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Happy Thylacine Day: we haven’t learned – just look at the badgers
Thylacine: A species that was alive within living memory Picture this: an animal in a zoo dies of exposure one night because the door allowing it to return to the inside area of its enclosure was...
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Specimen of the Week: Week Nine
Well now my dedicated and trusted readers (I choose to believe that you exist in this format), I am currently in sunny Mexico trampling across Mayan and Aztec ruins, filling my brain with more...
View ArticleThe price of the pouch
I went to an absolutely excellent UCL Lunch Hour Lecture by a good friend of the Museum, Dr Anjali Goswami about how the way marsupials reproduce has impacted on their evolution. In any case, it’s my...
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Finding and not finding the rarest museum specimens – Happy Australia Day
This is the tale of two non-discoveries. More accurately one non-discovery and one discovery of something not sought. I often dream of thylacines and I often dream of the Grant Museum, but only once...
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Specimen of the Week: Week Twenty-Two
I want you to guess a location. If I say ‘marsupial’, you say… Australia? Survey says… ‘Eh ehhhh’. Modern marsupials are in fact also found in both North and South America. North America has only...
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Kangaroos cooked up by Cook / Strange Creatures
Seeing is believing, right? I’ve often looked at historic animal paintings and wondered “how come artists back in the day couldn’t draw animals?”. We’ve all seen images of animals that are extremely...
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Specimen of the Week: Week Twenty-Nine
A favourite in my household when I was growing up, these South-Pacific mammals are pleasant once you get to known them despite their bad reputation, only really fight when it comes to women or food,...
View ArticleCatching dingoes in the dead of night
I spend lots of my holiday time volunteering for a charity in Australia which manages huge areas of land for conservation. The Australian Wildlife Conservancy is dedicated to undertaking in-depth...
View ArticleAnimal record breaking
So far I’ve been very good at not linking activities at the Grant Museum to the Olympics. While I’m out here on ecological fieldwork in the remote northwest savannahs of northwest Australia, The Games...
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Happy 76th Thylacine day
Another year has passed since the last known thylacine – one of the greatest icons of extinction – died of exposure. That makes 76 years today.Thylacine: A species that was alive within living memory...
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Book Worm… Kangaroo by John Simons: A Review
Book Worm – that’s Grant and a lugworm I’m writing this second review in the predictably punned “Book Worm” occasional series whilst in the desert town of Alice Springs. As I like to match my reading...
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Europe’s First Kangaroo and the Grant Museum: Save our Stubbs
James Cook’s landing in Australia in 1770 changed the political, social and natural world. With regards to the latter, the animals the expedition discovered, described and exported have had profound...
View ArticleIt’s Australia v England, in battle over Stubbs masterpieces
In September I wrote a post about two paintings by George Stubbs – of a kangaroo and a dingo – which had been placed under an export bar to allow time for the National Maritime Museum to raise funds to...
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Specimen of the Week: Week 141
Zoology is tribal. To the outside world natural historians present a united front: the geologist is my brother and the botanist my friend. But hidden within are genial rivalries. You might find that...
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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...
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 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...
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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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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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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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