NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON: A Few of Our Favorites

Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton in front of the Natural History Museum, London.

On our recent trip to London, the Natural History Museum was our first stop. The museum is enormous and you can’t possibly see it all in one visit. And even if you do have time, it is best to decide which things to focus on. Our main goal was to see the exhibit of the winners of the yearly photography competition—100 photos selected from more than 4000 entries. We also wanted to revisit some of our favorite parts of the museum.

Blue whale skeleton in Hintze Hall.

We walked to the museum from our hotel near the South Kensington tube stop and entered at the East Gate, where we followed a path through the Evolution Garden to get to the Central Entrance. The museum is free, but we had to line up to go through security. Once inside, the giant skylit space of Hintze Hall loomed before us, with a huge whale skeleton hanging overhead and a grand staircase leading up to a statue of Charles Darwin.

Art with Statue of Charles Darwin.

After paying our respects to Darwin, we stopped at the information booth to pick up a map and get directions to the photo exhibit. The map divides the museum into four color coded zones. We focused on the Green Zone which includes birds, the wildlife photographer of the year gallery, fossil marine reptiles, and treasures of the museum, where we saw the fossil skeleton of Archaeopteryx, the first bird.

Caroline with fossil of giant sea reptile collected by Mary Anning.

On our way to the photo exhibit we passed by the amazing display of fossil skeletons of giant marine reptiles, many of them collected by Mary Anning in the nineteenth century. During the Dinosaur Age the oceans teemed with these huge reptiles.

Wild Photographer of the Year Gallery.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year photo exhibit requires a ticket, which we purchased at the entrance. Each photo in the exhibit was backlighted so that it glowed in the partially darkened room and was accompanied by a label with the title, photographer’s name and other pertinent information. What surprised me was not only the diversity of the subjects and locations where they were shot, but the variety of cameras—ranging from specially designed equipment to a simple iPhone.

Photo of moth camouflaged against tree bark--taken with an iPhone.

Having worked with photographers on many of my books, I know how hard it is to get just the right shot. I appreciated a quote mounted on one wall of the exhibit: It is vital to be patient and wait for the moment that completes the story you are trying to tell, even if it takes hours or days or weeks, or sometimes even years. (Akansha Sood Singh, natural history filmmaker)

Models of two dodos. Extinct since 1681 due to overhunting, habitat loss and predation by other animals.

The exit from the photo exhibit was through the museum gift shop where it was possible to buy postcards and books of the images in the exhibit. We then visited the bird room in search of the Archaeopteryx fossil but got sidetracked by a case full of birds that have gone extinct, including the dodo, which once lived on a remote island in the Indian Ocean. Although we found a cast of Archaeopteryx in the bird room, we learned that the actual fossil, one of the most valuable items in the museum’s collection, was upstairs in the room of treasures. So we trudged up the stairs to find it.\

Fossil of Archaeopteryx embedded in limestone. You can see impressions of feathers attached to the wings.

After viewing Archaeopteryx and the other museum treasures it was time to sit down and have some refreshments, which we did in the Central Café behind the stairwell on the main floor. We had seen many of our favorites and been inspired by the photo exhibit. We’ll come back another day to see more.

Main entrance to the Natural History Museum, London.

MARTHA, THE LAST PASSENGER PIGEON, at the Natural History Museum, Washington, DC

Illustration of a Passenger Pigeon by Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 1729-1747

Once there were billions.  Now there are none. One hundred and fifty years ago gigantic flocks of passenger pigeons blackened the skies of North America. However, due to indiscriminate hunting and habitat destruction, the flocks rapidly diminished, and by 1914 only one passenger pigeon remained alive. She was known as “Martha” and lived in the Cincinnati Zoo.  When she died one hundred years ago, the species became extinct.

Passenger Pigeons; Martha, #11, on left

Martha’s body was sent to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, where she was preserved and put in the research collection. She has been off of public view since the 1960's, but in this centenary of her demise, she is once again on view and is the center of a special exhibit, Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America.

Recently, I had a chance to visit the Natural History Museum and see Martha for myself, along with other now extinct birds including the Carolina Parakeet, Great Auk and the Heath Hen.  Martha is displayed with several other passenger pigeons from the museum collection and with historic illustrations from the archives of the Smithsonian library. Distinctive features of the passenger pigeon are warm pink breast feathers and soft grey feathers on the back and wings. (Passenger pigeons are related to another native American species, the band-tailed pigeon-- not the ubiquitous pigeons that inhabit our towns and cities, a non-native species imported from Europe.)

The passenger pigeon was among the many birds painted by John James Audubon for his book The Birds of America. In 1940, Norman Rockwell painted a picture for Look Magazine depicting a scene of Audubon observing passenger pigeons in flight.

Great Auk with Audubon print above

The Smithsonian’s Great Auk is one of about 80 museum specimens. Living in large colonies along North Atlantic shores, the birds were easily slaughtered for their meat, eggs, feathers, and oil.  They were extinct by the mid-1800's.

Heath Hen

In colonial times, Heath Hens flourished from Maine to Virginia, but they were tasty and easy to kill and their numbers quickly declined. The last heath hen, living in a sanctuary on Martha’s Vineyard, died in 1932.

Carolina Parakeets

Carolina Parakeets, prized as decorations for ladies’ hats, became extinct in the wild by 1904; the last one died in captivity in 1918.

The story of the last Passenger Pigeon and the disappearance of the Great Auk, Carolina Parakeet and Heath Hen, illustrate the fragile connections between species and their environment.  This exhibit reminds us all that we need to pay attention to the natural world and the complex connections of all the living things in it.

Note: Audubon Magazine featured the story of the Passenger Pigeon in its June 2014 issue, which included a pull-out origami Passenger Pigeon and link to a website “Fold the Flock” designed to create awareness of the Passenger Pigeon's plight as the folded birds are added to the virtual flock.  For more, click HERE to see my post at my Caroline Arnold Art and Books blog.

PILTDOWN MAN: 100 Year Old Fossil Hoax, Natural History Museum, London

Piltdown Fossils on display at the Natural History Museum, London

A little over 100 years ago, in December 1912, the British Museum announced the discovery of fossils that appeared to be the missing link between humans and apes.  The bones, which included a human skull and an apelike jaw with human teeth, seemed to provide startling new evidence about human evolution.  In fact, the finds were fake.  It was not until the 1940's that the hoax was uncovered, revealing that the bones were much younger than had been originally thought and that the jaw actually belonged to an orangutan.  Today, those fossils, which altered the course of scientific thinking for nearly half a century, are on display at the Natural History Museum in London.  On a recent trip to London I had a chance to see the exhibit.

Reconstruction of skull based on Piltdown finds

The fossils had been found by Charles Dawson, a Sussex solicitor whose hobby was paleontology.  Throughout England fossils are found in gravel pits and road cuttings and Dawson, like many others, had a hobby of collecting them.  When he heard from some workmen repairing a road near Piltdown Common not far from his home in Sussex that they had uncovered a human bone, Dawson went to look for more.  What he found was a thick human skull and an apelike jawbone that appeared to be about five hundred thousand years old. Dawson took his discoveries to the British Museum where he showed them to Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, head of the geology department.  Woodward immediately recognized the importance of Dawson’s discoveries and returned with him to the Piltdown site, accompanied by a third man, Teilhard de Chardin.  The men continued to dig.  They found more bones, including those of animals such as elephants and hippopotamuses, and more flint tools.

The skull became known as Piltdown Man.  Yet, it presented a puzzle to anthropologists, for it was a piece that simply did not fit into the other known facts about human evolution.  Most people believed that the jaw and teeth began to evolve into their human form quite early in history, and that the enlarged skull evolved later.  However, the Piltdown skull suggested the opposite order of events.  Some scientists developed elaborate theories to make the Piltdown skull fit into the scheme of evolution.  Others were skeptical from the beginning.

Nearly forty years later, Dr. Kenneth Oakley, a British geologist, discovered that bones buried in the earth absorb fluorine from ground water.  The longer the bones are buried, the more fluorine they absorb.  In 1949 Dr. Oakley tested the Piltdown skull and found that it was much newer than previously thought. Further tests were then done–including x-ray spectrography, geiger counter readings, and improved chemical dating techniques–proving conclusively that the “ancient” jaw had come from a modern orangutan and had been artificially stained to create its old appearance.  Telltale scratches on the molars showed that the teeth had been filed to make them look more like human teeth.  Also, the forger had cleverly broken the hinge of the jaw so it would not be obvious that the jaw did not fit with the skull.

Who was the forger?  The evidence pointed to someone with expert knowledge.  Dawson was the logical suspect, for he lived in the area and could easily have planted the fake fossils in the dig.  He also had a large fossil collection that could have included the animal fossils such as those which accompanied the Piltdown skull.  Other people involved in the discovery may also have had a hand in the deception. All the people who were involved in the Piltdown discoveries are now dead, and many of the questions remain a mystery. To mark the centenary of the Piltdown finds, they are being re-analyzed using the latest technology.  Possibly some questions will finally be answered.  In any case, Piltdown man remains one of the most fascinating and longest-running scientific hoaxes of the twentieth century.

Main Hall, Natural History Museum, London

If you are in London and at the Natural History Museum, you will find the display about Piltdown Man in the hallway leading to the entrance of the dinosaur exhibit.  It is not large so it is easy to miss, but worth stopping to look.
For more information, click here.

MARY ANNING's Amazing Fossils at the Natural History Museum, London

"Mary Anning" at the Museum of Natural History, London

In 1811, Mary Anning and her older brother Joseph discovered a strange-looking skull eroding out of the cliffs of Lyme Regis on England’s Dorset coast.  The fossil turned out to be the head of an ichthyosaur, a sea-going contemporary of the dinosaurs.  (At the time the word “dinosaur” had not yet been coined.)  This was the first of Mary Anning's many remarkable discoveries, now on display at the British Natural History Museum in London.

Meeting Mary Anning

On a recent trip to London, I visited the museum, and as I walked along the gallery where Mary Anning’s fossils are displayed, who should I see, but Mary Anning herself!  Of course, it was not the real Mary Anning, who lived from 1799 to 1847, but a character actor, who was delighted to interact with me and other visitors as if we were still in the early 19th century.  For me, this was a special treat, as I had researched Mary Anning’s life and written about her discoveries in two of my books, Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age and Pterosaurs: Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age.

Ichthyosaur fossil, 203 - 194 million years old. Like reptiles that live on land, ichthyosaurs needed to breathe air.  Their nostrils were located in front of their eyes.

Fossil hunting in Britain had its “golden age” in the first half of the nineteenth century.  People collected fossils for fun and profit as well as for academic study.  Mary Anning collected fossils from the rocks along the shore near Lyme Regis and sold them to support her family.  She had little formal education, but an uncanny ability to find fossils.  The ichthyosaur skeleton, and many of Mary’s other finds, were used by leading scientists of the time as a basis for their new theories about Earth’s history.

Ichthyosaur head. The large eye of an ichthyosaur was surrounded by a doughnut-shaped bone called the sclerotic ring.  Large eyes enabled ichthyosaurs to see well in dim ocean depths.

The cliffs at Lyme Regis, on England’s southern coast, are filled with the remains of marine animals that had lived 200 million years earlier, during Jurassic times, when this region was a shallow sea.  When Mary Anning’s brother Joseph first saw the ichthyosaur skull, he thought it was a crocodile.  Later, after a fierce storm washed away more of the cliff, Mary discovered the neck and shoulders of the animal’s skeleton. At the time, she was only thirteen years old.  She and her brother excavated the bones and sold them to a fossil collector from London, who thought they belonged to a giant fish.  At the time, little was known about prehistoric sea reptiles.  It was not until several years later, after similar fossils had been found, that the skeleton was correctly identified as that of an ichthyosaur.  Because these strange animals seemed to be part fish and part reptile, they were given a scientific name meaning “fish lizard.”

Plesiosaur skeleton, 203 - 194 million years old.  Collected by Mary Anning in 1824.

In addition to her discoveries of at least three ichthyosaur skeletons, Mary Anning found fossils of two plesiosaurs and a pterodactyl, as well as numerous fish, ammonites (spiral-shelled mollusks that are ancient relatives of the chambered nautilus), brittle stars, and other marine animals, including many belemnites.  Like squid, belemnites had ink sacs.  One of the belemnites she found was complete with its fossil ink!

Ammonites from Lyme Regis

Mary Anning collected fossils for many of the leading scientists of the day and her work helped develop new ideas about what the world was like in prehistoric times.  As a woman and without a formal education, she was not recognized in her time.  Today, she is given credit for some of the most amazing fossil discoveries ever made.

Recommended book:
I recently read about Mary Anning in the book, Remarkable Creatures: A Novel by Tracy Chevalier.  This fictionalized story of Mary Anning and her relationship with the Philpot sisters who helped promote her work, brings the town of Lyme Regis to life and makes you appreciate the difficulty of fossil collecting and the amazing contribution Mary Anning has made to our understanding of prehistoric life.  The book is also a window on the social and religious conventions of the time and how Mary Anning’s  fossils challenged many of those ideas.

London Museums

Natural History Museum, London

Museum of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Childhood, Royal Academy of Art:  Here are notes of some of my museum visits from my diary of our three month stay in London in the fall of 1998.  London is packed with museums, so this is just a sampling! Click on the links for current information about museum hours, locations, etc.

Museum of London
    My other excursions last week included a trip to see the Museum of London, which traces the history of the city from 50,000 years ago.  (I didn’t realize that until the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, Britain wasn’t an island and people simply walked across from Europe.)  I have never been able to keep the kings and queens of English history straight, but this museum does a good job of making it clear when and why ruling families changed.  I didn’t allow enough time so I’ll have to go back to find out what happened after Henry VIII.

    (A few weeks later.) On Saturday afternoon we decided to visit the Museum of London.  The museum is so packed with information that one can easily go there again and again.  One of the items that caught my attention this time was the story of building the wall around London when it was the Roman city of Londinium.  The stones for the wall came from a quarry near the mouth of the Thames and were transported by boat up the river to the city.  We know this because one of the boats sank with its load of stones and was preserved in the mud of the river.  Wedged into a hole in the side of the boat archeologists also found a pair or men’s leather underwear.  Apparently some Roman sailor had tried, in vain, to use his clothing to stop a leak in this ultimately unseaworthy vessel.   

St. Paul’s Cathedral
    After tea in the museum café we visited St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unlike most other English cathedrals, which are medieval, St. Paul’s is baroque, built after the earlier medieval cathedral was destroyed in the great London fire. It is topped by an enormous dome which is one of London’s most impressive landmarks.  We decided to stay for the 5:00 Evensong, a sung service performed by the priests and the St. Paul’s Cathedral choir.  This is a boys’ choir with the soprano parts sung by little boys, who looked as young as seven or eight, and were positively cherubic in their long robes and high, fluted collars. I had been eager to hear one of the Anglican cathedral choirs after watching the Masterpiece Theater series, “The Choir” (based on a novel by Joanna Trollop), on television last year.  The boys’ voices are so pure and clear and they just soared in the huge space of the cathedral.

National Portrait Gallery
    Last Monday I met a friend and toured the National Portrait Gallery, which is a collection of portraits of notable British people from medieval times to the present and ranges from political figures like Winston Churchill and royal personages to ballet dancers, writers and pop singers.  Most are paintings, although in the modern era there are some photos.  Almost every name is familiar from history books (or in the modern era from the news) and I was amazed at how the pictures brought the people to life and in some cases revealed a different character.  In an early picture of Henry VIII he is actually quite thin!

Natural History Museum
    On Thursday morning I finally visited the Natural History Museum, and I spent most of my time in their excellent dinosaur and fossil collection.  I discovered that one of the most important fossil collectors of the last century was a woman named Mary Anning and that she made her first major find at the age of eleven.  I am trying to get more information about her with the idea that I might write a story about her later. [Note: I did include her and her discoveries in my books Giant Sea Reptiles of the Dinosaur Age and  Pterosaurs: Rulers of the Skies in the Dinosaur Age.]

Victoria and Albert Museum
    The Victoria and Albert Museum is across the street from the Natural History Museum so I spent the afternoon there.  It has an enormous collection ranging from paintings (including more Constables and Turners) to costumes and decorative arts from all over the world.  I went to two special exhibits, one of the work of Grinling Gibbons, a wood carver who made elaborate decorations for doorways, fireplaces, mirrors, etc. in the 18th century, and the other of the work of Aubrey Beardsley, whose black and white drawings characterize the 1890’s.  I did a paper on his work when I was in college, although I never saw then the quite shocking erotic drawings that were on display here.

Museum of Childhood
    On the same outing as my visit to Toynbee Hall, I visited the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, a museum that is packed with dolls, doll houses, toys, trains, etc. many from Victorian times but others that were more recent.  It was a bit odd to see Malibu Suntan Barbie displayed alongside China dolls dressed in 19th century outfits.  In the shop there was a series of children’s books on Victorian life in Britain and now that I'm home I regret that I didn't buy one called "Victorian Toilets.”

Royal Academy of Art
    One of my stops was at the Royal Academy of Art, which has a special exhibition of Picasso ceramics.  It is a wonderful show with room after room of all kinds of ceramics including vases turned into voluptuous women, birds and other creatures, plates painted and decorated with ceramic fish and forks, other plates with bullfighting scenes where the plate itself becomes a miniature bull ring, painted tile murals, etc, etc.  The sheer quantity and inventiveness show what a genius Picasso was.  The show was crowded and included a lot of school children taking notes and carefully sketching various pieces.  I thought to myself, what a great homework assignment!  Maybe the kids didn’t think so, but most other children are lucky to see pictures of great art in books or posters.  As I came out of the museum I noticed the elaborately decorated shop windows across the street and realized that the store was Fortnum and Mason’s, the famous food emporium.  So I went in to take a look and it was like another museum with every kind of pickled, bottled, boxed, or packaged food imaginable, all at great cost and displayed and wrapped so nicely that it seemed a shame that one would have to open the packages up to eat what was inside.