Hello. My name is Elaine Charvet. I'm a doctoral researcher at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
On my first day at the museum, I was given an enormous bunch of keys and told I could open every cupboard and door.
That was one of the best days in my life.
And these podcasts I want to share with you some of the treasures I've encountered on my many forays into attics and cellars,
cupboards and storerooms. I've also been very privileged to meet many experts who do research,
look after collections and the visitors, and turn the museum into a living organism.
We can all be part of. But looking at the crowds, visiting the museum every day.
Here's a chance to create a microcosm of nature and science, to celebrate you and biodiversity,
but also to talk about hugely important topics such as the loss of biodiversity, the climate emergency and manmade extinctions.
This series of podcasts takes a close look at some fascinating and surprising objects in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
It's a kind of fringe event to go hand in hand with a major display happening at the museum in 2022.
Each podcast is a journey of discovery through the nooks and crannies of the museum.
Talking to researchers and experts on the way,
they will seek out the rarely seen or heard about Enigma objects in the museum and their stories scientific, historical and personal.
These objects can be specimens, natural objects, artefacts, tools, or even museum in turn, such as conservation fluids.
What they all have in common is that they speak to us about ecology and biodiversity.
Both terms are linked with our constantly evolving ecological relationships.
There is no biodiversity. Is there even such a thing as biodiverse objects?
Well, let's find out. Welcome to our first Biodiversity Objects podcast.
On display. Nature's dramas, nature's dioramas.
This one is all about biodiversity, captured and displayed, sometimes in weird and wonderful ways.
Diorama. The name comes from the Greek, literally meaning that through which is seen.
I like to remind myself of that because the diorama indeed acts like a lens focussing our attention.
But it is also a stage. Natural history.
Dioramas are definitely putting the drama into nature.
It's an old fashioned term, and we tend to think of dioramas as a 19th century thing.
But even in the 19th century, there were many different incarnations of the diorama.
Today, most of the museum's dioramas are in storage.
They are often no longer seen as a good way to communicate knowledge about the natural world.
It probably does not help that many of them are in quite bad nick or represent outdated concepts.
And to our eyes they can look terribly kitschy.
I would say that there are two types of dioramas. One, that's the realistic diorama, the lens that tries to cram into a display box.
Everything that we know at this point in time about a particular group of animals and their environment.
Well, let's have a look at some in the bird store. So here we have the animals themselves as taxidermy.
Landscapes in the background are often very beautifully painted and the foreground.
There are geological features, rocks or caves, dense vegetation often model in 3D from papier maché or plaster, plastic or fibreglass.
The taxidermy animals can be arranged in very dramatic poses.
Think, for instance, of a golden eagle crushing with enormous talons on its yellow feet, the fluffy head of a snow hare.
It has just called. Next to it, a grey rocks with patches of snow in the shadows.
There are splotches of red on the white.
And if you look carefully, you can see another snow have pressed completely flat onto one white patch behind a rock,
hiding its white fur, already starting to reveal patches of brown with a coming spring.
To one side in a respectful distance is a raven.
Its black feathers are shining. As a scavenger.
It eats either carrion or benefits from predators making a kill like this one.
Although an impressive bird, it looks small compared to the eagle, a convenient indicator of scale.
In the background there are painted snow capped mountains and the moody skies of the Scottish Highlands.
So captured in this diorama we have predator prey relationships, scavenger behaviour and interdependencies.
Adaptation of the snow hare, which turns white in winter.
Camouflage behaviour also of the snow hare as well as the Eagles killing techniques and anatomical details.
So for instance, on its feet, the backwards pointing digit and talon are particularly important for making the kill.
So this digit acts like a thumb and it has a razor sharp, long equivalent of a nail.
And together with the opposing digit and Talon, it can grab like a hand.
And if you look closely, you can see that these two digits and claws are largest on the Eagles foot,
and a golden Eagles claw can be well over six centimetres long.
But there's also the habitat, the Scottish Highlands, with the particular geology and perhaps even some of the lichen mosses,
plants specialising in this harsh nutrient poor environment.
So all of this seems like a lot when you think about it, but is of course only the tip of the ecological iceberg.
Despite being a lens as well as a stage, this diorama only captures the scales and phenomena that are easily visible to us.
What about the micro-level? Clouds of midges, parasites on the hair.
Like, for instance, ticks, parasites on the eagle.
Like mites, microorganisms in the ground, digesting the last scraps of the dead hair or big phenomena like the weather, landslides or erosion.
So all these complex networks may be as or even more important than what we can readily perceive.
So these are the realistic dioramas and the ones you would usually find in a trace gymnasiums.
But there are others. These are the ones we could perhaps call creative dioramas.
That does not necessarily mean that they are not representing current scientific knowledge accurately,
although some also often dating from the 19th century,
have definitely taking the drama aspect of the diorama to extremes and are more
about showing off stunning colours or patterns of animals and artificial groupings.
It's all about the wow factor and stunning interior design.
In a best case scenario. These dioramas are a bit like remnants of the cabinets, of curiosities of the Enlightenment.
And 19th century creative dioramas were usually made for grand houses and were showing off exotic destinations and wealth.
There are several examples in storage as these dioramas are often part of larger private natural history collections that are donated to the museum.
They often aren't most well, not most of the time, but very often seem to involve hummingbirds or other birds with beautifully coloured feathers.
Taxidermy animals are usually central to dioramas, and birds are particularly popular in the decorative variety.
The beautiful feathers evoke jewels, expensive fabrics and either hunting exploits at home using,
for instance, birds like pheasants or conjuring a tropical paradise with hunting included, of course.
So seeing the taxidermy animals inside or outside of dioramas everywhere in natural history, museums.
Even today I thought I'd chat to an old friend of mine who actually studied how to prepare animals for museums.
I'm curious how much of the living animal can be found in these stuffed animals and about the knowledge
and techniques used to turn them from carcases into display objects with their own stories and histories.
This is Dr. Catherine Boomer, who's now a history of science expert at the Berlin State Library.
In the former GDR, the German Democratic Republic.
When I learnt the profession of the taxidermist from 1985 to 87, it was a really rare profession.
Only taught at some museums. I was strongly interested in animals, especially ornithology and museums like the Natural Canoe Museum in Berlin,
which I knew quite well because my father was working there as a scientist.
So profession fascinated me. Multiplicity of techniques, the art aspects and the work in the museum was such a large collection of specimens.
I asked Katrin if she could describe for us, How do you turn a living bird into a museum display specimen?
Okay. I will try. For instance, a G.
At first there's always the question is the specimen for exhibition of scientific collection?
If it has to be prepared for scientific collection, I have to make a so-called bird skin, which has to be solid and light.
It looks like a sleeping bird lying on its back and its neck extended.
If a specimen is needed for an exhibition, the taxidermist would try and give the bird the best possible look as near to life as possible.
And of course, for this proposed, you have to know your species.
How does the animal look like in life? What are the exact positions of the head, the tail, the wings?
What colour do the eyes have and how are they positioned in the head?
And to go into the more technical side of taxidermy. Preparing the bird means skinning it.
You should end up with a torso, but wings, legs and head removed intact torsos and discarded this all organs neatly contained inside.
So there's no mess if you have poor, properly and very little blood.
Only the wings, the legs and the skull remain covered by the skin without any support of muscles.
Of course, here you have to be very careful because such preparations can easily get infested by
insects who in the end can destroy the specimen you special chemicals to avoid this.
I used an arsenic solution which was applied with the brush.
Okay. Back to the skin. The limbs stabilised close to where the trout we made with the wire from the skull to the artificial made torso.
This torso has to have the same size and proportions as a natural body.
And the next step, all the wires are fixed in the artificial torso.
After all these technical steps, the most important parts are follows.
Giving the bird its unique look by positioning it in a typical posture and form of behaviour.
I have used the term stuffed animal before, but this doesn't sound at all like stuffing animals.
So I asked Katrin if she thinks that the popular term stuffed animal is actually really misleading.
Yes, of course. This term recalls an old fashioned, often unprofessional technique of literally stuffing animals,
which often completely distort the natural proportions. You can still find this today.
It was the proper way to has not been properly trained in the historical techniques of almost centuries.
But if you want to create a specimen which captures the exact look anatomy, habits and the character of an animal,
you have to approach it as a lot of knowledge about the species and artistic skills.
Woops, I will definitely make sure to use the term stuffed animal only for my teddy bears.
But one final question for Katrin. I asked her how scientific knowledge?
To what extent did knowledge about a particular animal, its behaviour observations or even its environment play a role in preparing the taxidermy?
Without knowing anything about the animal, you can't do it.
Taxidermy. It's a little bit like recreating the animal.
For this, you have to know as much as possible about the species, how it moves, how it feeds, how it behaves.
Its character, the habitat and food takes a day.
This lovely golden brown bird with a blue speckled monitoring for this.
He is a so-called watchman of the woods because he's watching everything and gives a noisy screech of warning to the whole force in case of danger.
And he likes to eat acorn, which he often hides or steals from other birds or even squirrels.
That's why a taxidermy jay is often shown sitting on a bench, looking down attentively,
watching Kristen Wiig, nosey and noisy and Cucuta in that is great.
But dioramas without taxidermy, of course, do exist.
Often where the animals depicted are either long extinct like dinosaurs or too small like microorganisms, or even too big like whales.
Here, models and reconstructions come into their own.
For instance, there are dioramas that take us to the microscopic level, showing the hidden world of tiny but vital soil organisms.
These can be as low tech as back in the 19th century, using mainly papier maché and paints,
all state of the art like computer generated virtual reality environments.
There's a great example developed at the St Burke Museum of Natural History in Gurlitt's, Germany.
Virtually shrunk to the size of a wood louse.
You're able to meet soil dwellers at their scale and pace from well-known characters such as earthworms now giants to antsy spring tails and mites.
These animals are, in fact, 3D virtual models, with the aim to being scientifically accurate regarding scales, movement and behaviours.
But they also convey a sense of wonder and all.
The same framework can be applied to long extinct worlds.
Some of you may remember the first Animals exhibition here at the Oxford Museum,
with its animated and colourful reconstructions of the first complex lifeforms on Earth reconstructed from fossils.
But one of my favourite examples states from the 18th century,
and it captures animals about whose life cycles there was almost as little known as of dinosaurs in the first half of the 19th century.
It is, in fact, what I would call a series of 2D dioramas.
It is held in the museum's library. I guess that's a give away.
Let's have a look. Right.
Let's go down to Florida. Some staff.
Excellent. So this has been nicely laid out for us.
A beautiful book. And this is Maria Sibylla Marian's work, important work.
And she was an incredibly accomplished naturalist and illustrator and a pioneering entomologist.
So sit there and have a good look at this because this is a real treat to look at.
Marion was born in Germany in 1647, and when she was 38 she left her husband and in 1699 she travelled to Surinam and Guyana and stayed for two years.
So scientific expeditions at this period of time were not common at all, especially not to this part of the world.
And Marion's unofficial, self-funded expedition raised many eyebrows.
A single woman travelling to the end of the world. Basically, she succeeded in discovering a whole range of previously unknown animals and plants.
And in 1705, she published her famous work, The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam.
And this is what I'm looking at here. So let's print it.
It's quite a heavy tome.
So this particular copy I'm looking at here in the library is very special indeed.
So this is the 1719 Dutch edition.
But it has been customised and individually hand-painted on the orders of its Dutch owner, the collector Johan, that I had to kill about.
Gosh, that's a name. He had bought the loose and coloured plates and the text needs to have his special copy made and had lots of gold thrown in.
So it's quite a lavish copy, but the frontispiece is great fun.
So this is a rather allegorical illustration, including a figure that is arguably Marianne herself,
surrounded by half naked cherub like children, bringing her specimens of plants, insects.
But in this particular hand-painted version here, the lady herself, as well as the children, look muddy with dirt on the legs, arms and even faces.
So is this smudged paint or is it a tongue in cheek,
realistic touch concerning the reality of collecting in the field in an otherwise very stylised scene?
Who knows? But most special most special of all is really what is contained in the plates.
So Marion studied insects in great detail, keeping her own life specimens and made drawings,
showing an insect metamorphosis in which all life stages of the insects were depicted.
So egg larva, pupa and the adult.
So in a way you could say her work. Sometimes even one single illustration ranged from the decorative or artistic to the realistic and scientific,
fuelled by her own observations, studies, experiments and deductions.
So insects, you can see here everywhere, insects and other animals are depicted laying their eggs, feeding or preying on each other.
In a letter Marion did write, I was not looking for any more creatures, but only at the formation,
propagation and metamorphosis of creatures, how one emerges from the other, the nature of the diet.
So this is definitely not just a collector work nor just an artist.
This is definitely a scientist at work. And Marion not only noted the typical food plants of caterpillars, but also, for example,
of a caterpillar fed exclusively on one particular plant so that there was a specialist versus the less exclusive ones feeding on a variety of plants,
the generalists. So just like it was with the eagle and the head diorama that we saw earlier, Marion records the behaviour of prey animals.
In this case, it's the caterpillars instead of the hair. And when they attacked.
So some curled up and played dead, others twist and turn to pull themselves free.
So in her earlier book on caterpillars, Marion would record the cannibalistic behaviour of certain caterpillars as well,
and how they were used as hosts and food by parasitic wasps.
So these are all food webs in action.
This here is my favourite of all the absolutely exquisite illustrations in this book.
So this is Plate 18 of the Metamorphosis.
And of course, everyone who sees this big and bold illustration for the first time will immediately be drawn
to the large tarantula crouching over a dead hummingbird next to its nest and its tiny eggs.
So the hummingbird appears to be much smaller than the tarantula.
So it's a very striking image.
The tarantula is burying into the neck of a colourful little bird, a ruby topaz hummingbird, which is lying on its back.
It's quite gruesome.
And one of the tarantulas is in an ever so sinister and casual way, still sitting on the bird's nest, implying that the eggs upright as well.
So this formidable animal is the wonderfully named pink toad tarantula, and they are indeed active tree climbers as depicted here.
And yes, they have pink toes. The tips of their legs look a bit like they've been dipped in pink nail varnish.
But there's so much more drama captured in the illustration site.
And he in the corner attacking a smaller Huntsman spider and its spider links and also trying to grab a roach.
They are, in turn preyed upon by a second tarantula that seems to prefer smaller prey than a bird.
Leafcutter ants are busy stripping the guava tree of its leaves.
So there's a lot going on. Colony is gave the tarantula its scientific Latin name irony Columbia based on this
illustration here today the this particular tarantula is called a pickle area A,
B, Columbia and a bicolour means small bird.
So does this refer to the prey suggested by Marion, all perhaps to the tarantula size being that of a small bird?
Linnaeus in 1767, in his description of the pink toad, Tarantula writes that it ambushes small birds and insects.
In fact, the spiders very rarely hunt and catch birds.
So Marion most likely observed a tarantula eating a dead bird.
Even to the dedicated and scientific observer drama can sometimes be irresistible.
And in the tarantulas case, the drama became part of the animal's scientific name.
So intriguingly, article Arias in Latin, in fact, means bird keeper, perhaps an even more sinister name,
implying that the spider harvests the birds and the eggs, like ants, form aphids for their sugary excretions.
In a 1773 German translation and commentary full analysis original description the tarantulas called Hummingbird Eater,
adding that it eats mainly ounce but also attacks hummingbirds and sucks the eggs.
It also records that A are sometimes dipped in gold and used as toothpicks.
Wow. I mean, poking between your teeth with tarantula fangs.
To be honest, I find people much stranger and scarier than most animal behaviour I've ever seen or read about.
In an 1806 English edition of the work, including Linnaeus's original description of the Tarantula.
It is also helpfully it added that the tarantulas,
fangs all the size of hawks talons and that it's all these can be set in the manner of glasses and used as microscopes.
So this is not just an illustration capturing a snapshot of nature, biodiversity and ecology at a particular place at a particular point in time.
But it also captures cultural and historical elements.
Marion's illustration set the wheels of science in motion, leading to the scientifically accurate description,
naming a classification of this particular tarantula, but also the wheels of human imagination and sadly, exploitation.
I think the tarantula gets its fangs into anyone who looks at this illustration as surely as into the little hummingbird.
See where it will take you.
Fear or fancy curiosity to find out more arguing with the illustration, contradicting observations and data, or contributing your own,
or just wonder and admiration for Marion's sheer artistic talent and determination to travel,
to observe, to experiment, and to increase our knowledge.
But it's, of course, not just pictures or representations, dioramas that can make ecology and biodiversity very clearly visible to us.
There are, of course, actual specimens that can do that.
And when you look closely, there are many of these objects in the museum.
So let's go and find one. Fossils can reveal so much about a long lost environment.
The only problem is that specimens are most of the time removed from the context to be exhibited in museums.
However, some carry that contexts with them.
So here in the main court of the museum, I try and be a bit more quiet.
All right. I should speak a bit more loudly because you will not be able to hear me.
But so here this play features two bones, one fossilised, one modern, both of which have been.
Shoot, shoot. It turned out by Hyaenas.
One of them in Yorkshire. Around 120,000 years ago.
Hang on a minute. Hyaenas in Yorkshire. So William Buckland, professor of geology at Oxford,
was able to overturn one of the most widely held beliefs of the time when in 1821 he visited Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire.
Bones of exotic animals like rhinos and Hyaenas have been found in Europe before,
but the accepted explanation was that the bones were carried there by the biblical flood.
Buckland, however, decided to take a more holistic view on the bones found in the cave and by some very close examination of
all objects in the cave and some very clever hands on experiments which actually involved living hyaenas.
He discovered not only hyaena tooth marks on some of the other bones, but also fossilised hyaena poo.
How exciting is that? And and this was proof that once upon a time a hyaena had lived in what is now Yorkshire,
eating and digesting large animals which have long disappeared from the British Isles and indeed Europe.
So a wonderful contemporary lithograph shows a young Buckland crouching to enter the famous cave carrying a candle.
Clearly greatly upsetting three or four hyaenas present, whereas one remains dreamily absorbed in gnawing a large bone.
This is just a brilliant 2D diorama capturing an ancient.
Fauna, its food webs, but also the modern naturalist capturing the hyaenas in the act as it were.
So discovering fossils and interpreting their context is a very real form of time travel and I just love that.
Now for some objects behind the scenes. And also, I must admit, in my own collections, I am totally obsessed with Amber.
To me, pieces of Amber are the ultimate diorama specimens capturing ecological relationships.
I know some people look at cat pictures and videos on the Internet to relax and to get a rush of endorphins.
I look at macro lens pictures of the inner worlds hidden in pieces of Baltic amber.
So Baltic animals, usually around 44 million years old.
It is the fossilised resin of probably and now extinct tree,
possibly a relative of the Japanese umbrella pine in the gold and orange or reddish light of the amber,
i.e. for instance, look at two adults locked in a tight embrace.
They are two different species, so possibly a fight.
Another out has been trapped next to the aphids it may have formed.
Insect larvae still attach to bits of their food plants.
A chaotic bundle of crane flies and a tumble of their long legs point to maybe a mass emergence.
A small beetle is trapped in a spider's web.
The web is eerily luminous.
In another piece, there is a spider actually caught in the act of building its web,
and you can see its leg holding the spider silk issuing from its abdomen.
Speaking of spiders, my favourite species of spiders are jumping spiders.
So jumping spiders are so tiny and feisty.
They are full of surprises like the elaborate courtship dances some species engage in.
But they are not just cute. They are fearsome predators.
Well, tiny but fearsome, often tackling prey much larger than they are.
And this is exactly what I am looking at now.
A scene from 44 million years ago, a jumping spider measuring less than half a centimetre.
Going after big, juicy fly or rather to.
There's another fly. That one is slightly more intact than the mangled one next to the spider.
It may be mangled that flight,
but its compound eyes are still staring with a look that one cannot resist calling startled Amber can preserve colours in an astonishing way.
And here it is, the eyes of the jumping spider looking at you.
And they are red. It's incredible. I'm not sure which species it is, but it's probably now extinct.
Jumping spiders have unique eyes.
Their main pair of eyes are set forward, facing in many species in a flat, often hairy face, a bit like a monkey face.
And the three remaining pairs of eyes are often wrapped around the the head, so to speak, to give the spider a near 360 degree field of vision.
So it's an incredibly visual animal, just like us and anyone meeting a jumping spider.
If you notice it because it's so small, you will notice that it actually looks at you and appears to to really follow you with its gaze.
Someone has called them eight legged cats because of their habit of just observing, stalking, and then pouncing on prey.
So this habit in this case sadly made the jumping spider a prime candidate for getting trapped in the resin, which became the amber.
So they probably saw the fly, which had got trapped in the resin and they pounced on it.
And they got themselves. If only I could spend my days looking at nothing but organisms called an amber.
I imagine I would be the happiest person alive, actually.
Is such a person at a museum. He has endured my curiosity and excitement and envy with incredible patience.
And he has agreed to show us a few treasures. This is his office.
And there is, of course, also a lab.
His name is Dr. Ricardo Perez de la Fuente, and he researches life in amber.
And I'm particularly fascinated by his research on evolving defensive behaviours such as camouflage.
So that is a very ecological topic.
And reminds me again of the eagle haired diorama and the Marion Caterpillars and their small relationships between plants and pollinators.
And one of my favourite topics parasites, even parasites on dinosaur feathers can be called an amber.
There is Baltic amber, which you can sometimes find yourself on the east coast of Britain, and that is around 44 million years old.
There is also the much older, so called Cretaceous amber, which can be around 100 million years old and that one can contain dinosaur remains.
This, very sadly, is not the kind of amber you would find on the beach, but you can find it here in Ricardo's office.
Ello. Ricardo. Sorry, I'm trying to calm down.
Thank you so much for sharing this treasures with us.
So where is your research taking you at the moment and how are you actually looking at the needs of quite a hidden world?
Amber, thank you for inviting me to this podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So right now, research is a bit slow because I'm mostly working on the release play project here at Oxford University myself for Natural History,
but I'm currently studying some laser wings,
which is a type of insect and some spiders preserved in 100 million year old amber or fossilised plant resin.
And that amber is mostly from from Spain, from my homeland. So it's been an interesting last month.
So this is all the tech here using, I guess, hyperbolic microscope.
Yes, indeed. So different types of microscopes.
So one of them are several microscopes that allows us to go high magnifications while still maintaining a 3D perspective of the samples,
which of course, is very important when going deep into a number piece.
Right. We also use compound microscopes in those.
We use the 3D vision, but some details are get resolved and better.
Now, aside from microscopes, we use also use an ingenious device, a very old one actually called camera Lucy that go with the camera lucida.
We basically we entomologist are the few ones that are still using it.
So it allows us to trace the shapes that we see under the microscope.
So with one ocular, we see the sample and we don't have one.
We see a sheet of paper that we put in here and nearby.
And so we can actually see that we can trace the fossil.
So we when you whenever you see a drawing from an entomologist, certainly by me, we are not artists most of the time.
We just trace the entomologists and particularly Paleo entomologists are amongst the few scientists that are still using that device.
Really, just because it trains your eye as well, doesn't it? In a way.
But while you're tracing, you see it properly, exact and.
Exactly. And and it's a very good excuse to get to actually.
See structures and and get to understand your battle.
Right. Because obviously you cannot draw when what you cannot understand.
And also, it's definitely very useful to use this microscope and go up and down in the depth of field and see the different layers.
Exactly. And only then is when you can start, you know, kind of incorporating all those layers into your drawing.
Oh, I like that. But it's it's very new, very cutting edge technology.
And, you know, you know, we yes, we we we we merge both.
And aside from this classic techniques nowadays we have also access to a series
of new techniques that allows us to create virtual 3D models of our specimens.
And then we can get to examine them from different angles,
even those normally hidden and even make virtual cuts of our specimens to see what's inside.
Oh, you can section them basically. Yes. Yeah, that's good that you can do that without actually destroying.
Absolutely. That's a that's a huge advantage of these CT scans or tomography techniques.
Well, this is certainly better than my pocket microscope.
You can see a lot, but there's so much more to see.
So what are your favourite examples of ecology and biodiversity that you've observed in Amber?
And it's a difference to what you would see in fossils preserved in rock.
Yes. And actually that's one of the main characteristics. And, you know, special things about Amber, right?
The racing was able to capture life almost in an instant.
Right. That makes Amber very different from other fossil first materials, like rocks because a new rocks most part of the time,
the organisms that became fossils, they had been hanging out, so to speak, in the environment for a while.
Amber Gill, you get. A very small window of the past trapped inside.
So it's definitely something that makes Amber unique right now, in the case of my experience with these sort of scenes, so to speak.
I have many that I like, but some of the closest to my heart are those entailing a baby later weeks, at least with the larvae.
Yeah. So one of them. And that was actually something that I had the chance to study or edit,
or maybe if there was a a lasering larva that was found preserved with a, a packet of or a cloud of tray combs surrounding the specimen.
Now it turns out that this specimen or this later we gathered that a cloud of combs from its environment try combs,
meaning fibres, hairs, I guess usually from plants or lichen, I can have quite beautiful shapes.
So in amber you sometimes see star shaped clumps.
That's the right word, because they're they're quite fragile looking, but you see them floating about like underwater creatures.
They're quite stunning. But of course, this kind of debris can be very useful and the larvae end up collecting this fluff floating about.
And that's something that is found nowadays in modern reality in extent green labelling like green list links and crate opens.
So they actively select different types of materials from their environment, and then they hold them on their backs,
or they get retained by special structures that are not so special shaped or have like structures that are even cooked or serrated,
and therefore they can attach those elements.
Now, interestingly, it's it's it has a twofold purpose.
It provides camouflage to approach their their prey.
And I suspect that we know right now these larvae are printed source that cell,
but also it provides a physical protection, a shield that can be used against their predators.
So it's a very small, very smart solution that through our natural selection and millions of years of evolution, these insects got to acquire.
And so it's one of my favourite examples because.
Aside from this ecological importance, we also were able to tell that these larvae were very different from their mother relatives.
What the larvae show, any predilections and what they pick up and use.
I mean, it depends, of course, I guess, what kind of material is available in their environment.
Is this something you'd be able to observe in the late spring larvae that are caught in amber?
Thus you're investigating? Absolutely.
And it turns out that this debris packet and that the larvae, the larva, sorry, had it on its back, it's entirely composed by these triangles.
And these freckles have a very special morphology. They make a sick sack pattern.
And that's why we think that they belong to a particular group of firms that are actually associated nowadays with wildfires.
So some species, some foreign species are prone to live in environments that get burned frequently.
Right. Actually, ferns are one of the first plants that get to colonise those areas.
Apparently wasn't quite specific. Well, it's actually this sensitive, right?
Because we only have one specimen most of the time. That's the case.
Right, with our findings, because chances are that we find the same species are very, very unlikely.
Right. We can both posit that. Maybe the their their issue was quite specific, right?
Because the strikers actually make a very fluffy strike.
So he could be very good in order to create your camouflage and protection.
But at the same time, we found a similar larvae in other ambers that.
Such as those from Lebanon, which are even older than the Spanish amber, that they are carrying bits of soil on their back.
And obviously, soil is an issue less is a nobody speaking a more available material.
Right. They use specific. Species or the tri compost, the plants or icons of a specific species right off of tree,
or they can be more generally sticky, which they make use even if you know, different source of materials.
One individual and I but they are using plants.
So an insect is gathering, you know, plant material is using stones and minerals and soil.
Yeah. So you have that real interplay between the animals they implement.
Thank you very much. That is brilliant. Thank you. I think you've got the best job in the world.
So I definitely something that I feel makes my my my days.
Well, yes, you're you're surrounded by Amber, but have you have you ever found bits of Amber yourself?
Oh, I was really lucky to find a small piece, quite reddish one on the Kent Coast earlier this year.
That that was brilliant, amber floating water.
And of course, aside from that being a characteristic that we use to extract the extract in the field,
it also means that that the sea washes it right sufficiently on the shore.
So I can see how finding some amber fragments when when doing a walk on the beach.
It must be a good experience I never had. I never if I've never found one myself though.
So I still need to experience that. Thank you so much, Ricardo, for this.
A glimpse into lost worlds, but worlds that work in much the same way as today's with regard to ecological relationships and adaptations.
So these worlds aren't really lost.
They are still here. The players may have changed, but the rules of the game are still the same.
We have covered quite a lot of ground from 3D dioramas from the 19th century that contain
taxidermy to today's virtual reality reconstructions of ancient or hidden worlds.
We have marvelled at 2D depictions of insect and plant ecosystems from the early
18th century and joined an early 19th century act of time travel through fossils,
forensic fossils that bear the marks of their ecosystems, which are there for us to decode.
We've also explored miniature dramas captured in many million year old Amber.
So what are the kind of dioramas natural history museums should put on display today?
How can we make biodiversity visible through virtual reality, through better displays,
by looking at the details and telling the incredible stories behind specific biodiverse objects?
How do we keep the context, the ecology of objects and specimens alive in the museum and in the visitors thoughts and imagination?
Well, let us know your faults. And thank you so much for listening.
I hope you enjoyed the journey and that you'll join us for the next podcast in the series.