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 sellers,
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 it. 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.
Is 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,
we will seek out the rarely seen or heard about any attic 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. Hello.
Welcome back. This is our second podcast in the series and it's called Extinction and the Museum.
Skeletons and Other Remains in Our Cupboards.
In this podcast, we look at extinction and the role of collections and museums.
This ranges from good researching causes for extinction and preserving evidence to the bad,
contributing to extinction or damaging populations and environments through overcorrecting to the
ugly legacy of regarding and displaying extinction as deserved in the survival of the fittest.
We will also explore the spirit of conservation methods of preserving animal remains one of the very few cupboards that no magic key did not open on.
My first days at the museum was the one containing precious objects from the Ashmolean collections,
the oldest core of the collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
But I have that special key today to have a look inside this particular covered with here.
Right. What can we see? Ooh.
An inflated pufferfish with spines, a little spiky ball.
Although the spikes look a bit worn.
Now, some species of pufferfish have some of the deadliest poison in the animal kingdom, so I will resist taking it out of the cupboard.
This dry fish still be poisonous just to make sure.
I asked like collections manager Mark Connell.
So it's a really good question and there are parts of the collections that we have to really take care when
we're accessing and handling because of the preservation methods and much rarer biological qualities.
With Pufferfish, which is a huge group, the tetrodotoxin that they contain synthesised from bacteria, from their environment.
And so the pufferfish, which can be toxic and all of them are if you raise them in aquarium,
they aren't toxic because they don't have exposure to these bacteria that you find in the marine environment.
And most the toxin is stored in tissues and sometimes in their skin.
So you're mostly at risk from poisoning by basically eating them.
In this example, this particular fish is 400 years old, so you'd have to get more intimate than we normally allow visitors to get with and be really,
really unlucky, I think, to suffer any effects from from remnants of toxins that might be lingering in this case.
I think it's a fairly low risk for museum specimens generally.
Phew. That's reassuring. Thank you, Mark.
What else is in the cupboard? Oh, a tiny armadillo.
I love armadillos with a long snout, pig ears and banded arm.
Armadillos were very popular and the cabinets of curiosities of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Even Rembrandt had a taxidermy armadillo.
It was also used as a symbol of the American continent.
And in the late 16th century, artist Adrian Collett personified America as a muscular,
half naked armoured lady riding on an equally armoured armadillo.
This armadillo definitely is not meant to look cute.
It is not only considerably bigger than this tiny specimen here in the cupboard, but also has a dragon like face with quite a rakish grin.
Armadillos are also very interesting to science, as the four young they usually have are genetically identical as they come from one single egg.
This is called poly embryonic, and in mammals it is probably unique to the armadillo.
But this this skull here, that that is really the showstopper quite beak heftier even than crocodile skull, which is also in this cupboard.
And it looks like it has two pairs of tusks.
It looks a bit like a strange wild boar, but it's a warthog.
The tusks are, in fact, the upper and lower incisors, typical for the warthog.
And this is a very special one indeed.
This very. Skull has only relatively recently been identified as the oldest known scientific water specimen in the world.
It was assumed the earliest water specimen had reached Europe in the 1760s and got its scientific last name in the following decades.
This one here, however, was listed in the catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum in 1685.
So much, much earlier.
So if the quite random assortment of specimens inside this cupboard seems strange, it only does so from our modern point of view.
So we used to need a geographical and taxonomic order that museum and natural history collections.
However,
time travelling educated visitors from the 17th or the 18th century in Europe would have no problem recognising and appreciating these specimens here.
They were, in fact, the standard fare found in one come on or cabinets of curiosities across Europe.
And these cabinets had their own logic and order focussing on the wondrous, the exotic, the amazing.
While still collecting evidence,
observations and data that would become the basis for the modern scientific collections and natural history museums of the 19th century.
And this is exactly what this cupboard is about.
These are zoological specimens from the Ashmolean collections.
The oldest core of the museum's collections.
As I said, these collections have also been referred to as the desk and Arc, which I think is a very good name, first of all,
because the curious objects and specimens were mainly collected by two john traditions, father and son, as well as the younger wife, Hester.
From the 1630s to the 1670s.
Elias Ashmole helped to catalogue and order them and eventually came into their possession and gifted them to the University of Oxford.
The whole coming into possession business was quite a murky one and does not shed a very favourable light on animals character at all,
in my humble opinion at least.
But I guess we should be grateful that this absolutely unique and precious collection of the treasure skins came to the University and to Oxford,
and all the way across the centuries. To us, a true ark, preserving priceless specimens.
Even if some of them fell by the wayside over the centuries, or very nearly did.
This is even true for the most iconic specimen from the desk in collections.
The Oxford dodo remains the only dodo specimen in the world to still have some of its soft tissue.
Sadly, the dodo did not make it in one piece to us.
The methods of conserving organic materials were still very limited in the 17th and 18th centuries,
and taxidermy animals would decay very badly within just a century or so.
This is probably why we only have one leg and the head left.
And here it is, even within this cupboard of wonders.
This is special. It has its own made to measure state of the art conservation box.
And if we take the lid off very carefully, this looks almost like a mediaeval shrine to a holy martyr buried on soft white material.
Precious remains like reliquaries bone and skin.
It is a bit of a mystery why the dodo has become such an extinction celebrity.
Is it the evocative name, the Alice in Wonderland Connexion, its charisma as a tragic comic character that's big, flightless bird from her ashes.
It was not used to efficient predators and apparently approached people when they first arrived on the island.
The dodo was first mentioned by Dutch sailors in the 1590s and became extinct through hunting, habitat,
destruction and invasive species within less than a century, probably in the late 17th century.
So perhaps it was also the first animal going extinct because of our actions that science and the more general public became aware of.
And that's why it's so famous. Even before its extinction, its rarity and strangeness caused some interest remains.
And even a few live dodos were transported to Europe, where they joined the cabinets of curiosities of Kings and noblemen.
Even a few live dodos joined the less exclusive enterprises.
There is an account of the wonderfully named historian Sir Hammond Strange, who saw a live dodo in London in 1638,
exhibited by a showman in a similar way that many creatures and people who were in any way different from the perceived norm became part of the shows.
Strange writes about 1638.
As I walked along streets, I sold a picture of a strange looking fowl,
hung out upon a cloth and myself with one or two more in company went in to see it.
The keeper called it a dodo, and in the end of a chimney in the chamber, there lay a heap of large pebbled stones.
Where off? He gave it, many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs.
And the keeper told us that she eats them conducing to digestion.
There has been some speculation that this this very dodo could be our Oxford dodo when it died, perhaps from being fed all these huge pebbles.
It seems logical that it would have been sold to the Traditions world famous collection,
which at the time was still located in south Lambeth in London.
And that counts of the tradition in collections predating the mentioning by Strange.
No dodo or any likely candidate as listed in catalogues or any accounts.
Really, the bird that could not fly quickly became iconic,
and we are incredibly lucky that this precious specimen was preserved first in
the Ark and then in the Ark of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
Who knows how many new insights and data we will get from these remains in the future?
DNA has already been extracted and revealed the taxonomic tree of the dodo that the date I was in fact a close relative to the also extinct solitaire,
and that they both belong to the family of pigeons.
Its closest living relative has been established as the Nicobar pigeon, despite or perhaps even because of all the latest technology we throw at it.
These remains will remain a source of wonder, but also of urgency, urging us to do better than this.
I am looking at the skull with some of its face still intact, looking naked.
I feel somehow I need to say something to it.
To the dodo. To mark this extraordinary moment of meeting it in the flesh.
Although there isn't much of it left, I don't know.
What can you say something like?
Dear Master of Extinction in your conservation grade cardboard shrine.
Please forgive us. Is this silly?
Sentimental? Perhaps. But our imagination, our emotions, our stories and connexions, I think,
are very powerful spaces and may perhaps yet trigger some sort of change that we learn.
I'd like to think that this is where the dodo now lives in a different kind of arc.
That is our conscience. Despite some claims to the contrary, no dodo eggs or remains of dodo eggs are currently known to have survived.
It seems fitting, therefore, that in this very same cupboard as the Oxford dodo is an egg of a more recently extinct bird.
Although this egg was not part of the Ashmolean collections and came to the museum only in the mid-19th century,
this extinct bird was also flightless, but much closer to home.
The EC sits in its own historical wooden frame glass case, complete with an almost theatrical black velvet cover.
Right. I am lifting the bell very carefully.
This feels like a magician's trick.
And here it is. Not a white bunny, but quite a big egg, perhaps the size of a goose egg.
But what it immediately reminds me of is a two big guillemot egg with its sort of triangular shape.
This is a great oak ache.
So the resemblance is no surprise really, because the great auk was a close relative to the guillemot.
And like the guillemot, it has a distinctive set of squiggles and splotches.
In this case, black and in shades of grey, on white and light on guillemot eggs.
These patterns are like fingerprints unique to the one bird laying the eggs.
It is now thought that this helps communal cliff breeders like Guillemot to recognise their own eggs in the packed colonies.
So what we have here really is like the fingerprint of an extinct bird.
This very useful and also beautiful variation in pattern and colour, however,
also had the effect of making the eggs very attractive to egg collectors.
Whereas naturalists mission is to describe the rule as well as the exception.
Collectors are often fixated on the rare and wonderful the variety of eggs.
The beauty made them highly desirable collectors objects, especially in the latter half of the 19th and in the early 20th century.
As the popularity of egg collecting sold, it became a huge money spinner and began to have serious consequences.
George Lupton is a good example. He was one of the most prolific and obsessive egg collectors in the 1920s and 1930s.
His particular passion were Guillemot Eggs and an unlucky female guillemot on Pentland Cliffs in Yorkshire,
who produced a particularly rare and desirable colouring.
Reddish Brown was never able to hatch a single egg or rare chick in her entire 20 year breeding cycle.
The acts were all taken by climbers, paid by Lipton and other collectors in pursuit of the perfect set.
The difficulty in obtaining the guillemot eggs only added to their desirability.
Thankfully, it is now illegal to collect eggs from wild birds.
Still, collectors collections were often donated to museums.
So in fact, museums often inherited something deeply problematic.
The guillemot survived the onslaught. It existed in big enough numbers and was rarely hunted for meat as it could fly.
The great auk, however, did not survive.
The last pair of great orcs were probably killed in 1844 off the Icelandic island of Elodie.
So this great oak egg is a rare treasure.
It is one of only about 75 known to still exist.
Very little is, in fact known about our egg here at the museum.
We know that the egg was given by a Lady Watson of Chop House Blackheath, London, to her relative, Sir Walter C travelling to day prior to 1839.
Sir Walter died in 1879 and bequeathed his egg to the University Museum at Oxford.
That is all. So I decided to do a bit of digging.
Thomas Marion Wilson, the seventh baronet.
He left from 1773 around that to 1821.
He lived at Chiltern House and apparently had a menagerie there.
It is recorded that he was the owner of a private menagerie of wild animals, some of which were allowed to run loose about his house at Cheltenham.
It's very tempting to think that there may have been a life great auk running
wild near Greenwich in London at the end of the 18th or early 19th century.
Well, at least the precious Oxford egg was sitting exactly there at some point.
So before the menagerie running loose, a more sessile collection could already be found there.
Made by Thomas Wilson's mother. So the sixth baronet.
The Father of Menagerie.
Thomas Marion Wilson. While Sir Thomas Spencer Wilson.
And he was married to Jane Weller. Lady Wilson.
She was born in 1749 and died in 1818.
And she was a keen naturalist, a fossil hunter and collector extraordinaire.
It was indeed Lady Wilson who amassed the very valuable collection of natural history,
which was recorded as a very valuable and consisting of minerals, fossils, insects and various other subjects.
She sparked a passion for natural history and the natural sciences in her family for generations to come.
Her collections still form the core of the museum at Wallington Hall, Northumberland and a testament to her wide interests.
Intriguingly, in a description for her portrait dating from 1879.
She's referred to as a college tourist, a beetle expert.
But a quick search on the amazing Biodiversity Heritage Library reveals that she might just as well be called archaeologist,
an expert on shelves contributing with her collections to various important works,
including the standard ones by James Selby or a mycologist or indeed an ornithologist.
So in the portrait painting in her portrait, she is also depicted holding the catalogue to her collections.
The Oxford Great Oak Egg is very likely listed there.
John Woolly in 1864 concluded it probably hailed from the water around new found plant.
Jane Wilson's daughter Maria married Sir John Trouble in 1791, and the oldest son is the Oxford University naturalist and geologist,
Sir Walter Seed Travelling, who donated the great oak egg to the university.
Natural history and the great object definitely seemed to have run in the family.
It's a great shame, though, that so little of Jane Wilson's collections and contributions to natural history are known.
Unfortunately, all too often the case of the naturalists, all scientists in question were women.
But back to the great auk its large size, enormous beak, and especially its flight looseness.
Just like with the dodo made the great oak unique amongst the seabirds of the North Atlantic.
They were first hunted for meat, the great ox, but also for their fat and feathers.
They were salted in barrels to take on ships, but also ever increasingly hunted because of their curiosity, value and their rarity.
Like the dodo as well, they were seen as stupid, clumsy and ungainly, the implication being that they were not fit for survival.
Anyway,
an account of 1879 describes how the poor stupid birds were driven into the sailor's boats and salted down to position the ships in great numbers.
The rarer the great auk became, the more valuable and more sought after he became as well.
And there was a veritable race going on with collectors going to extraordinary
lengths or paying someone to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain specimens.
And that meant dead specimens. So this was all about collecting and the status associated with trophy species.
Although partly clad in scientific interest,
this was hunting relentless human persecution and changes to the breeding colonies sealed the great ox fate.
At the Natural History Museum in London is a taxidermy specimen of a very special great oak, the so-called blocks oak.
This one is one of the most celebrated of all great oak specimens.
It was killed in 1813 on the Orkney Isle of Puppy.
And it is one of the earliest of the surviving taxidermy specimens.
The circumstances of its capture well known and recorded.
So the last pair of Great Oaks was known to the islanders as the king and queen of the Oak.
So this specimen in the Natural History Museum in London is the king of oaks.
It originally came from the collection of exhibitor and dealer William Bullock,
and the taxidermy specimen was acquired for the British Museum Natural History in 1819.
An account appeared in the Scots magazine of March 1814, written by Patrick Neal,
and he wrote He Bullock soon learnt that the female great dog had been killed with a
stone while sitting on her egg and that the male was still in the neighbouring body.
He had the satisfaction of getting solid of him and chased him for several hours unsuccessfully with a six aught boat.
He, I'm assuming the Great Hulk dived most dextrously and made great progress on the water so as to effectually elude his pursuers.
Last summer, the bird again returned to his former holds, but he was solitary, having been unsuccessful in procuring another mate.
The zeal of the island is being roused. He was at length killed.
This is the only British specimen known to exist.
So the killing of the queen and king of the ox took place on the cliffs of poppy and the waters around poppy.
So this small island is a very important place for the Great Hall.
And I went all my great old pilgrimage in 2016, and my inspirational guide was Puppy Ranger Jonathan Ford.
I asked him to talk to us again about what the great auk means to him and also to the island Oak Grove.
Good morning, Elaine. Good morning, Jonathan. Thank you very much for joining us.
There is a memorial to the great all up on the cliffs of Poppy.
Do you think it is important to have a memorial like this?
Yes, I think it's very important to have a memorial to the Great Oak Open for Craig.
I think for a number of reasons.
I think particularly at this moment in time, I don't think there's ever been a more important time to have a memorial to the Great Walk.
And even if it is just to remind us of what can happen if we do.
Ignore what's happening around us, particularly to sea bird species.
Pepe has seen a massive decline in CB seabird populations really even over the last 30 or 40 years.
People here will remember there being 15,000 Arctic terns on North Hill last year.
There may have been 300. And the year before that there was no kittiwakes.
There were 8000 known for Craig at one time.
Last year there was no. And so there's been a huge decline in seabirds.
And this is obviously echoed around the world as well.
And I always think, well, I dread the day that not only will we have a memorial to the great all powerful Craig,
but there will be a memorial to all the other birds that we've lost as well.
So I think as a visual reminder of what possibly could happen and what can happen,
I think it's very important because 1813 sounds like a long time ago, but 200 years not that long ago.
And, you know, I think there is a little bit of a.
An attitude that these things can't happen now that we've changed, that, you know, we know more about birds, we know we care for them a lot more.
We have organisations that look after them, but I think that's a very dangerous way to think and I think the memorial hopefully will.
Just raise awareness of that. And, you know, for for an island to lose its population is.
Yeah it's pretty dreadful really. So yeah a great I mean I think it is a very important time to have a moral to talk.
In fact, we are working on a new memorial to the great AUK, really just to re-emphasise that point.
So we're working on a project with the Natural History Museum to get the original specimen from here, 3D scanned, which has been done.
And then we're raising funds to get it 3D printed and then cast in bronze, and then we'll use that to kind of replace the memorial we've got.
I mean, the more we've got is is grand. It looks nothing like a great oak,
but it has many positives as well that it was made by kids for the I think it was the Orkney Field Club U.S. in the 1980s.
So it has a very strong resonance with the island.
So we will take that on out of the out of the wind and Geils and maybe put him inside somewhere and then
replace it with a bronze version of as close as we can get to the real thing being back up on Fall Creek.
You know, it's not a vanity project, is it? For me, it's much, much more than that.
And that whatever any awareness we can raise, whether it's either just doing the project or by the actual thing being so,
oh, good, I can't wait to see the new memorial,
but I'm also really glad that the old memorial is being kept even if indoors, because you've told a little bit of the story of this memorial.
And I think people like me who saw it there first made a very strong emotional connexion with it.
So yeah, I'm glad that one is going to survive as well.
Speaking about emotional connexion, this may be a bit of an esoteric question, but do you think that a landscape like the one him puppy,
these cliffs meeting the Atlantic can hold some sort of memory of an extinct animal, a plant that was once part of it?
And I think that's an interesting question. I think I think I have felt over the time I've been here and I've been here for seven years now and.
It's probably a little bit. I mean, I suppose I'm an exception to the rule.
I mean, I do think about the grey talk a lot, especially if I open for grey.
And you do try and imagine the bird being here, those birds being here.
But in some ways, it feels like to me a very, very distant thing.
No, I guess I'm just more. I think more focussed on now.
I think that's the cliffs tell you about now.
Visually, there's no getting away from now, really.
So I think places can hold memories of things.
Be nice if we could stand there and listen to what once was there.
I mean, even to hear a great talk would be something.
I think it was Marconi that thought that all the sounds of the world never died and that actually they just carried on around and around.
But we just didn't have the technology to hear them now that they going beyond any kind of audible sense.
But they were still. Women around the world. So perhaps we could invent some sort of device to police for Craig that was good
enough to capture sounds that were once there and that were pretty amazing,
I think. It's an interesting question and probably one that we think about a lot more now than probably ever.
I think that probably it actually I think that is the the guiding light in it all.
Actually, there's a hope that. You can in some way feel these things that have come.
How wonderful it would be if the call of the Great all still existed somewhere.
And we just need to find a way to make it audible again.
But I think Jonathan is right. The here and now is what counts and preventing extinction from happening all over again.
So let's hear what the here and now sounds like Up on the Cliffs of Puppy, recorded for us by Jonathan.
It's 1239 on the 1st of May at Fall Creek.
Just a sound recording right by the Great Oak Memorial. Sounds from the Cliffs of Puppy, which used to be the home of the now extinct great oak.
Thank you very much, Jonathan. I'm carefully covering up the precious great oak egg again, and I'm returning it to its caput.
I love collecting myself. Mainly shells, fossils and minerals, so it can understand a little bit what motivated a collectors.
But one specimen collecting becomes entangled in prestige, status and the marketplace.
This can very quickly spiral out of control, and museums, sadly, can play a role in this when rushing to buy or accept rare specimens.
Today we have very strict laws, but illegal collecting, sadly, is still happening.
Looking at the great old egg just reminded me of another egg that not so long ago I was shown by one of the curators and it was very different.
It's quite small and looked like polished alabaster and quite white.
And this was a passenger pigeon egg.
Yet another extinct bird found in North America.
It was so numerous in the 19th century that it flocks, numbered billions and darkened the skies.
It was probably the most numerous bird species that ever existed within less than 100 years.
The passenger pigeon went from billions to none at all, and the last individual named Martha died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Relentless hunting on an industrial scale and habitat destruction decimated the passenger pigeon to a population size that was not sustainable.
And once I started chatting about extinct birds in the museum's collections with Ralf, who is currently looking after them,
it became clear that there is quite a number of them in the bird store and I asked him to show me a few of them.
And here was the passenger pigeon itself, not just the egg.
So it's not quite in the flesh, but as near enough, I guess, as the taxidermy can make it, its glass eyes look ever so slightly in the wrong position.
It was quite disconcerting. But.
But its nick has a beautiful patch of pink iridescence and I wasn't prepared for that.
After all the historical illustrations I looked at and the accounts I read and seeing this, really, I felt a lump in my throat.
It was so beautiful. And and somehow this lump in my throat only got worse when Rob got down the box with the ivory billed woodpecker skin.
So skin here, meaning that the bird has not been mounted, unlike the passenger pigeon,
but and it also has no major additions like glass eyes, wires or an artificial torso.
It just looks like a stretched out dead bird. And the ivory billed woodpecker is a particular favourite of mine.
It was one of the largest woodpeckers in the world and it lived in the forests of the southern United States and Cuba.
Its coal apparently sounded like a toy trumpet, which would make it similar to the still exist and black woodpecker,
which I'm quite familiar with from the Woodlands around Berlin.
And here is a recording from Berlin by Stefan Riche from the amazing database See No Country.
It never fails to thrill me when I hear art and the little trill you hear in the
middle between the two trumpet calls is also a call the woodpecker makes in flight.
So, yeah, it's a very musical book.
The last accepted sighting of an ivory billed woodpecker in the U.S. was in 1944.
There have been spurious reports since that it may still be around.
There were sightings, but you cannot help but wonder if this is more wishful thinking.
Hoping to see the bright red flame of its crest dancing again in the woods.
It wasn't hunted quite in the same scale as the passenger pigeon.
It never existed in in such great numbers.
But the deforestation of vast stretches of land sealed its fate.
And also, unfortunately, again, the hunting by collectors as it became rarer.
And collections and museums were scrambling to get their hands on a specimen.
So I feel a big hiss, a strange range of emotions when looking at this specimen.
Feeling the enormous privilege to be able to see it with my own eyes.
That it's still present here in the museum, at least as a kind of bodily ghost.
I also feel a huge tenderness somehow towards that which I can't quite explain
and just plain fury that we but we've managed to destroy it and its world,
its whole ecosystem. And naturalists, scientists and natural history museums were complicit in this.
Instead of protecting, they were collecting.
We are supposed to be the clever guys on this planet and we just can't get it right.
Will we ever grow up to be Homo sapiens? So this is what happened when I met the ivory billed woodpecker, right?
We can see the cotton wool poking up here while.
The regs is pretty good. So striking.
Believe that the feathers are still glossy.
Yeah. Especially that. I mean, the red is pretty impressive.
Really impressive. And they can see the whites.
Yeah. You want to? Yeah, you do.
Yeah. And so you can just conquer. You can hear them in.
Oh, yeah. Oh, oh, oh.
Poor thing. Yeah. They always commit sides, especially when they've can bench sufficient books.
That's just nice to see the whites, the bank as well. Amazing.
I wish I had that hair colour. It's just crazy.
It doesn't look natural. It looks totally bonkers.
Right? Well, I think that's fine. Let's go back in.
Ready to go back. I'm so grateful to Rob for this encounter with the ivory billed woodpecker.
It is a somewhat curious custom to give Christian names to the last individuals of a species, at least, I guess, since the 20th century.
So we have Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons or Lonesome George, the giant Galapagos tortoise.
It's this guilt, I wonder.
And did this also apply to the last thylacine? So the story goes that its name was Benjamin, although this is probably post mortem.
Benjamin died in Hobart, in Tasmania in the zoo in 1936.
He was a so-called ending, say like Martha and Lonesome George.
He was the last of his species. I've always been fascinated by thylacines or Tasmanian tigers, as they are also called.
How can it look so much like a wolf or a tiger and be related to kangaroos?
It looked more like a wolf, but it had stripes.
So it was called a tiger. And in fact, it had nothing in common with either Wolf or Tiger.
It was a marsupial more closely related to the cuddly looking koala.
I will never forget the moment I came face to face with one.
McConnel, the collections manager, had taken me on a tour of the old spirit store in the dark, cavernous basement of the museum.
I must say I felt slightly high from the fumes emanating from all these jars in all sizes.
And to me, this was like a glowing underwater treasure trove.
And the specimens in the jars, although discoloured and often slightly off shape, seemed all life to me somehow.
Then the carefully prepared and curated taxidermy animals on display upstairs.
And Mark stopped at one impossibly large jar that stood on the floor.
It came up to my thali and inside were floating stripes.
I nearly jumped a Tasmanian tiger.
So here at Oxford there are two spirit specimens and these individuals do not have names and we know very little about them.
They were quite thoroughly dissected at some point and look quite mangled, to put it nicely,
but is strange to see a big complete, well, reasonably complete animal like this floating in fluids.
Normally you'd expect them to see them as taxidermy animal, and the conservation of animal remains is its own fascinating craft and science.
And without it, museum specimens would not last very long at all and would be unable to tell their tales.
Jackie Chapman Grey is the museum's conservator, and I felt I'd find her in her lap and ask her about her work.
Preserving the animals and organisms second lives as museum specimens, just as in life.
They are all individuals and every single specimen has its own needs and requirements.
Okay, Jackie, thank you very much for your time and welcoming us to your studio or lab.
This time of scene I found quite fascinating because it's such a huge animal and it is suspended in fluid in a huge jaw, basically.
So it's unusual for such a figure. It's not unusual to have them in a big job, but it is unusual to have an adult thylacine.
So adult vaccines are the rarest wet specimens in the world.
Well, we have a headless female who's being dissected, and I think there's five carcases in the world,
four of which have been disembowelled or eviscerated.
And I think the National Museum of Australia has the only complete by the sea in fluid in the world.
It is quite rare, even organ.
So we have separate organs of it in jars and I think in the world there's 98 jars of fluid preserved organs from the vanishing,
which seems like a high number but is quite a low number for one.
I guess species. And so what kind of fluid is it actually in in?
So it'll be in 75% ethanol. Most things these days are stored in ethanol or formalin 10% formalin.
So for our museum, we put things in 75% ethanol.
Some museums use 70% ethanol. The higher the concentration, the more intact the DNA.
So ethanol at 90% and above, you can extract DNA still from fluid, preserved specimens.
So there are stories in the old days of 200 years ago,
they would use sometimes brandy and things like do we have a grasshopper that's in its original rumble?
And it would have been plopped into the wrong when it was collected.
We still have I think we have some herbarium specimens that are in the little windows they were collected in and that would have been wine.
So I think it was 1662, it was called wine spirits at the time.
Things were put originally in wine spirits and that how that's how preserving fluid specimens started.
So it was interesting. It's evolved over time, but basically whatever was to hand is what they got put in.
So on a ship you would expect lots of rum, brandy.
So collectors just put them in that. Yeah.
Remember stories that sometimes the crew would actually drink the, the fluid of the specimen when they're desperate.
I'm not surprised. But yeah, we still have at least the bottles.
So the bottles then become part of the specimen and then become a museum object just because the history is intertwined.
And so what's your day to day job like?
Erin Mine's quite a mixed bag, so I work on some things across the museum, so environmental monitoring and I have that open generally.
As soon as I get in, I reckon all the graphs and charts check them and then that stays open for the rest of the day.
Answering enquiries. At the moment I'm focussed on our display projects so we have 20 new main upright
cases that are being revamped and I've got close to 700 specimens to work on.
I'm almost done with the first case and I have started the second case at the moment.
That's all my time. Training staff is another one.
Mentoring conservation interns.
Students, volunteers like managing our Mount Maker and our conservation or museum cleaning technician who also does conservation.
Do you feel you've got a really privileged access to the specimens?
I mean, you get closer to them than anybody else. I guess that is that.
Yeah I mean really enjoy it is I love my job.
I love what I do. I do like getting up close and personal.
I've worked in museums for 32 years,
so it's you kind of forget that you have that advantage over other people until someone comes in and goes, Oh, wow, look at that.
And then you realise, Oh yeah, my job's pretty cool. I get to see what other people do and I get to hold things that most people wouldn't even touch.
And a lot of times I've worked on the dodo, I repaired the eye orbit,
so I took it down from its current or it was mounted on and sort of it fell apart.
So then put it back together and I'm kind of a bit blasé about it,
but when I stop and think about it, there's not many people who would get to do that in the world.
So there's quite a special thing to be able to do.
The specimens tell you a lot about the history.
In a way. I had some swordfish rostrum and you can see where they've had a fight.
So if you can sort of determine what's a scratch potentially and what was something that happened during its life, by the way?
It's age, by the way. It marks the bone. That's that's yeah.
It's a little bit harder to determine. But there's some things that after working on natural history specimens for a while,
you just sort of pick up thing you get to see back through the time frame.
One of the most interesting things recently was with our deck of main displays.
We had, I think it was a crocodile, an alligator, and they were literally blown up like balloons but stitched.
So they all the bones, even in the feet, have been removed, which is quite unusual.
And we could see through the skin had been inflated that large,
but they were stitched up so we couldn't quite figure out how it was done and it would be hard to find
like a pig bladder or something like that that you could insert in the time to to keep that shape.
And it's perfectly shaped. It was by a doctor gone to oh, and their only process that is similar is inflating caterpillars they used to.
So I spoke with our entomologists. They they would remove the internal organs from the caterpillar through the vent or the anus,
and then put a little glass straw in and inflate them that way.
And of course, that gives you an amusing vision of how a crocodile might be done.
But we had to treat it slightly differently because everything else was packed with straw or some sort of packing material,
and that was completely void of it. So is it quite hard now if you pricked it, would it just go?
No, is quite to say it would have been a long bladder that kept it in it.
To have an inflated bladder and still stitch through around that bladder would be quite complicated.
So I really hope somewhere there's a record of how it was done.
Yeah, I think just part of it is the social history behind collecting and how taxidermy or fluid specimens are done.
That was fun. Thank you so much, Jacki. But let's return for a moment to the thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger in its big jar of conservation fluid.
So Tasmanian tigers were regarded as a possible threat to human farming by the European colonisers and indeed much like wolves.
They were hunted down mercilessly with bounties being paid for dead ones.
And although rare for many decades, they were only officially protected from 1936,
which ironically was the very year they also officially went extinct.
Sadly, it wasn't just hunting to kill that took place.
They were also hunted in order to supply living thylacines in Australian and European zoos and at once for museum collections.
Passenger pigeons were also regarded as pests and because there were so many of them, no one thought they could ever go extinct.
So think again if you think anything living is a pest and there's too many of it.
Just think again.
Earl Fuller, expert on extinct animals, quotes Steven Slate home regarding 19th and early 20th century scientific verdict on the thylacine.
The scientific community perceived the thylacine as being an evolutionary relic considered slow, dumb, stupid and cowardly.
It's the same story again and again. First, the stupid dodo.
It's all by nominal name. Vida's ineptness means exactly that.
Carl Linnaeus bestowed the name on the dodo,
and his German translator concludes in 1773 that this was fully justified as the dodo could not only not fly,
but was also waddling awkwardly and was too stupid to know to run away from people.
Same with the great auk. The passenger pigeon could fly, but because it was migrating,
roosting and nesting in enormous numbers could just be clipped out of trees or even the air.
Jill Greenberg in his book A Feathered River Across the Sky,
quotes to a contemporary source as recounting how the fat chicks of the passenger pigeons called squawks
could just be shaken out of trees and would hit the floor and often burst open like a dropped pumpkin.
Is ironic that the very specialisation of extinct or endangered animals, the perfect adaptation to very specific environments, was seen as stupidity.
Until very recently, the dodo and the great auk had no need to fly before humans appeared.
Why expend energy on something you do not need?
The passenger pigeon had no need to hide. Its enormous numbers meant the predators would only ever be able to kill a tiny part of the joined flocks.
Until humans came who hunted on an industrial scale, we've seen a little bit of the good,
a little bit of the bad and a little bit of the ugly of natural history collections and museums.
To me, the most important role of natural history museums is preserving date and specimen.
They are still arks, but they are also places for cutting edge.
Research happens. They also celebrate and communicate the oneness of biodiversity and its loss.
Speaking of loss extinction, there is always the hope, probably, that an extinct species will be found again,
even if it's being declared extinct for decades, or that we can somehow clone them or bring them back to life.
And did you know there is such a thing or the term Lazarus species?
So I became quite intrigued by this concept. And you can also find Lazarus species in museums as well as the environment.
So I thought I asked Mark Cano about what this extinction terminology means, what is behind that?
I heard the term Lazarus species so that when an extinct when when something that was thought to be extinct resurfaces or is rediscovered.
Yes, there's lots of really nice, fun terms for species which have disappeared.
So we have things like Elvis, taxa, zombie time, Lazarus.
Wow, somebody is good. Yeah. So. Lazarus Taxa and, uh, organisms which were thought to be extinct or haven't been seen for a long time.
And probably the most well known, one of those is second.
And so the number of living species. Another example is a mask for me.
A Paulina I think is one of the largest yet.
So they know their name from the fossil record 500 million years ago.
And today we kind of consider that a distinct class of molluscs.
And there's like a level of goblin hat to show this this gap of 400 million years.
And they were rediscovered in 1950. Wow, that's great.
Lots of taxa and things like Elvis taxa is when something is thought extinct.
And then it was thought that it wasn't extinct, but it wasn't that something else that looked like it?
Yes. Very nice. Very nice. Some fun terms when it comes to species which may or may not be extinct.
A zombie taxa. A we is a tendency ontology that refers to a organism or fossils of organisms which
have been fossilised and then eroded out and then redeposited into later times.
So it looks like something was around much later than it was and it was takes off.
And that's not to be confused with what's called decade walking, which is modern organisms,
which, although are still around, have a low likelihood of surviving.
And so this is where the ending organisms come in, in our species,
which are reduced to a handful of individuals of either one sex or not, with a five or whatever population size.
And since these are interesting times we used to play to talking about how different species are faring,
but also told me about the rarest, possibly extinct British animal.
Nobody, including me, seems to know about it.
And this may be because it is an anemone really I find very interesting what you said about the charismatic ones that went extinct.
I mean, they gets a lot of publicity now and I call Eat Like the Dodo.
But yeah, you're right. Sponges that went extinct, nobody really cares about or knows about a no,
some example you told me about and I had no idea of an organism that went extinct quite recently,
actually, during, well, some of our lifetimes here, so not somewhere far away.
Yeah. So we have we have them occasionally we get people coming to see them.
So in the, in the museum we have a couple of jars which they only known samples of anemone called Ibis and named after Ivo.
And it's invariably been called Britain's rarest animal, Britain's most endangered animal,
because it's only known from one locality, once from a brackish lagoon.
What's unusual about it and why it sometimes attracts these titans of rarest or most critically endangered,
or whether it's extinct on or has it actually split up into.
It's because very because of the century, because the ice age in Britain was almost completely covered with ice.
And there are very few species which we have which we only find here and because we find them across northern Europe.
But I was in an anemone is one of the handful of species that sort of easily accessible.
So you're absolutely right.
And, you know, my own biases are when you tend to think about animals in extinction, we tend to think in three decolonial ways of,
you know, that's happening somewhere else or that's happening in places which have these exotic.
Of course, it's also happening here. And I was in 10 minutes a really good example.
The environment where it was found still exists. There have supposedly been a couple of efforts to go and refind it, but these have been cessful.
And this is one of the difficulties. And I think why some of our icons of extinction are these insular animals is because it
can be prohibitively difficult to work out with if something doesn't exist anymore.
Which is why I think, you know, the systems that we have for listing and species as vulnerable or endangered, critically endangered.
The emphasis proof is the wrong way around.
And so particularly for marine organisms, it can be almost impossible to demonstrate that something is totally gone about.
So colleagues here at the museum and frequently are rediscovering species,
which we thought we had in the UK for sometimes tens of years, sometimes hundreds of years.
And that's purely down to something nobody has made the effort to go and specifically
look at these things where and when you'd expect to expect to find them.
We think about marine organisms. It's a whole extra level of difficulty.
This is what I love about museums.
People come here to ask questions not only about the obvious, the charismatic and beautiful, but about the tiny, the weirdos, the usually unnoticed.
And there's always more to discover. A bit like in any other ecosystem.
And here as well, there be Lazarus spaces.
The importance of a particular specimen or even just its existence may only surface after decades in a storage box in a museum,
as there are just too many specimens for a handful of collection managers and experts,
things generally perceived as boring and not sexy enough to deserve much funding or attention.
Like record keeping, archives, labels, catalogues, databases, and such like are the very planks that hold the art that is the museum together.
It's no use to have a dog if you don't know what's in it or if you know you should have something and you can't find it.
You need people to keep it in shipshape, including the specimens themselves, so that they will last the journey in good spirits.
Sorry for all the puns. Bad puns, but natural history museums, as we've seen, can also become part of the problem through overcorrecting,
creating a market for rare specimens, destroying habitats through collecting, for instance, dredging.
Or they will acquire and exhibit the collections of hunters and, well, essentially hunting trophies.
In the past, they've also become complicit in simplistic and twisted narratives of extinction
and have enriched their collections through colonialism and exploitation,
not only of the natural world, but also of people.
But I think the more narratives museums allow specimens to acquire the scientific, historical,
cultural, personal, emotional narratives, the more meaningful and precious they become.
And with a bit of luck, we can transfer this feeling of preciousness and connectedness to nature and biodiversity still out there in
the wild to safeguard it as the ark that carries us all nature and culture collections and collectors alike.
To me, this is what natural history museums are all about.
Thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
Just in case you haven't come across them. There are two more in the series and please do get in touch and let us know what you think.