queasiness opiate: A treasure trove of natural history opens

Saturday, December 1, 2012

A treasure trove of natural history opens

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

(Images: Natural History Museum)

Where can you see the pigeons that feature in Chapter One of the On the Origin of Species, next to a first edition of the book? Or the iguanodon teeth that sparked the discovery of dinosaurs? Opening this Friday, the new Treasures Gallery at London?s Natural History Museum displays some of the most influential and fascinating artefacts from the museum's collections in a single room.

In an age of shortening attention spans and information overload, the museum has condensed its collection into a one-stop mega-shop for natural history. But while some may balk at the notion of a boiled-down collection of greatest hits, the new gallery is well-named. The pieces within it - the first Neanderthal skull ever discovered, for example, or one of the emperor penguin eggs collected during Captain Scott?s 1910 expedition to Antarctica - are indeed treasures, and the stories behind them are captivating.

Take the foot-long tooth specimen sitting in a display case between a plate from Audubon?s The Birds of America - the most expensive book in the world - and the first meteorite seen to land in Britain. This dwarf elephant tooth from Cyprus was discovered by palaeontologist Dorothea Bate in 1901 and provided the first evidence of elephants on the island. Bate?s discovery supported the theory that elephants swam over from mainland Europe and then, constrained by the scarcity of food, evolved to be far smaller than their ancestors - roughly the size of a pig.

Bate, we learn, was a self-taught enthusiast. She talked her way into a job at the museum at the tender age of 19, having pursued her interest in fossils by battling up mountains near her home in Carmarthenshire, UK. She went on to pioneer the field of archaeozoology, looking at the impact of humans on their environment.

Where zeal for nature drove Bate to discover, other exhibits show it as a source of creative inspiration. Sparkling within a well-lit case are three glass models of marine invertebrates, deftly sculpted by the Blaschka family of Dresden, Germany. This father-and-son team, who are responsible for the glass flowers in Harvard?s Museum of Natural History, were so fascinated with sea creatures that they not only owned an aquarium populated with specimens from Naples?s marine zoology centre, but were in correspondence with biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose diagrams of microscopic organisms informed their work.

The curiosities on show are frequently backed by this type of engaging human story. A portrait of the museum?s founder Richard Owen sits next to the iguanodon teeth. The teeth were discovered by Mary Ann Mantell alongside a road in Sussex. Her husband Gideon, an amateur naturalist, saw a similarity between the fossil find and the much smaller teeth of the modern iguana. From this observation, he posited that long ago giant reptiles roamed the Earth.

A touchscreen betwixt the two exhibits tells a remarkably honest history of how Owen, an established biologist, wrested the mantle of dinosaur discovery from the Mantells, though Gideon - the son of a shoemaker - fought to overcome both his class and amateur status so that his theory would be accepted by the scientific elite.

The human side of science in days gone by is nowhere more obvious, however, than in the display of pigeon specimens gathered by Charles Darwin during his experiments on breeding (see photo above). Seeing his meticulous labelling and notes on the dead birds and skeletons conveys both his intense dedication and methodical approach, which we now know enabled him to formulate his world-changing theory. ?It gives you an insight into Darwin as a curator, working with the collection, as a researcher, the kind of approach that he was taking,? says Jo Cooper, curator of the museum?s bird collection.

Ironically, it is a fossil of the earliest known bird that brings these stories into the present day of scientific research. The archaeopteryx fossil is the most valuable in the museum?s collection, and is held as the world standard for this type of fossil. A CT scan of the skull cavity in 2004 showed the similarities between the archaeopteryx?s brain and that of a modern bird. The fossil may yet hold more gems about the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. ?We?re still researching it really intensively?, says curator Tate Greenhalgh.

The Treasures Gallery does what it says on the tin, and more. Far from providing a whistle-stop tour of groundbreaking discoveries and theories in natural history, these artefacts and the stories behind them draw you in - and will spur your curiosity to delve ever more deeply.

The Treasures Gallery is a permanent collection opening tomorrow at the Natural History Museum, London.