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Specimen of the Week 363: The kangaroo stomach
After nearly a year working at the Grant Museum I realise I have become accustomed to aesthetics of my working environment. Decorations in your typical office might include team photos, prints of...
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Specimen of the Week 336: The Common Spotted Cuscus Skeleton
Good afternoon to all Specimen of the Week lovers. Before I get started with my inaugural blog I’ll take this opportunity to introduce myself. I’m Chris – museum...
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Specimen of the Week 330: The taxidermy koala – The language of natural history
With generic terms like mankind and Homo sapiens (“wise man”), people of all genders are well aware that it is the masculine that has dominated the vocabulary of humanity. Not so in the animal kingdom....
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Specimen of the Week 318: The newly recapitated bandicoot
This is embarassing. The sheer scale of natural history collections means that some objects are going to be wrongly identified, and the fact that generations of professionals have worked here over...
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Happy 81st Thylacine Day: Thylacines were lucky to last as long as they did
81 years ago today – the 7th September 1936 – the last known thylacine died, committing its species, indeed its entire family, to extinction. The last known living thylacine, 1933. (Image in the public...
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Specimen of the Week 306: The Bilby Skull
Bilby skull LDUCZ-Z82 Australia is widely considered to be the extinction capital of the world. In the 230 years since European invasion, 29 of its 315 native land mammals have been driven to...
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Specimen of the Week 283: The Eastern Quoll
Eastern quoll. LDUCZ-Z2307 Mongooses, ferrets, shrews, meerkats, otters, weasels and cats: These are animals that most people will be familiar with. Planigales, ningauis, kalutas, dunnarts, mulgaras...
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Specimen of the Week 242 – the Marsupial Lion
Thylacoleo skull cast LDUCZ-Z3167 1) Large lion-shaped predators were living in Australia until around 50,000 years ago – lion-shaped, but not lions. This is because there were no wild cat species in...
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Specimen of the Week 224: The Rock Wallaby Skull
Rock wallaby skull. LDUCZ-Z845 The high octane pop-rock band The B52s are responsible for one of the world’s most aggressive earworms – Rock Lobster. A tune so catchy that it takes no heed of the...
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Specimen of the Week 223: The Tasmanian wolf
One of the most interesting things about zoology for me is the way in which skulls are sculpted by evolutionary and environmental forces. A particularly fascinating outcome of such processes is...
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Specimen of the Week 218: The Sugar Glider
Preserved sugar glider. Petaurus breviceps. LDUCZ-Z2171 Climbing up things can be challenging, be it hills, cliffs, trees or stairs. Climbing down, however is arguably far more difficult – your eyes...
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Specimen of the Week 208 (Four years!): The four-eyed opossum
Preserved four-eyed opossum.LDUCZ-Z1596 As those of you who can divide 208 by four – or have read this post’s title – will have realised, four years ago this week Specimen of the Week was born. The...
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Specimen of the Week 195: The Kangaroo Joey Preserved on a Teat
Kangaroo joey on teat. LDUCZ-Z1102 For the past fourteen weeks a kangaroo has been the most celebrated object in the Grant Museum, but it was not part of our collection, nor was it a zoological...
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The earliest Strange Creatures: Europe’s first meetings with marsupials
There is a popular British colonial narrative in which Captain James Cook “discovered” Australia in 1770, as demonstrated by this Google autofill: Evidence that James Cook indeed discovered Australia...
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Specimen of the Week: Week 185
This week I’m honouring a mammal that we can link to two significant factors in my life recently. First, it’s an Australian hopping marsupial, as are kangaroos. Our current Strange Creatures exhibition...
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On the search for the Scaly-tailed possum: Wet and Wildlife
A scaly-tailed possum caught on a camera trap in AWC’s Artesian Range. (C) Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Over the past few years I have been spending my spare time in a remote area of the Kimberley,...
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18th Grant Lecturer: Anjali Goswami
Dr. Anjali Goswami out on field work Dean Veall here. On Tuesday this week Team Grant celebrated what would have been Robert Edmond Grant‘s 221st birthday in the a suitably zoological manner raising a...
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Specimen of the Week: Week 160
We all know that in this world of competing stimuli, an animal really needs to work hard to get people interested, achieve celebrity status in the media, and ultimately realise the dream that all...
View ArticleHappy 78th Thylacine Day: Remember the little guys
Today, in Australia, is National Threatened Species Day, but far more importantly. to Grant Museumers, it’s Thylacine Day. Both of these events commemorate the ludicrously avoidable death of the last...
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Specimen of the Week: Week 147
Museums are full of mysteries (particularly when you are as cursed with historically challenging documentation, as many university museums are). For example, why do we have a plum in a jar? Why does...
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