
with dead animals.
I work with Tasmanian devils,
I've seen many more Tasmanian devils
in the wild, alive,
than I have in museum collections,
which is a good thing, I imagine.
But what I've learnt from
natural history museum objects,
what I've learnt from encounters
with a skeleton or a skull in a museum,
is different to what I've learnt from
encountering a wild Tasmanian devil.
There is only so much you can learn
from seeing an animal alive in the wild.
You can learn how it moves, behaves
and interacts with its environment,
which are all wonderful,
but that doesn't necessarily tell you
other things
like how does it move or fit together
in its environment
in a structural way?
How does it relate to other things?
How has it evolved and come to be?
That's the story we can get
from natural history museum objects.
Those are two essential pillars
of natural history.
The talk is 'The Unnatural Nature
of Natural History Museums',
I will talk about the way
museums are biased
in the way they talk about nature.
We don't talk particularly straight
about animals.
I'm also going to start
with some more positive things.
Natural history museum objects
are interesting, I have one here.
We ask them to work really hard.
My favourite animal
is a duckbilled platypus.
Best animal in the world,
it's a scientific fact!
And when you put...
There's very few
natural history museums,
at least in the UK,
that don't have a duckbilled platypus.
Let's say a taxidermy
duckbilled platypus.
We ask that object
to do many things at once.
We ask it to work really hard.
The idea of
a natural history museum object,
we use the word specimen.
Specimen just means
it's representative of a wider thing.
A duckbilled platypus, in a museum,
is there to represent
all of duckbilled platypus kind.
It is there to be the sole
representative of its entire species.
That's quite a significant task
we ask of it.
We might also ask it to represent
all of Australian mammals,
if it was in a display
about Australian mammals.
That is a representative of global
diversity in Australian slice.
We're asking it to do that.
We might ask it to represent
a wider taxonomic group,
a wider relationship group.
It might be there to represent
all egg-laying mammals.
That one single individual
is there to work really hard to do
something in the natural history museum.
At the end of the day,
it's not really a platypus.
It's just an object
made of platypus.
Someone has built that animal
out of platypus skin,
some wire, some wood wool or sawdust,
some fabric,
to create a specimen of a real animal,
a platypus.
We can question how authentic
that would be.
At the same time as doing
this really wide task,
those objects might also do something
really specific.
They might also be representing
their own individual story.
All museum objects tell a story
of the time they were collected,
the person that collected them,
and the way they were treated
in their own individual histories.
They've got this wide role
and the specific role.
When we start looking at these objects
and the way they have been produced
and turned into a museum object,
it will tell us something about
the time they were collected,
and the ecosystem that they looked at,
we could chemically analyse them
and say what they were eating
and what the environment was like
at a chemical level.
They tell us about the human culture
that collected them,
the politics of how did they get from
Australia to here.
What does that tell us about it?
I don't want to think about
museum objects as just dead animals
or just as scientific evidence.
They also represent the local, national
and global politics
of the time they were collected.
That's where these biases come in,
that I'll be talking about.
But to begin with,
let's start by talking about
the kind of thing we can learn
from investigating museum objects.
Does anyone want to shout out
what the object on screen is?
Walrus?
Very good.
This is a walrus skull,
which is actually my favourite skull
in the world,
despite not being further
from an Australian mammal.
Being an Arctic animal.
Does anyone know what walruses eat?
I think I heard someone say shellfish,
which is correct.
I think about 90% of a walrus' diet
are clams.
Bivalve molluscs that are about
the size of a pound coin.
The question is,
how do they eat them?
That's what we can see
from a skull like this.
It's quite extraordinary.
If you ever look inside
a walrus' stomach,
you will not find,
which I doubt any of you have,
you will not find a single shell,
you will not find
a single fragment of shell,
which gives the question, how does
a walrus get the meat of the clam
out of the clam shell
and into its stomach.
We might start by looking at its teeth
and saying, is it chewing the shells
and then having some way
of spitting the shells out
and getting the meat in?
If we look at these teeth,
they're really smooth and shiny,
there's not a single scratch on them.
Of course,
if you're chewing mollusc shell,
you would expect them
to be scratched,
so we can dismiss that.
I have the jaw here.
What they actually do
is quite extraordinary.
Firstly, walruses don't have hands,
they have flippers.
How do they pick up the tiny shellfish?
That's the first question.
You can't really see this from
the skull, except some scarring here,
but walruses have the most
advanced and complicated facial muscles
of any animal.
They have long whiskers,
like a cat,
but they also have short, thick
whiskers,
which they can control
incredibly finely.
When they are foraging around
in the mud at the bottom of the sea,
they can feel for these shellfish
and then pick them up
in their whiskers,
like a hand.
They pick it up and then...
if i put it in place...
when they shut their mouths,
there's a little ridge here,
a little divot in the lower jaw.
Can you see this?
That is where the shellfish sits.
It is sitting right at the front
of their mouth in this little crack.
Next thing to notice about this
is that,
I mentioned the carnivorans,
the carnivorans is the order of mammals
that includes seals and walruses
and fur seals,
but also cats, dogs, stoats, weasels,
and badgers,
bears,
civets and things like that.
These are all predators,
mostly all meat eaters.
If you look at the jaw
of any other carnivoran,
you will find that this bone,
which is separate to this bone,
this bone and this bone,
they are not well connected
in these other animals.
That's because if you are predator
and you hunt
and you bite into living large animals,
if you bite into a deer, for example,
if you are a tiger,
and that animal struggles,
you need your jaw
to have a little bit of give
to respond to the way
the animal is struggling in the mouth.
You expect to see
a little bit of looseness.
Ours are really solid because
we can eat hard foods like nuts,
which we need our jaws
not to give.
Walruses are interesting
because they are completely solid.
There is a very fused seam
down the middle here.
We've got our walrus in the situation,
where the shellfish
is stuck at the front there,
you can see that the palette,
which is the inside of the mouth,
is really arched,
it's kind of like a tube.
Inside that tube, fits their tongue.
Their tongue, I like to describe it
as a meat sausage.
It is almost a cylinder,
like a salami, of meat.
They then stick this
to the front of their jaws,
with the clam clamped in place.
As I say,
their jaw has got no give,
so this is going to hold on
very tight.
With that tongue
pushed to the front of the mouth,
they suddenly whip it back,
and that creates a vacuum
at the front of their mouths
and shucks the meat out of the clam
and they can just drop
the empty shell.
Think of the pressure you'd need
to pull a live clam,
firstly apart, and then out.
They can do that with the vacuum,
piston-like structure of their tongue.
We can see all these things
from our skull here.
Walruses are amazing.
While we have walruses,
the tusks.
Do we know what the tusks are for?
Any ideas?
Fighting?
Fighting is a good one.
When we see animals with weapons,
fighting is a good indication.
Also, this is a female walrus,
male walruses can have tusks
that are about a metre long.
Females are a bit shorter.
Normally, if we see a difference
between the males and females,
then it's something to do
with sexual selection,
it's something to do with
how animals win their mates,
or win the ability to mate.
In a case like that,
we might think fighting is in order,
because the males are bigger
and the males do the fighting.
Yes, that is one thing
they use them for,
but it doesn't explain
why females have tusks.
They do fight a bit for territory,
but not much. Any other ideas?
[INAUDIBLE]
Exactly. This is my favourite thing
about walruses.
The scientific name for a walrus
is odobenus,
which if you know your Greek,
means tooth walker.
This is the ice shelf,
floating ice,
they stick their heads
out of the water,
hook their tusks in,
and then use them as grappling hooks,
to haul themselves out of the water,
which is pretty amazing.
They do other things
like use them as ice anchors,
so they can go to sleep with their heads
above the water and bodies in the sea,
by hooking them into the ice,
like an ice anchor,
and float there without drowning,
that's quite cool.
They can also use them as saws
to cut into the ice.
People thought for a long time
they used them as rakes
to rake up the mud
to get these clams out,
but if that were the case, you'd expect
to see scratches on the inside,
where they've dragged them, but there
are no scratches, so they don't.
There are scratches on the outside,
where they're dragged forwards
through the mud,
so tusks aren't used in feeding.
That's walruses,
one of my favourite skulls.
My second favourite,
any idea what this is?
It's some kind of snake, yes.
It's a Gaboon viper.
In real life, it's about the size
of my hand.
This is the snake with
the longest fangs of any snake.
It's a venomous snake.
All the bones you see
on this snake skull
have equivalents
in our own skull,
but our skulls
are made of plates of bone,
snake skulls have reduced those plates
into very fine rods.
Each of these rods is the equivalent
to one of these bones.
A bit of audience participation.
I want you to do something.
I want you to try it
without moving your head side-to-side
and without moving your neck.
I want you to try and move
as many parts of your skull as you can.
Not a lot of movement
going on.
I don't know how hard
you are trying.
The only thing we can do
is we can move it around 5-7 mm
left or right of centre, like this.
You can move it a couple of millimetres
forwards and backwards
but that's about it.
We have very inflexible,
immobile skulls.
Snakes have got
incredibly mobile skulls.
We can only move at our jaw joint,
we can move up and down.
We can move our jaw joint,
which is equivalent to this joint
at the front of the skull,
because all of these bones
make up our middle ear,
which is pretty cool.
The ones with the teeth at the front
are equivalent of ours.
Snakes can actually move their skulls
or can hinge their skulls,
as I say, we have one hinge
on either side,
they have eight hinges
on either side.
They have a hinge...
No, wrong way.
They have a hinge, that's the functional
equivalent to ours,
there's another one here.
There's another one here.
Another one here.
Another one here
and another two on top.
Also, we talked about the mandibular
synthesis,
that's what this joint
in the middle of the skull is called,
snakes don't really have one.
It's not connected at all.
There's a gap with some cartilage.
With all this flexibility,
it means their brain case, this section
here contains the brain,
the little rod
up on top,
they can swing their mouths round
so their mouths become bigger
than their heads
and it becomes a full circle almost
with just that brain case
sitting on the top
that allows them to eat.
They don't have hands
or biting teeth,
so they can't cut anything up
or place it in,
so that's how snakes eat
very large animals.
More incredibly than that,
they can move each side of their skull
independently.
These bones...
I keep pressing the wrong button.
These teeth you can see
are actually the bones of the palate,
the pterygoids, they're called,
the ones inside the palate.
These have got teeth on, which
is kind of scary in an alien way.
What's really impressive about them
is you can see
they are hooked backwards,
they are re-curved,
pointing backwards.
They can move each side separately.
This is how they feed without hands.
They move one side forward,
hook it in,
pull it back,
move the next side forward, hook it in,
pull it back, and then when
they lift it up to pull it back,
they pull it up, turn it sideways
so the teeth don't catch,
and then put it back in again
and push forwards.
What's interesting
is that when snakes feed,
the snake moves forward
but the prey stays where it is.
The snake is walking its head
over what it eats.
Absolutely incredible.
This is incredible, interesting things
we can learn from museum specimens,
before I get on to the point
where I start critiquing.
Which happens now.
There are a number of ways
that museums...
This is what we can learn
from the objects,
but then we put them in displays
and they do different things.
There are certain biases
and I will talk about four.
The first one is the taxonomic bias.
The different proportions of animals
that are on display.
Does anyone have an idea
of how many animal species,
living animal species,
have been described to date?
We're up to about 1.5 million species.
Does anybody have any idea
how many mammals have been described?
5,000?
So, until January, the answer
would have been 5,500.
Now, we say 6,600.
Someone did calculations on one's that
have been split or recently discovered.
Of 1.5 million animals,
only 6,500 are mammals.
If you were to draw a pie chart,
essentially the size of that screen,
you wouldn't even be able to see
the slice that contains mammals.
There are so few mammals
compared to global diversity.
But, when you go into
a natural history museum,
you are likely to see all the galleries
completely dominated by mammals.
This is my favourite museum
in the world,
the Museum of Comparative Anatomy
and Zoology in Paris.
It's absolutely amazing.
Everything in this photograph
is a mammal.
The entire main gallery
is taken up by mammals.
Most of the specimens
on display in the Grant Museum,
in fact all the animals in the centre
of the museum are mammals.
We have a massive bias towards mammals,
because we're selfish.
Mammals are easy to display.
We're interested in them.
But, it's a massive misrepresentation
of nature.
Of those 1.5 million species,
about 900,000 are insects.
Think about how many insects you think
are on display in many museums
and it is very, very few.
If you see them,
if they're there at all,
they are likely to be
a few favourites cherry-picked,
the bright blue,
blue morpho butterflies,
maybe some spangly, nice looking
flower beetles,
which are very pretty.
You're unlikely to see flies on display.
You're unlikely to see fleas
or many, many groups.
In fact, there are more fly species
in the UK
than there are mammal species
in the world.
We do not put them
in our museums.
I don't really mind
because I like mammals
but there are people
who get quite upset by this.
However, when we put animals
in museums,
particularly large animals,
there are three classic ways
of preparing them and displaying them.
Skeletons is one.
Taxidermy is another.
Putting things in jars, preserving
the whole animal, is another.
Taxidermy, your skins,
animals preserved in fluid
and skeletons.
Out of curiosity,
raise your hands which you think
is the most authentic?
Which is the best representation
telling you about the animal?
If you go into a museum
and you wanted to see a cat,
would the best way of showing you
what cats look like,
what is the most authentic way,
skeletons, taxidermy or in a jar?
Firstly, for skeletons
put your hands up.
For those watching at home,
that's about eight people.
For taxidermy, put your hands up.
That's quite a lot more.
Say, 15.
And for animals in jars?
This is surprising,
that is by far the biggest group.
I am surprised by that because you
rarely see a fluid-preserved mammal
or a fluid-preserved bird
in a natural history museum.
Our storerooms are full of them.
We do not put objects like this
on display.
I put objects like this on display,
but most museums wouldn't.
This object is the most controversial
object in the Grant Museum.
It is the object
we get most complaints about.
It's a fluid-preserved cat.
We get even more complaints
when we display it the other way round.
Particularly if you notice,
towards the back there,
it's pregnant.
People get really upset
about fluid-preserved cats
or, in fact, mammals in jars,
because taxidermy is trying
to convince you the animal is not dead
and you as visitors
are willing to go along with that.
Generally, subconsciously.
When you look at a skeleton,
it's obviously dead
but it's also quite clean and clinical.
When you look at an animal in a jar,
particularly a dissected one,
it's so obviously dead
and it's so obviously gruesome,
that museums don't trust you
not to freak out.
Very, very rarely will you see
a mammal or bird on display in a jar.
We normally put fish,
which live in water,
amphibians,
which go in water.
Not that this is water!
And reptiles, which nobody care...!
Which people don't have
the same emotional response to,
is what I was going to say.
My biases coming out there.
I work with reptiles also.
Interestingly, we have this bias
towards mammals
but we are careful
about the way we display them.
Even though this is
the most authentic way of displaying it
because it's the whole animal,
more or less,
and it hasn't been artefacted by people,
which I'll come back to.
The second bias
is bias for massive animals
and this is related again
to mammals, as well.
This is an amazing object,
don't get me wrong.
Have you been
to the Natural History Museum
since they re-displayed
the main hall?
If you walk in the front entrance,
it's worth the queues,
rather than going in the side,
walk in and stare down the mouth
of this blue whale,
it's incredibly, absolutely,
awe-inspiring.
If you think about
natural history museum favourites,
we've got the whales,
we've got the dinosaurs,
these are massive animals.
In reality, as I've mentioned,
900,000 species are insects.
The rest of them are tiny.
We have in the Grant Museum,
this is my micrarium.
If you haven't visited,
this is a highlight.
It's our place for tiny things.
It's about 1.2 m square.
There's 2,500 tiny animals.
Each of these are microscope slides
showing a visible,
but tiny animal,
just to try and give some limelight
to the tiny animals
that we do not put
in our natural history museums.
If you think about where are the worms,
where are the fleas and the flies
in our natural history museums,
we don't put them on.
There's a reason for that.
Not a good reason.
But there is a reason for that.
This is a penis worm.
It's called a penis worm because
it looks like a human penis
or so thought the taxonomist
that described it.
When did you last see
a worm in a museum display?
Not often,
or only ever token.
In fact, there are 38 ways
of being an animal,
38 major phyla.
We are vertebrates. Vertebrates are
a part of one of those phyla.
There are 37 others.
About a third of them are worms
in some ways.
We have penis worms, arrow worms,
acorn worms,
we have spoon worms, segmented worms,
flat worms.
I could go on,
but we don't put worms on display,
because when you put an object on
display,
when you make a museum exhibit,
you have to fulfil two key criteria,
I think.
The first of those is you have to give
the people what they want.
You have to fulfil
the visitors expectations,
"I came to a natural history museum
as I like dinosaurs."
Or "I like whales."
Or "I like mammals."
That's perfectly reasonable.
Museums have to have visitors.
We have to get them in
and show them what they want.
All those things are interesting
so that's fine.
That's one.
Give people what they want.
Give them what they expect to see.
The second thing they have to do is
communicate the stories
that the museum
wants to communicate,
that it has decided
the museum is about.
There are certain animals
with very exciting stories
and we want to put those
on display.
The displays we do
have to do both of them.
The reason is this.
If you were to put this object
on display,
the penis worm itself
is about 3 cm long.
Penis worms are interesting.
There's only about 15-20 species
in the entire phylum,
living.
They've been around
for about 520 million years,
so a very, very old group.
It's hard to talk about this
without being a bit risqué,
but they live in muddy sediments
in shallow waters.
To move forward, they periodically
engorge and deflate their heads
and those heads have got spines
inside of them.
As they move in and out,
those spines are exposed and hidden,
which basically pulls them forward as
they catch on the mud in front of them.
That's how penis worms move.
These are perfectly valid things
to say about them
but we don't put them on display
because no-one will look
at this object.
It could be the most interesting thing
in the world,
but if no-one is going to stop
and look
at a small, brown-beige,
boring-looking animal,
should we put it on display?
It's a serious question,
I don't have the answer.
Do museums have a responsibility
to be comprehensive
and cover the whole of animal kind?
If we think,
we've only got limited display space,
what is the point
of putting an object on display
however interesting its story,
if no-one is going to look at it.
I chose the penis worm
to talk about this,
because, there are a lot of worms
on display in the Grant Museum
because the Grant Museum
doesn't do what most museums do.
But this is the only one
that anyone looks at.
There are all those
other worms I listed,
but if you sit in the museum
and listen,
you'll see that people are talking about
the penis worm, for obvious reasons.
It's got massive letters
that say, PENIS WORM, next to it,
so you hear people
pointing at this.
That's the only one
that anybody talks about.
The question is, do some animals
look too boring
to be in a museum?
It's a difficult question.
I don't know if the solution is big,
neon arrows
pointing towards these things
to capture people's attention.
The next bias is around
where objects come from.
We have very biased geographical
coverage in our museums.
In the UK, our bias is towards
the British Empire, obviously.
We have many, many more
Australian animals, for example,
than we do Chinese animals.
Again, good for me.
This is my third favourite animal,
does anyone know what it is?
An echidna, that's right.
Echidnas are the only living relative
of the platypus.
Again, like the platypus,
it's rare to go to a natural history
museum and not find an echidna.
If you were to go to a museum in France,
you will find a geographic bias
towards South America and North Africa.
Likewise for any country
with an imperial past.
Those biases are very, very obvious.
You might think that's fine
and it's just the nature of the beast
that there is the logistical reality
of going to Australia
and shipping back an animal
when you have the kind of diplomatic
relationship we have with Australia.
Had, actually.
It's very hard to get animals
out of Australia now.
Just logistically, that makes sense.
If you think about it, there's a more
insidious story behind this,
and that's that the act of collecting
in a country
is, I would argue, part of the act
of colonisation.
When people were exploring
and settling and invading
these countries,
it wasn't just good old-fashioned
excellent science,
'this is interesting,
aren't echidnas excellent?'
Yes they are!
'Let's get them in our museums.'
It's also...
what has this country got in terms of
animal, vegetable, mineral resources
that we can exploit
and make the most of back home.
Echidnas may not be
the best example,
because there aren't really huge
economic values to echidnas,
but there certainly are,
in botany, economic value
and in minerals
and certainly in some animals.
Platypuses have recently had some
medical implications, which is good.
While we're on the echidna,
I was talking about
which of these object types
is the most authentic.
There's an excellent Twitter account,
@CrapTaxidermy,
that I recommend you look at
for enjoyable taxidermy.
I hope you will agree this is a decent,
high-quality piece of taxidermy
that we think is an accurate
representation of an echidna.
In fact, it isn't.
Taxidermy, as I say,
is a man-made object
and so is a skeleton,
it's a man-made object.
Decisions of how this object
came to be are human.
What would have happened,
particularly in historic taxidermy,
is that someone
would have gone to Australia,
clubbed or shot an echidna,
skinned it in the field,
and then sent it back to the UK
or Europe
to be taxidermized.
At best, they would have drawn a
picture of what an echidna looked like.
They may have written some notes
of what an echidna looked like,
but quite possibly
you just got the skin.
Then the taxidermist back here,
and this taxidermist clearly has skill,
it's not overstuffed,
it's not got gaps,
you often see gaps around joints
or elongated necks.
I assume it's a he,
because it generally was,
but this echidna's feet
are pointing in the wrong direction.
Echidna's back feet
should point backwards.
Echidnas are excellent animals
because if you frighten an echidna,
which is very easy to do,
just by walking up to it,
they do this with all four feet
and sink vertically into the ground,
leaving just this mat of spines
and their heads are tucked under
so you can't get them.
They need their feet to point back
so their claws can make a big arc.
The taxidermist has had to use
his own assumptions and biases
and it is a reasonable assumption
to make
that animals feet point
in the same direction as their heads,
but in the case of the echidna,
it was wrong.
When we see a lot of taxidermy...
Though to do so, you can't quite
make it out at this light level,
but it's very easy to see on the object,
the echidna's ankles have been ripped
where he's turned the skin 180 degrees
and it's an impossible
anatomical arrangement.
That's not great.
We often see a political or human bias
in taxidermy.
The fox or the tiger
with that snarling face.
Foxes cannot make that face.
You will see it in taxidermy everywhere.
An argument for why that is
is that the hunter and the collector
and the museum
are wanting to be seen to overcome
this ferocious beast
and we're putting this fearsome,
nasty creature
in its place in a museum
and I, the hunter, the collector,
am bigger and scarier and more manly
than that animal was
because I've shot it
and those teeth are evidence of that.
We can see these politics.
I'm going to keep talking
about the politics of...
Who can tell me
what this animal is?
An aye-aye.
Aye-ayes are very, very famous
Madagascan lemurs.
They're famous for some
pretty extraordinary attributes.
They are effectively
mammalian woodpeckers.
They have these really big ears,
which they can listen
for beetle larvae, for grubs,
just under the wood in trees,
and then they've got very sharp
gouging incisors,
they can cut a hole in the bark
and then they've got,
if you can make it out,
they've got really long middle fingers,
hard to demonstrate politely!
Really long, thin middle fingers
that they use to hook out
the beetle larvae.
Very, very interesting animals.
Does anyone know what this animal is?
It's not a yapok
but you're taxonomically close.
This is a striped possum.
Put your hand up
if you've heard of a striped possum.
We've got three hands up in the room,
all from zoologists.
Striped possums live
in north-eastern Australia,
the very north tip of Queensland
and three or four species
in New Guinea as well.
They do exactly the same thing.
They have very good hearing.
They have exactly the same arrangement
of these sharp gouging incisors,
if I'd put a skull picture in,
you'd see,
and they have this elongated middle
finger as well to hook it out.
Exactly the same thing.
My question is, why has nearly everybody
heard of an aye-aye,
but nobody has heard
of this striped possum?
My argument is that, firstly,
we're biased towards primates,
because we are primates.
Secondly, we are biased
against Australian animals.
How many times have you heard
or read that platypuses, echidnas
and also marsupials,
are primitive?
This is a popular idea
in the zoological popular zeitgeist.
Firstly, it's impossible
for a living animal to be primitive.
All animals are as evolved
as any other thing.
These are mammals.
If you were to go along with the idea of
some animals being primitive or not,
they can't be that primitive.
That's not really a good argument.
That argument doesn't stand up
to scrutiny.
The way that we talk about
Australian animals
is often pejorative.
Everything will kill you,
is what you're told.
That's a way of...
Actually, striped possums are believed
to be this striking black and white
because they have
noxious chemical defences,
which is interesting.
The idea of things being dangerous
is pejorative.
Even the way we talk about them
taxonomically,
the taxonomic name for marsupials
is metatheria,
which means half-beasts.
Whereas our own group,
the placental mammals,
are the eutheria
or true beasts.
I think this all contributes
to late 18th century zoology,
when Captain Cook in 1770 landed
not far from where these guys live,
actually almost exactly
where these guys live,
and started to talk about Australian
animals in a very pejorative way.
The first European settlers
in the first fleet
started to say that Australian animals,
marsupials,
were against the laws of nature.
It all contributes, I argue,
to the idea that Australia is inferior.
The concept of terra nullius,
that nobody lived there,
which of course is not true
and that it was claimable.
Cook, one of his missions,
was to take possession for the Crown
of any unoccupied lands.
I think the way we talk about
our animals
contributes to that idea.
Obviously he took possession
of an occupied land in Australia.
So, the Empire and politics.
The next one, the final one,
is about the sex bias in museums.
When you go to a natural history museum,
particularly for birds and mammals,
you will find there is a far greater
number of males on display than females.
In fact, except for, as far as
I can tell, this specimen here,
and maybe the baby,
all of the objects in this display
are males.
It's not too hard to think
why that might be.
That's that when the males and females
of a species are different,
particularly in mammals and birds,
it's typical that the male
is the more impressive one.
The male is the one
with the massive horns
or the big antlers
or the big tusks
or a fancy plumage.
The female by comparison,
in birds particularly,
is more likely to be drab and brown
or antler-less or horn-less.
Or, in the case of many antelope,
smaller horns.
That means that if you are a collector,
you are more likely to want to go
and shoot the more impressive thing.
Firstly, because it's easier
to sell it to a museum.
Then, when it comes to the museum,
museums are more likely to display it.
In fact, a colleague of mine currently
at Leeds City Museum, Rebecca Machin,
did a study of a typical
natural history gallery
and found that,
29% of mammals on display were female.
23% of the birds on display
were female.
There is a huge numerical bias
in our natural history displays.
As I say, you might excuse that
as a historical bias of the collecting.
That's also the reality of the
collections behind the stores.
There's a male bias
because of those collectors.
Actually, the way we then display and
talk about these animals in the display
is biased as well.
She found that when males and females
are in a case alongside each other,
the males were more than likely
to be higher in the case,
looking down on the females,
which is an interesting, presumably
subconscious, curatorial decision.
Again, we can say
these displays are old,
that's not how we think now.
Even in modern interpretation, even
what was written in modern displays,
there was a difference in how museums
spoke about male and female animals.
The males would have very generic
natural history labels.
This animal lives here, it eats this,
it has this interesting adaptation
where it can walk on its teeth.
By contrast, the females
would be interpreted
only in relation
to their ability to produce young.
The females are depicted as mothers.
The males are depicted
as otherwise broadly interesting.
Of course, the males also have children
in most cases
and the females also eat and move
and have evolved from other things.
Those generic facts
weren't applied to the females.
You might question,
when a visitor goes into a museum,
and is given this kind of information
about sex roles in the natural world,
what impression
that leaves us with.
Yes, we see many more
males on display.
Interestingly, we don't see
all of the males.
Can anyone spot anything unusual
about this skeleton?
Other than the tail in front.
Penis bone!
Thank you!
This is one of the very few examples
I've ever seen,
of a skeleton
with its penis bone attached.
Most mammals have penis bones.
The two biggest groups of mammals,
the rodents and the bats,
have penis bones.
So do most primates,
we don't.
Shrews, moles, hedgehogs
and the carnivores.
This is a cacomistle,
which is a South American raccoon.
The penis bone doesn't articulate
with any of the other skeletons,
so it is easy to lose a penis bone
when you're skinning an animal,
because you start by circling the
genitalia and skinning up the belly,
so because it's not attached,
it's easy to lose it.
Nonetheless, there is
a common curatorial practice
at least historically,
but I would say still today,
to remove the penis bone.
You go to natural history museums and
you will find drawers of penis bones.
I have one here.
This is the penis bone of a walrus.
This is the largest penis bone.
They're also called bacula,
baculum singular.
This is the body end,
this is the other end.
No-one really knows
why they have them.
It's presumed to be about
increasing stamina
and increasing the likelihood
of successful insemination,
but curators don't trust you
not to freak out.
So, they remove the penis bones.
The few animals who have clitoris bones
are typically removed as well.
Museums are supposed to be scientific,
you would think,
so deliberately removing part
of their anatomy ,
just in case visitors freak out,
is an interesting scientific thing
to talk about.
I'm not going to talk about that.
All of these stories, as I mentioned,
are in this book.
These, as I say, are...
The point of the book is to talk about
not only these interesting evolutionary
natural history stories
that we can get from museum objects,
but also the way that we think
about objects
and the role that objects play
in natural history museums
and the human stories and biases
behind what we say about them.
I will finish there.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jack for an
engaging and thought-provoking lecture.
I'm sure there are many questions
and we've got about ten minutes,
so, please, if there are any questions
from the audience,
I'm sure Jack will be delighted
to answer them.
I recall you said your favourite museum
was in Paris.
What's your least favourite
natural history museum?
I don't know
if I have an answer to that.
I don't remember going to a museum
and thinking it was terrible.
Have you been
to the Creation Museum?
No, no!
Probably that.
Hello, I've been to the museum
in Cambridge
and they have an iguanodon
where they broke the spine
to make it stand up and be scary
like a dinosaur.
It really walked around on four feet.
Is that the museum
you will go to?
No, that's the Sedgwick Museum,
the Earth Science museum opposite.
That's a good example!
Absolutely, the iguanodon was one
of the first dinosaurs to be described
and a number of mistakes
were made with it.
Firstly, it's got...
They found
the big conical spike
in some of the first fossils
that they found of it
and early depictions, including the
iguanodon sculpture in Crystal Palace,
do you know
the Crystal Palace dinosaurs?
If you look at the animals nose,
firstly, it is arranged like an iguana,
because it's called iguanodon,
which means iguana tooth.
The teeth of the iguanodon
look like the teeth of an iguana.
It's not very clever.
Scaling up,
their teeth are similar,
so therefore their entire bodies
are similar.
They've just made
a giant iguana.
This conical spike
was put on the animal's nose
a bit like a rhino.
In fact, it was its thumb.
You're absolutely right,
the earliest depictions
of iguanodons
were in a kangaroo-like pose.
Very much upright.
We now know they could move
between two legs and four legs
and they were kind of
at that angle.
The concept of dinosaury-ness
is an interesting one.
Probably not in your heads
but in many people's heads,
if you think of a t-rex, it is in a
similar kangaroo-like pose.
Very, very upright.
Or dinosaurs are tail-dragging,
slow, sluggish animals.
Actually, the t-rex is almost horizontal
in its pose,
we now know.
You could pose almost any
animal skeleton in any way you like.
You think of a skeleton as
a relatively inert scientific object.
You don't think
it's been wired together.
When people discovered extinct elephant
species in the Mediterranean,
you could easily pose that
as a bipedal two-legged animal,
even though it's an elephant,
and think it was a giant.
You can just move the bones around.
There's a lot of human interpretation
in these things.
Sorry, I didn't see you.
If this were 1918,
would your lecture
have been different?
If it was 1918?
100 years ago.
Good question.
I don't know, because particularly
in museum displays,
a lot of the objects are the same.
The Grant Museum,
which I showed at the beginning,
that museum was only arranged
in 2011,
but it was the same objects
in the collection in 1900s.
Probably not.
Actually, what I think is interesting
about these taxidermy issues
and what I didn't say,
which I meant to,
is if you go to any museum
and see an echidna,
I look out for this,
and please when you see one,
tweet me a picture of it,
more than half of echidnas
are posed wrong.
We choose, as museum people,
to still put these on display.
Most people in the world
have never seen an echidna.
Their only interaction
with an echidna is in a museum.
We choose to say it's fine
that this is an incorrect animal
or we are teaching people
the wrong thing deliberately.
Consciously, I would say,
but without choosing
to do anything about it.
I suspect the museums
would look the same,
the objects we put on display
would look the same,
because they're still there.
The idea behind the museum
was to change.
David Attenborough's [INAUDIBLE]
in television,
modelling animation,
none of this has happened yet.
Absolutely.
Museums have many roles
but the public side of the museum
hasn't changed that much.
It's got a lot more conversational
rather than very didactic.
This is a fact.
But perhaps less so in natural history
museums than other places.
We still ask people to come and look at
and read about and see the same objects.
They obviously didn't have
David Attenborough 100 years ago
but I don't know if that means
the museum would have changed.
Interesting question though.
How much collecting
and taxidermy still goes on
in natural history museums?
They are pretty full.
They are pretty full, absolutely.
A few research museums
still collect.
Very rarely will museums
collect for display.
There are a handful of museums
that have significant research profiles,
all of the national museums,
South Kensington, Edinburgh, Cardiff,
Dublin and Belfast.
They all collect
and also Oxford and Cambridge
have a research staff.
They will still be amassing objects for
research.
However, when they go out
and do that,
unlike pre-1992
when the legislation came in,
they will always do it with a partner
organisation in the host country.
Typically, it will be a team comprised
of the host nation scientists
and UK scientists
and then they'll either
split the collection
or all of the collection will end up
staying as belonging to the host nation.
They will just lend things in.
Collection for display
really doesn't happen.
Except when they die in zoos,
we get them that way.
You talked a lot about issues with
display and representation of animals,
which makes sense
because they're often the focus
and you work in a zoological
museum.
Do you have anything about the display
of non-animal life
and geological specimens
and things like that?
If you think insects get a hard time,
plants get an even worse time.
I spend a lot of time in my charities
with botanists
and their game going round natural
history museums is to find the plant.
That sort of pressing exercise!
It's nearly always willow
or...
or a rose, or...
hemp, something pretty boring.
There are significant biases there.
Bacteria and viruses nowhere,
although interestingly the next
exhibition at Oxford University Museum
was 'Beyond Bacteria'.
If you think displaying a worm
is difficult...!
I have no idea how they do that.
Natural history museums are biased
towards animals, certainly.
How do you display minerals
in an interesting way?
People who like minerals,
really like minerals.
If you go the mineral gallery
at the Natural History Museum,
there are not a lot of people in there,
because it is an encyclopaedic row
of wooden cases and glass tops
with rocks in them.
That's the physical reality
of a mineral.
It's not very displayable.
I don't know the answer.
Fortunately, I don't work
in museums with minerals!
One last question
at the back.
How closely do the museum collections
fit with the socio-political borders
at the time of collection?
For instance,
if you knew nothing of Earth,
came to a museum, would you be able to
go, 'England colonised the Caribbean'.
Yes.
The same with India
or the foundation of the Americas.
Yes, I think you would
be able to do that.
That's exactly what would happen.
You can see where
the diplomatic relations lie.
It's strange to think
how big Russia and China are,
and how many animals live in them,
but how few Russian or Chinese species
we have on display in our museum.
We might get some pandas,
but not a lot of other things.
Absolutely.
I think those aliens would have a very
skewed view of what nature is like
and what biodiversity is like on Earth.
I think you could trace
those relationships.
Well, join in me thanking Jack
once again for a wonderful talk.
