Category: Have Science Will Travel

For my last science travel outing of the year, I went to the Grant Museum of Zoology, during lunch break of my last work day of 2014.

The Grant Museum of Zoology is a natural history museum of University College London. As a university museum, it’s not very big – only spanning one room – but there is a lot to see. It has samples from 67,000 species, including one of only seven existing quagga skeletons in the world.

Elsewhere, there’s a little alcove that’s covered floor to (mirrored) ceiling in old microscope slides, which you can take a closer look at with the provided magnifying glass. It made me feel like a 19th century biologist!

The museum was founded in 1828 as a teaching museum, so some of the specimens were prepared for educational purposes, which can make them a bit creepy-looking. Monkey heads in jars, that sort of thing.

Today, the museum still has an educational purpose. It’s the only zoological university museum in London, and offers teaching support to university groups at UCL and beyond, who want to use the samples in the classroom, as well as to high school, artists, film crews, and others in need of animal anatomy samples.

The museum is currently working on continued preservation of some of its largest skeletons as part of the “Bone Idols” project. When I visited, the rhino was being worked on.

To be able to carry out this preservation task, as well as its regular maintenance, the Grant Museum is raising funds in several ways. The most visible is the “adopt-a-specimen” project, which allows you to have your name displayed next to one of the jars or skeletons, in return for a donation.

Recently, my friend Kat (who lives in Canada) received this specimen adoption as a birthday present from her other London-based friend, so I set out to find her jar. I knew it was an octopus, so that narrowed it down somewhat, but it still took me a while to find the cephalopod section. When I did, I had to search a bit among all the other adopted samples, but then I saw it, at the back!

If you also want your name on an animal of your choice, you can adopt a specimen via the Grant Museum website. Let me know if you do, and I’ll drop by again to visit it. The museum is a stone’s throw from my office and I can’t believe I had never even been before last week!

Did you know that the Vatican has a science institute?

When the pope recently announced that he doesn’t see a conflict between evolution, the Big Bang and the teachings of the catholic church, some people reacted with surprise. It’s a lot less surprising when you realize that the Vatican has employed astronomers for centuries.

Dating back to at least the calendar reform of 1582, Vatican astronomers have studied the sky. These days they’ve got the calendar pretty much figured out, but they have enough work on their hands. They hold conferences and summer schools, study nearby galaxies, and – something that might seem surprising for an institute with religious ties – they search for extraterrestial life.

The Vatican Observatory has two locations: One is at the Pope’s summer residence Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, and the other one is at Mount Graham Observatory in Arizona. There is no longer an observatory in Vatican City itself, because Rome’s smog and city lights interfere with the view.

Visiting the observatories is not straightforward. The location at Castel Gandolfo does not have regular tours, and is inaccessible when the pope is using his summer home. The Arizona site can be visited as part of an organised tour, but only on particular days.

Image credits: Castel Gandolfo photo by Wikimedia user Rb85z37, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0. Mount Graham photo by Wikimedia user GreatInca, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Last week I found myself in various conference venues in and around Washington DC. With just about an hour to spare before my trip back to the airport, I managed to briefly visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

According to Wikipedia, this is the most-visited museum in North America, and the most-visited natural history museum. It didn’t feel as crowded as some other museums, though. Maybe I got there on a rare quiet Saturday?

The central exhibit of the museum is the African elephant in the foyer. Like all elephants in rooms, it’s quite noticeable and unavoidable. From a floor above, you can learn all about elephants while walking around the balcony that overlooks the central elephant.

Themed exhibits on the first floor covered life in the ocean, human evolution, and mammals. Topic-wise, the exhibits didn’t differ much from those in other natural history museums I’ve visited, but the displays looked more modern. Continue reading “Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History”