Tour the invertebrate palaeontology store

Here’s the last of the three stour tours. I hope you enjoy looking round.

Massive ’sea monster’ found in Britain

An incredible new Pliosaur has been discovered in Dorset.

more about “BBC – Earth News – Colossal ’sea mons…“, posted with vodpod

Pliosaurs are types of plesiosaurs, they lived upto 200 million years ago and dominated the seas covering Britain. This new discovery is really important because of it’s size. It gives a sense of how rich in life the seas must have been, just to provide enough food for this predator!

Have a look at our Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs next time you are in the museum. Even these are tiny compared to the new one they have found in Dorset!

Type & Figured store tour

Here’s the next installment of the palaeontology store tours. I’ll put the third one up next week, I don’t want to give you too much excitement all in one go.

Manchester Blog Awards

The Manchester Hermit blog was recently shortlisted fro the Manchester Blog Awards, so myself and a few others went along on Wednesday evening to find out if we’d won… drum roll… we didn’t win, but we got runners up in the Best Arts and Culture category. Pretty good really and all credit to the Hermit (Ansuman Biswas).

The Manchester Blog Awards

A good night was had by all and it highlighted some really great writing going on in Manchester. The overall winner was a blog called Lost in Manchester which is a really nice read if you have a minute.

Manchester’s fossil stores open to the world!

Take a look round our vertebrate fossil store with the first of our new video tours:

The Joys of Documentation

I’m catching up with some documentation. For those of you who aren’t so familiar with museums, this means transferring information from objects to our computer database.

The invertebrate Palaeontoogy store

As you might imagine, with a collection of over 70,000 fossils this is quite a big job, but very rewarding. Myself and Rebecca Machin (Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences) have been working hard over the last few years to collect basic information on the entire collection which is now done. We are now filling in the details.

Having the information about the collection on computer makes a massive difference to how we can provide access to the collection. We can answer enquiries more quickly and find things to use in learning, exhibitions and handling at the touch of a button.

See the A-level workshops that use the catalogue or take a look at our Type and Figured catalogue available on-line.

Darwin exhibition opens tomorrow

Our fantastic new Darwin Exhibition opens tomorrow!

Charles Darwin: evolution of a scientist

The exhibition called Charles Darwin: evolution of a scientist follows Darwin’s amazing life and discoveries.

His ideas are illustrated with an incredible array of objects, many of which Darwin collected himself on his travels.

The exhibition forms part of our year long Darwin festival which includes a range of public events, talks and exhibitions.

Ferns and Fossils day this Saturday!

Come and see some amazing ferns this Saturday at the museum. There will be a spectacular range of things to see from a fern jungle, to 300 million year old ferns and model dinosaurs. Watch the video to find out more.

Experts from the museum and the British Fern Society will be around all day, with craft activities, talks and help with grwoing your own ferns.

Anne Frank House

Whilst I was in Amsterdam over the Summer I also got chance to visit the Anne Frank House. Somewhere I have wanted to visit since reading her diary as a teenager.

Visitors are not allowed to take photos, so i just have a few from the outside. The spice factory where the Franks hid looks perfectly ordinary from the outside (I guess that was the whole point).  Once inside the museum, you are led through a series of rroms that were part of the factory. These rooms do a very sensitive job of building up the atmosphere of the period using extracts from the diary and other supporting objects. After climbing some very steep stairs you are asked to pass behind a bookcase to the Secret Annex.

The rooms the families occupied are stark. There are very few objects, principly the photos  of film stars Anne pasted on the walls and lines on the walls recording the children’s heights. Very ordinary.

The few things displayed in the rest of the museum were very thoughtfully displayed, especially Anne’s diary. It was in the middle of a room on its own.

One of the things I really wated to see was the exhibition about free speech. It showed video about the boundaries of free speech in modern society and asked visitors to vote on wether they agreed with them or not. For example, should the muslim cartoons have been allowed to have been published in Dutch newspapers last year? This was really interesting and sucessfully put the intolerance of the second world war into the context of modern society.

Well worth a visit if you are in Amsterdam, but remember to book tickets before.

Amsterdam trip

As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Amsterdam for a museum visit in August. I saw some great things which I’ll tell you about in the next few posts.

One of the main places I wanted to see was Naturalis in Leiden. A large new exhibition space was created about ten years ago to house the national natural history collection.

The Nature's Theatre gallery, Naturalis

Your visit starts in the geology gallery called Primeval Parade. This gallery had some spectacular fossils, but it was very dark and I found it disappointing. I got the impression they had been asked to show the public biodiversity from the past and had done this by putting all their best fossils on display and put a label next to them. Not very imaginative or exciting!

One floor up of the Nature’s Theatre gallery. This was visually impressive, but again I got the impression they had been asked to show the public biodiversity and had done this by putting all their best specimens on display and put a label next to them.

The best two galleries were the Life gallery which focused on movement and the Wildebeest temporary exhibition. The life gallery had some fantastic taxidermy helping explain how movement works. The hunting scenes and flight were particularly good. The Wildebeest exhibition had some great inter-actives such as creeping up on the herd and avoiding crocodiles coming up  in a river. The changes from day to night every few minutes was very effective.

Overall Naturalis was disappointing, with a few great bits.