The Secret Life of the Leeds Tiger

The Leeds Tiger over at Leeds City Museum is one of our best-loved exhibits, but how did it get here and was it really once a rug?  

Thanks to some amazing research by Ebony Andrews, (in her PhD thesis ‘The Biographical Afterlife of the Leeds Tiger’), we have the answers to some of these questions!

The Leeds Tiger came from Dehradun in the Himalayas. It was shot in 1860 by an Anglo-Indian Army Officer, Colonel Charles Reid of thje Sirmoor Battalion (2nd Gurkhas) and sent back to Britain as a prize specimen.

This tiger is rumoured to have threatened the local population and may have been shot as part of a cull. Former curator Henry Crowther wrote of it ‘having destroyed forty bullocks in six weeks and was considered so formidable that no native dare venture into the jungle where this noble beast reigned supreme’ in a 1906 guide book.

Preservation – from skin to mount

The tiger would have been skinned in the field and then more carefully cleaned, with the head mounted by a taxidermist. At this point, Colonel Reid sent the skin to London, where it was exhibited at the 1860 International Exhibition in South Kensington.

By 1862, the skin had arrived in Leeds, where it was presented to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society Building Committee. A local taxidermist, Henry Ward, was commissioned to shape the skin into a full body mount.

Emma, our Conservator, working on the Leeds Tiger.

It seems that Ward had a difficult task, as he wouldn’t have known exactly what the original tiger looked like. Researcher Ebony Andrews believed that the skin might have been trimmed after it was tanned, leaving missing sections underneath the tiger’s chin, neck and up all four legs.

Posing the Leeds Tiger

Henry Ward decided to present a ‘fearsome’ tiger, pinning the ears back, stretching the jaw wide and putting the claws out. We’ll never know for certain whether the Leeds Tiger really lived up to its dangerous reputation, but today it sends a shiver down the spines of visitors to Leeds City Museum.

By Jen Newby, Digital Media Assistant

Sources:
Ebony Andrews, PhD thesis ‘The Biographical Afterlife of the Leeds Tiger’ (September 2009)

Taking care of our taxidermy collection

Swallowtail butterfly

Museum collections require constant care and there’s a lot of conservation work going on behind the scenes at Leeds Museums.

Right now, some of the animals usually displayed in Leeds City Museum’s Life on Earth Gallery are being conserved. We’re taking the opportunity to reveal what goes on behind the scenes, following the animals from their case to our conservation department!

Otter

Dangers and Pests

Museums take plenty of precautions to prevent pests from accessing our collections. Simple things like avoiding food and drink on the gallery can make a difference.

Good environmental conditions, well-sealed cases, regular pest monitoring, and the chemicals used to preserve taxidermy specimens all reduce the likelihood of our specimens being damaged by pests.

Unfortunately, something will very occasionally slip through all our deterrents. Recently, we discovered moth activity in some of our Life on Earth Gallery cases.

The larvae of the Webbing Clothes Moth (Tineola bisselliella) feed on natural fibres, including fur and feathers, and we found adult moths and the dropping of larvae had made their way into the taxidermy case.

Moths have eclectic tastes, so to be safe, we have removed a large variety of animals, including our famous Leeds Tiger. His companions range from butterflies to bats; birds such as the Black-headed Oriole, Huia (now extinct) and Yellow-capped Mannakin; as well as an otter and a Grey Seal.

Yellow-capped Mannakin

A trip to ‘quarantine’

We have arrangements in place to deal with invading pests! In order to prevent further spread of the moth, and to protect the rest of our collection, we have temporarily removed the affected and vulnerable specimens to the quarantine facility at Leeds Discovery Centre, our museum store. There we will freeze them to kill all the moths and larvae.

We hope to return all the specimens to the gallery soon, and apologise for any disappointment caused to visitors

By Rebecca Machin, Curator - Natural Sciences

Museums and extinct species

Natural science museum collections contain some of the huge biodiversity that we share our home planet with. A particular jewel of museum collections that curators are keen to shout about are specimens of extinct species.

Despite the promises of technological advances, once species have become extinct, we will never again share our planet with them. Millions of years of evolutionary history, billions of generations and iterations of natural selection are irretrievably lost.

Museums holding specimens of these lost species then become the only place where we can see them or learn from them. If we’re really lucky, there may even be recordings of their sounds held elsewhere. But that’s a poor substitute for enjoying them in the wild, and certainly no use in filling whichever ecological niches have been left empty by extinction.

While researching for my Bird Name of the Week tweet, I came across our Kōkako study skin. First of all, enjoy that name. Kōkako. There are two types of Kōkako, both from New Zealand. Some consider these to be two distinct species, while others consider them two subspecies within the same species. The bird skin we have in our collection had been catalogued simply as ‘Kōkako’ (I’m going to keep using this word while I have the chance!). When researching the meaning behind this name, it became obvious that our Kōkako is, or was, a South Island Kōkako. The North Island Kōkako (Callaeas wilsoni  (or Callaeas cinereus wilsoni)) is dark grey bird with characteristic blue wattles, visible in our two taxidermy mounts of this species.

North Island Kōkako

In contrast, the South Island Kōkako (Callaeas cinereus (or Callaeas cinereus cinereus)) has orange wattles, as seen in our study skin specimen.

 South Island Kōkako

As well as their wattle colour, the North Island and South Island species of Kōkako have another very important difference. Although they are endangered, it is still possible to see a North Island Kōkako in New Zealand. However, the South Island Kōkako is now thought to be extinct, the last confirmed sighting being in 2007.

So, it seems that Leeds Museums and Galleries can add another species (or subspecies) to our list of extinct animals in our collection. The extinction of the South Island Kōkako has made this sad-looking specimen precious. It will be vital in the future, perhaps to research the genetics and conservation of the surviving North Island Kōkako, but certainly to teach us why we need to look after our planet, and what we risk losing if we don’t.

Rebecca Machin, Curator – Natural Sciences

Treasures of the Herbarium Collection

During my placement at the Discovery Centre I have been documenting the Herbarium collection donated to Leeds Museums by the University of Leeds. 

Conserving delicate plants

The herbarium sheets, cones and seeds that I am working with are stacked in groups by the species to which they belong and groups of species folders are then placed together into larger folders by genus. The genus folders are then sorted by taxonomic family. 

The sheets have been temporarily stored in plastic wrapping and so I am unpacking the bundles and re-storing them in new conservation-grade boxes. Some of the specimens have been mounted on newspaper like the one above and you can see how the paper has become discoloured over time. I will have to re-mount some of the specimens on to acid-free paper to preserve them for the future.

Why do we preserve herbaria?

Herbaria are important for studying plant taxonomy, studying geographic distributions and in cataloguing the flora of a certain area. 

(Osmunda regalis)

Having a large collection from a single area can help us to understand the natural distribution over which plants grow and can provide a historical record of plants that have become extinct in one area. This information helps environmental scientists who track climate changes and human impact on the local species.

This example I found in the collection is Osmunda regalis a species of deciduous fern collected in York in 1877. If you look closely at the handwritten note above the label, in 1927 (forty years later) 

'In spite of reports that Osmunda was all gone from Askham Bog, I am glad to learn that it still survives on one spot, in small quantity….but strictly preserved.'

Another note below this says 'Happily increasing by protection 1936!'

This Osmunda regalis (above, left) is a perfect example of herbarium specimens being used to keep track of plants over time.

(Antirrhinum Majus)

Pictured above is Antirrhinum majus, collected by Ida M. Roper in 1829. These plants were often called ‘snapdragons’ and were thought to have supernatural powers to provide protection against witchcraft. This is probably because when the flowers die they leave behind seed pods that look like skulls. This specimen has some interesting newspaper clippings that show these macabre seed pods.

Finally, these are my favourite specimens found so far in the herbarium collection. I think they are beautiful and delicate, they could almost have been painted in watercolours. 

By Gemma Bailey, Herbarium Work Placement Student, University of Manchester

Eggy Oddities: Why Kiwis Produce Massive Eggs

Generally in the natural world the size of one’s offspring correlates with the size of one’s self. Elephant babies are huge and mouse babies are tiny. The bigger the bird the bigger the egg or the bigger the egg the bigger the bird…depending on which came first! Of course nothing in nature is that simple and so there are a few exceptions to this rule.

Kiwis are the smallest of the flightless bird group, ratites. However, their eggs are the largest relative to body weight of any existing bird. To put this into perspective, the average kiwi weighs just 2500g and an average kiwi egg weighs a massive 371g. This is 15% of a kiwi’s body weight. In comparison an ostrich weighs around 100,000g and lays an egg weighing just 1314g.  This is only just over 1% of the ostrich’s body weight (Figures taken from Amadon, 1947). 

Despite the horror inducing image of producing an egg this size, kiwis are highly productive and an average adult female will produce one of these giant eggs every year (McLennan et al. 2004). Females produce these eggs at little additional energetic cost. Half the energy needed to produce them is obtained from stored energy reserves (McLennan et al. 2004) rather than the bird desperately having to forage for food during egg development. Furthermore when the egg hatches the female still needn’t panic about providing for her young as the kiwi egg contains an unusually high yolk content (65% (Piper 2007)) which can sustain the chick until it is able to forage for itself. 

The greatest benefit of producing such large eggs is that they hatch into highly precocial young. This means kiwi chicks hatch fully feathered with open eyes and within a week are able to feed themselves (McLennan et al. 2004; Frances and Larter 2011). Being precocious helps young to evade predators. However, before mammals were introduced to New Zealand kiwis had very little problem with predation. 

Nocturnal predator species such as owls were only as large as 600g and therefore too small to prey on even young kiwis (McLennan et al. 2004). In modern days despite being nocturnal, well camouflaged and elusive kiwis are still preyed upon by introduced mammals including rats and stoats (Attenborough 1998; Frances and Larter 2011). The large and strong egg of the kiwi protects the chick as they are too large and heavy to be broken by rats (McLennan et al. 2004). Despite these adaptations smaller kiwi species are preyed upon for the first four months of life before outgrowing their predators (McLennan et al. 2004). 

Although there are some clear benefits of producing such enlarged eggs the true reason why kiwis exhibit this level of parental investment is unknown, but given the choice it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t prefer the parental life of our humble domestic chicken. 

By Sarah Burhouse, Zoology Project Placement Student

References
Amadon, D. (1947) An Estimated Weight of the Largest Known Bird, The Condor, 49 (4), pp. 159-164. 
Attenborough, D. (1998) The Life of Birds. Great Britain: BBC Books.
Frances, P. & Larter, S. (2011) The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Birds. London, UK: Dorling Kindersley Limited. 
McLennan, J., Dew, L., Miles, J., Gilingham, N. and Waiwai, R. (2004) Size matters: predation risk and juvenile growth in North Island brown kiwi (Apteryx mantelli), New Zealand Journal of Ecology, 28 (2), pp. 241-250. 
Piper, R. (2007) Extraordinary Animals: An Encyclopaedia of Curious and Unusual Animals. USA: Greenwood Publishing Group.

A bird in the hand... - Photographing the Leeds Bird Skins Collection

Pink Cockatoo ​skin, photographed by Sara Porter

Our bird skin collection has all been fully rehomed and documented. Now that the Skin Deep project has finished, the bird skins are all arranged in drawers, so are much more accessible to view and handle than their previous home in boxes.

Patterns and plumage - photographing the bird skin collection

My work this morning was some of the nicest in a while! My task was to choose around a hundred bird skins to be photographed by Sara Porter for a new display panel in our Leeds Museum Discovery Centre store. I was looking for a range of colours and patterns, so all I had to do was take a peep in each drawer, picking out my favourite in each. I chose birds which covered all the colours of the rainbow, and more besides, as well as some which have amazing patterning on their plumage.

I have seen the majority of our bird skin collection, but I was still taken aback by the beauty of these birds, as well as coming across some amazing specimens I hadn’t seen before. I really am privileged to be able to see the amazing plumage of these species close up. I thought to myself of the phrase ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. Obviously this is supposed to be a metaphor, but it got me thinking…

Why do museums preserve specimens?

One of the things that museums can offer visitors, researchers, and indeed staff like me, is the chance to see some of the immense biodiversity we share our planet with, up close. Seeing a specimen in a museum can be very useful to give a sense of size, and enables us to look closely at details we might miss when watching a living specimen in the wild. For instance, some of our butterfly collection have patterns which you would not be able to view closely if you saw a live butterfly flitting through a rainforest.

Speckled Tanager skin, photographed by Sara Porter

Museum collections are a valuable resource for research, scientific and otherwise, and for inspiring visitors. Personally, I find it sad that many animals were killed in the past for museum collections. However, since they were, I am glad that we can use them to benefit surviving biodiversity, and to add value to our lives. And it is vital that we do.

Highlights of the collection

Taking the ‘bird in the hand’ adage literally, I couldn’t disagree with it more. It has been amazing looking closely at the plumage of beautiful (and beautifully named) birds such as Speckled Tanager, Splendid Sunbird and King Paradise Bird. But I would love to see a distant glimpse of any of these birds in their natural habitat. Imagine the sun reflecting off iridescent wings, or the movement of long tail plumes during flight. I can try to imagine, because I have seen these birds’ skins today. And that makes museums brilliant.

Natural history collections offer us the chance to see some of the world’s biodiversity under one roof. But it would be a very sad world if all we could do were to imagine living birds from museum skin collections. Nothing can replace the experience of seeing nature, living, in the wild, complete with smells and sound and feeling.
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By Rebecca Machin, Curator of Natural Sciences
Follow Rebecca on Twitter @Curator_Rebecca

Mirror Image Museum - Creating an exhibition at St James's Hospital

Over the past several months, I have been organising an exhibition for the Bexley Wing of St James’ Hospital, Leeds. Each year an exhibition is organised for the cancer ward at the hospital by a curatorial trainee, with a different theme that is open enough to draw from the entire museum collection. My theme is symmetry and, on 2nd February we installed ‘Mirror Image Museum’ – a collection of symmetrical objects and photographs incorporating natural, social and industrial history.

Step 1: Choosing the objects

Once the theme of symmetry had been chosen, I asked each curator to send me a list of objects that they would like featured in the exhibition. Over 100 objects were suggested, ranging from porcelain dishes to glass cinematic prisms – the natural history objects I chose myself. I selected those I felt best suited the exhibition, either due to aesthetics, interest or practicality. 

Step 2: Condition checking and photography

Each object chosen for the exhibition was forwarded to Emma, our conservator, to be condition checked. After Emma had cleared each object for use (or rejected some due to the bright environment of the hospital being unsuitable – light damages objects over time) I arranged for a professional photographer, Sara Porter, to take photos of the objects that could not be displayed physically. 

Step 3: Writing labels and planning the space

I requested label text from each curator and started writing up the natural history text. As the physical objects were still in quarantine at this point, I used Sketch Up to create a 3D model of the exhibition space (pictured left) – a great help for planning and ensuring things fit where I wanted them before getting my hands on the real things!

After the label text had been sent to graphic designer Steve Mann for production, finally I gave the top surface of the cases a fresh coat of paint and applied the magnetic wrap around covers Ruth, Exhibitions Curator, had ordered to give them a more professional look. 

Step 4: Installing the objects

Fellow trainee Adam gave me a hand setting up a ‘trial run’, laying out all of the objects in the cases to ensure that there were no nasty surprises on the day! Thanks to this the installation went very quickly and smoothly when Ruth and I set the cases up in the Bexley Wing. 

Seeing months of planning come to fruition was greatly satisfying, as was seeing the interest of passing visitors. I hope that ‘Mirror Image Museum’ entertains visitors and staff at the Bexley Wing during the three months of the exhibition.

By Glenn Roadley, Natural Sciences Curatorial Trainee

On Twitter @batdrawer1

Crinoid Cake

​To celebrate the arrival of our new Geology Curator, Neil Owen, Natural Science Curator Clare Brown created the Lemon Drizzle Crinoid Cake – celebrating a mysterious creature from the oceans.

Looks can be deceiving as crinoids are animals not plants. They are members of the phylum Echinodermata. This group of animals is made up of starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, sea cucumbers and sea lilies. First appearing in the fossil record during the Early Ordovician, 480 million years ago and survived to present day. They were prolific from the Carboniferous to the Cretaceous with over 6000 species discovered.

The seas at this time would have been teeming with crinoids gracefully swaying in the currents, almost resembling plants in the breeze.

Unlike their relations, they developed a unique body structure with a body (calyx) was covered in a flexible membrane and was made up of interlocking plates, held aloft by a long stem made of individually stacked plates (ossicles)to form a column. At the base of this column they attached themselves to the sea floor with a root like structure (holdfast). On the upper surface of the body they developed arms (brachials) with tiny filaments (pinnules) to filter the passing water currents.

Unfortunately this body plan has been lost in time as modern crinoids have evolved to resemble sea urchins and are entirely mobile.

You can learn more about our Geology Collections over on the #GeoBlitz blog​.

By Lucy Moore, First World War Projects Curator

The Passenger Pigeon - 100 Years On

September 1st 2014 marked the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), a stark reminder of the destruction humanity can inflict on the natural world.

It is estimated that when Europeans first arrived on the coasts of North America, the Passenger Pigeon was the most abundant land bird in the country, with numbers ranging from 3 billion to 5 billion individuals – accounting for over 25% of the entire bird population. For over two hundred years, there were dramatic accounts told of the dense clouds formed by migrating Passenger Pigeons, blacking out the sky for days at a time with flocks a mile wide.

Passenger Pigeons would migrate around the country, moving whenever weather conditions or food availability became unfavourable, settling down in forested areas to roost. The roosting sites were often massive; though no accurate data was collected, estimates place nesting sites as covering many thousands of acres. One report of a site in Wisconsin estimated the roosting area to cover 850 square miles, housing over 136 million birds.

The decline of the Passenger Pigeon:
Passenger Pigeons had always been used as a food source by both Colonialists and Native Americans, however this had no real effect on the massive populations. The real damage started in the 1800s, when professional hunters began to trap the birds for sale at the town markets. Because of the dense populations found at nesting sites, Passenger Pigeons were captured in the hundreds of thousands – young birds were knocked out of nests with sticks, and burning sulphur fumes used to daze the birds so that they fell to the ground. 50,000 birds a day were killed over a period of five months at one of the last large nesting sites in Michigan, 1878. Those that survived were quickly tracked to their new nest sites by hunters and killed before they were able to raise young.

By the 1890s the bird had almost completely disappeared. In 1897 a bill was passed asking for a 10-year ban on the hunting of Passenger Pigeons – unfortunately the damage had been done by this point. The success of the Passenger Pigeon depended on its large numbers, as massive flocks were relatively unharmed by predators and adverse conditions, whereas the few surviving individuals were simply picked off.

Martha: the Last Passenger Pigeon:
There were not enough birds left to recover the species, despite numerous attempts with captive animals – a common problem we’re facing with many endangered species today. The last known Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden on September 1st 1914 at 1pm. Martha was mounted and is now preserved in the collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

What can we learn from the Pigeon's fate?
The attack on Passenger Pigeons by humans was two-fold – the slaughter certainly hastened their extinction, though it is likely that they were doomed by the deforestation that swept across North America. The lesson of the Passenger Pigeon is a poignant one that we shouldn’t forget, and is a reminder that the destruction of a species should not be allowed to continue until they appear on the ‘critically endangered’ list – by that point it may be too late to undo the damage.

Today, the only way to see a Passenger Pigeon is by visiting a museum, as fortunately specimens have been saved by 19th century collectors. These skins and mounts are the last remnants of a once thriving species and must be preserved for future generations to appreciate – museums provide access to extinct and endangered species for education, research and to satisfy (and enhance!) curiosity.  If you’d like to see a Passenger Pigeon for yourself, why not visit Leeds Museum Discovery Centre to see one of the seven specimens in the collection?

Glenn Roadley, Trainee Curator of Natural Science
@batdrawer1

Bibliography:

• Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 2001. The Passenger Pigeon
• The Chicago Academy of Sciences, 2012. About the Passenger Pigeon. 

A slug on a night out

I saw this lovely Leopard Slug on my path early this morning on my way to work. Leopard Slugs look rather like normal slugs on a night out, wearing fetching leopard-skin outfits. This one looked like it was on its way home after a big one.

One of the weird things about Leopard Slugs is the way they mate. Once paired up, they hang on a thick mucus thread, curled up together in a load of slime. I once saw a pair of them hanging from the corner of my bird table – it was quite a sight!

One of our previous curators here, Adrian Norris, is an expert on slugs, and he added many to our museum collection while he worked here. The best way to preserve slugs is to put them in jars of ethanol, as they are soft-bodied and can’t be taxidermied like vertebrates (animals with backbones, for example birds and mammals). We have several jars of leopard slugs, as well as other species, in our collection.  

By Natural Sciences Curator Rebecca Machin 

@CuratorRebecca

Sunny Sand Martins

I often see nice bits of urban wildlife on my walk to the Discovery Centre from the train station. Lately I’ve been cheered by the sight of Sand Martins (Riparia riparia) flying around over the River Aire by Leeds Bridge.

These are amazing birds, related to the more familiar Swallow and House Martin. They are called Sand Martins because they usually nest in holes in sandy banks, but these ones have been nesting in holes eroded in the sandstone walls of the buildings by the river. They were feeding on small insects flying above the river. Sand Martins are only in the UK over summer, and will migrate to Africa for the winter.

Here’s one of the Sand Martins in our collection (pictured above) at Leeds Museum Discovery Centre. It was an immature Sand Martin, collected in Arthington near Leeds in 1888 by F. W. Branson.

My colleague Kirsty Garrod and her team of volunteers and interns have been improving the condition of and access to our bird skin collection through the Skin Deep project, funded by the Designation Development Fund, part of Arts Council England. Our bird skins and other collections can be used to help conserve biodiversity, as well as being fascinating in their own right.

By Natural Sciences Curator Rebecca Machin
@CuratorRebecca
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Leeds helps in the fight for the endangered Tasmanian Devil

Leeds Museums and Galleries has three Tasmanian Devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) in its natural science collections. Their DNA has been taken and looked at by a team in Australia who are researching ‘devil facial tumour disease’ in the hope of finding a cure for this terrible condition.

One of the brilliantly stuffed Tasmanian Devils at
Leeds Museums and Galleries

Leeds, a large, rich, Victorian industrial city, spent most of the 19th century collecting scientific material from around the world. We had a ‘purveyor of Australian wildlife’ and acquired, amongst other things, two Devil mounts and a skeleton.

The study, also using specimens from Oxford, looked at genetic diversity in a group of molecules in cell membrane proteins called the ‘major histocompatibility complex’. Low diversity in this complex has been linked to the emergence and spread of devil facial tumour disease. The team needed samples of historical and ancient Devil DNA to see how diverse the populations were before European settlement and after. (Link to the article,published in Biology Letters) 

This is a great example of how museum natural science specimens can contribute to scientific research at the forefront of species conservation.

By Natural Sciences Curator Clare Brown

@CuratorClare

clare.brown@leeds.gov.uk

Collections through Cake: A Juvenile Giant Squid

Whenever I give a tour of the Discovery Centre, I always let visitors know that there is ONLY ONE object in our collections that isn’t the realest of real deals. In this case, I think we might be forgiven as it is a model of a juvenile giant squid. 

He was built for a temporary exhibition called ‘Slime’ which was in the Central Library in 2002 and now provides some jaw-dropping awe-factor to the Discovery Centre.

He is also delicious made out of cake:

Here are some #SquidFacts that I’ve come across:

• The study of squid is called teuthology.
• The earliest known ancestor of today's squid is Kimberella, a tiny mollusc that looked like a jellyfish and lived about 555 million years ago.
• Yes, squid are molluscs, just like more familiar shelled sea creatures. Snails are also molluscs. Mollusca is a huge taxonomic family.
• Giant squid have tentacles with suckers lined with teeth. These teeth chew prey so that it can then be swallowed.

• Squid have beaks, rather than mouths.
• Sperm whales prey on giant squid and often bear scars from the be​-toothed tentacles.
• Some neuroscientists practice their surgery skills on the nerves of squid, as they are thicker than human nerves and easier to practice with.
• Squid have an internal mineralised mass called a statolith which helps them to balance (like a counterweight I suspect).
• Statoliths have growth rings (like trees) and can be used to measure age. They suggest that giant squid only live for up to five years.
• Giant squid (along with colossal squid) have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom – up to 27 cm in diameter.

Interestingly, the squid probably has several brothers and sisters at natural history museums all over the world because it would cost manufacturers so much to make the cast, that they would make several models from it.

If you’d like to say hello in person, drop us an email, or telephone and we can show you around!

By Projects Curator Lucy Moore
@CuratorLucy

Collections through Cake: The Hedgehog

At Leeds Museums & Galleries, there is a great collection of taxidermy. One of our Site Development Officer Gemma’s favourite objects is this lovely hedgehog.

As it happens, this week is National Hedgehog Awareness Week. To honour hedgehogginess in general, Gemma caked (pun intended) ours in chocolate and buttons for spines.

Hedgehogs have been decline across the British Isles, due to a number of factors, including road deaths and death by invertebrates that have consumed slug pellets. 

Other things to note about hedgehogs:
- They are lactose intolerant – so don’t give them any saucers of milk.
- The spines are in fact modified hairs and grow to be 2.5 cm long.
- Hedgehogs have around 5000 spines, but each individual spine only lasts about a year.
- A baby hedgehog is called a hoglet, but they have also been called pups, kits and piglets!
- Adder venom has no effect on hedgehogs.
- Hedgehogs were ‘domesticated’ by Romans, who used them for quills and for meat.

The collective noun for hedgehogs is an ‘array’. At Leeds Museums & Galleries we have an array of nine European hedgehogs in our collections, including two skulls and one mounted in a 'defensive ball' position. 

By Curator Lucy Moore
@CuratorLucy

Collections through Cake: Butterfly Taxonomy

Rebecca, one of our awesome Curators of Natural Science, is on maternity leave. Just because you have small people, d​oesn’t mean you are excused from #MusCake duty! She made this fantastic offering of taxonomic butterfly cakes:

Taxonomy is the practice and science of the classification of things or concepts. Biological classification is based on characteristics derived from shared descent from common ancestors.

As the definitions imply, taxonomy can be something quite hard to explain, yet is fundamental to how we understand our world. Rebecca handily used cake as a medium to clear it all up! 

Some explanation: Latin is the language of Science, all new animals are given a Latin name which describes their characteristics. This is called binominal nomenclature. The name shows the genus and the species i.e. we are Homo sapiens (of the genus homo and the species sapiens). All these cakes are Laganum* (genus=cake) papilio (species=butterfly).
  
The eagle-eyed will have noticed that these Laganum papilio are all different. On the left we have the subspecies vanilla and cocoa (we enter trinominal nomenclature now!) – they are the same, but different. For example, the Amur tiger is Panther tigris altaica, whereas the Sumatran Tiger is Panther tigris sumatrae – both tigers, but of different subspecies, in this case due to their geography.

But what would happen if Laganum papilio vanilla had little caterpillars with Laganum papilio cocoa? Because they are subspecies, they are able to breed, and so we move to the cakes on the right. Here the X shows that they are hybrids! So Laganum papilio vanilla X L. p. cocoa is a mix of characteristics between a vanilla butterfly cake and a chocolate one.
  
*As it is a name, the first letter is capitalised. It is also traditional for taxonomic names to be written in italics.

By Curator Lucy Moore

A mountain of bird eggs: Unpacking the collection

I dedicated much of my year as a Biology Curatorial Trainee working on the bird egg collection at Leeds Museum Discovery Centre after it had been left packed up following the move from the old store. You can read an introduction to this project in my previous post. My first task was to unpack the specimens to improve their storage and see what we had.

A lot of the eggs had been removed from cabinet drawers and individually bagged up and put in cardboard boxes. I also discovered recently bagged up specimens still in their original makeshift containers, such as shoe boxes, cocoa boxes and cigar cases, including one with late 19th century newspaper as padding (see image). 

Removing them from these tight confines dramatically improved the storage of these specimens and reduced the risk of damage. There were also specimens that hadn’t yet been removed from partitioned cabinet drawers, often lined with deteriorating, highly acidic (sometimes pink) cotton wool. I individually bagged up these specimens so they were no longer in contact with the acidic lining and could be separated out when later rearranging the collection. I kept any data with the newly bagged specimens. 

Some specimens didn’t need unpacking as they were stored in individual glass-topped boxes, which offered the best possible storage for the collection. The specimens were laid into the drawers within the racking (see right).

As I unpacked these boxes and drawers, I stumbled across lots more boxes of specimens that I knew would require a bit more work. It was at this point that I realised what I had let myself in for and was glad I enjoyed pair matching games. The boxes contained large poly bags each filled with an assortment of eggs. I could tell by collector marks on the eggs that some of them belonged together.

I spent many days matching up specimens (see left) including some that had been in separate bags and could well have been stored separately for years. These specimens were also laid into the drawers.

I really enjoyed the unpacking phase, even when having to match up mountains of mixed eggs. It was actually quite therapeutic and satisfying being able to unite specimens and reinstate clutches of eggs. 

Being the first person to look over the collection as a whole was quite a privilege. I got to see all of the great specimens we have including the largest egg, from an elephant bird, to eggs from endangered and extinct species, such as the Passenger Pigeon. I was also able to uncover the quirky specimens and reveal for the first time the unique stories behind them.

By Kirsty Garrod, Biology Curatorial Trainee

A look back at the bird egg collection project

Back in March 2012, I joined the Leeds Museums and Galleries team as a Biology Curatorial Trainee and was privileged enough to be given (near) free rein over the natural science collections, to improve my curatorial skills and knowledge of natural sciences while expanding my museum experience. One collection that needed some attention was the bird egg collection, so I worked on it over the course of my traineeship year.

I realise that more than a year has passed since I finished as a trainee, so you’re probably wandering what has taken her so long to blog about the egg collection project and why now? After all, I now have another bird collection - the skins - to worry about.

Well, this blog is long overdue and, given the seasonal nature of public engagement with the egg collection, what better time is there to do it than in spring, when birds will be laying their eggs? Also, as I get used to my new role, I often find myself thinking, what if the egg collection was already perfectly curated when I began my traineeship and I was given a completely different collection to work on, would I be where I am now? I like to think that my interest in the egg collection and my passion for this project helped me secure my current role.

Along with the rest of the collections, the egg collection was packed up and relocated from the old store to Leeds Museum Discovery Centre in 2007 and not much had been done to it since then. Boxes of specimens were still tied to drawers from being transported but at least there were drawers and plenty of new racking space to house the collection!

These cardboard boxes provided a very cramped and acidic environment, with such fragile specimens only being protected from overcrowding and high acidity by the poly bag packaging (see image). Should anyone have wanted to get to particular specimens to check for pests, damage or get them out for visitors to look at, it would have been a very time consuming process. All in all, this was a far from ideal way to store the collection and it was the poor conditions driving the work that followed.

By Kirsty Garrod

Red-billed Oxpecker: The rhino’s guard

​I’ve been working as an intern with the bird collection for the past six weeks. I was quite excited to find in the collection a Red-billed Oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorhynchus). Unfortunately, the specimen (see image left) looks rather drab as it has lost its magnificent yellow and red eye. The colour has also faded from its bill, although it retains its distinctive shape.

I was particularly pleased to see this bird in the collection because of the mutualistic relationship it shares with Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis). In Swahili, oxpeckers are known as “askari wa kifaru”, which means “the rhino’s guard”. This is because they warn rhino of approaching danger. 

Rhino have very poor eyesight and rely on their excellent hearing and sense of smell. Oxpeckers, like many birds, have excellent eyesight. They often perch on rhinos to feed on ticks and other skin parasites of rhino. However, when they spot a potential predator, such as a lion, they will fly into the air screeching. This warns the rhino that something might be up, and they had better be on the look-out.

What is really interesting is that, if the parasites weren’t present, the oxpeckers wouldn’t sit on the rhino’s back and provide this service. Hence, in a roundabout way, the presence of the parasites may be actually helping, rather than harming, the rhino.

By Andrew Stringer, 
Natural Sciences intern, 2014.

Welcome our new acquisition of a Hawfinch!







Hawfinch (Coccothraustes coccothraustes)



Today we acquired a new specimen! Pictured above it is the skin of a Hawfinch and one of their most notable features is their large powerful beak which is used to eat hard seeds and stones of fruit such as cherries, plums and olives. Hawfinches are shy birds that mostly stay in the higher branches of trees and their numbers are on decline in the UK.

We have 18 Hawfinch specimens, but even though they are all the same species they have individual information attached to them providing details of the environment of the area that they were found. For instance, you would know that it wasn't moorland, as these birds need trees with hard seeds as part of their habitat. If a specimen was collected 100 years ago in a particular place and that species is no longer found there then that signifies that the environment has changed. This information can be valuable when looking at conservation, reintroductions and environmental education.

Collecting is different to how it used to be. In the past things were shot or caught in traps but when accepting modern specimens we will only acquire things that have died of natural causes from trusted reliable sources. If a big game hunter offered us a lion we wouldn't take it!

Rear-side view of Black-headed Gull.



Rear view of Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus)



For some reason we often have Black-headed Gulls (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) tapping on the skylights so I thought I would use this opportunity to take a rear-side view.

Black-headed Gulls do not actually have black heads, it is more a dark chocolate brown which they only have in the summer around breeding time; the rest of the year they have white heads with two dark spots. The gulls are definitely not 'seagulls' as they are mainly land based and do not fly far from the shore. Food wise they will eat a large variety of things including invertebrates, carrion, seeds and rubbish scraps and they are known to live to over 30 years of age, with one unconfirmed story of an individual reaching 63 years! Expect to see them all over Europe and around north-eastern North America, there was even one sighting in Australia, although this was very unusual.