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| A jar of moles |
Last weekend R and I went on an action packed weekend to London. On our last visit we were unable to visit the Grant Museum of Zoology and I completely forgot about the Natural History Museum at Tring, so that's where we spent some of our time on this trip!
The Grant Museum of Zoology was founded in 1828 by Robert Edmond Grant, the first professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in England. He was from Edinburgh and is credited with establishing that sponges were animals and giving them the name Porifera. The collection contains around 67,000 specimens of taxidermy, wet preservations and skeletons packed into glorious wood and glass cabinets upon cabinets. It was once, and still is, used as a teaching collection - a haven of education and inspiration for the likes of me!
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| Beautiful glass nudibranch (sea slug) models made by the Blaschka family in the late 1800s |
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| How often do you see fin whale foetuses? |
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| Surrounded by slides! |
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| Relatives and ancestors looking down |
There are also a few examples of extinct species in the museum such as the Quagga skeleton (member of the zebra family), Dodo bones, Thylacine (Tasmanian wolf) and a giant deer skull with huge antlers.
We also spent a couple of hours at NHM Tring, the collection by Lionel Walter Rothschild (who has lent his name to hundreds of species!) opened to the public in 1892. The galleries are impressive large glass case displays providing corridors around a central atrium. Some have old wooden entomology cabinets, opening the wooden doors carefully to find out what beautiful inverts are lurking underneath!
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| Giant ground sloth skeleton |
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| A variety of longhorn beetles |
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| Saiga - a type of antelope |
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| Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine |
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| There is a an impressive taxidermy collection of domestic dogs |
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| Including this tiny dude |
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