Museum Advent Calendar

This year, for the first time The Manchester Museum has its own advent calendar that you can open everyday!

I don’t want to give too much away, but there is a fantastic range of amazing objects from the museum’s collection behind the doors. Just click on the doors each day to reveal the object and its fascinating history.

There will be several Christmas themed objects from the Earth Sciences collections, so keep you eyes open for those!

Last Christmas post

This is my last post before my Christmas break. Here’s the view from my office window to prove we have a slight dusting of snow.

A dusting of snow on The Manchester Museum

It has been a great year. We have opened the Manchester Gallery and the Darwin The Evolutionist exhibition as part of our Darwin festival. We have continued to run and develop our A-level geology sessions, which have proved a great sucess. There has been an amazing range of public activities from Fern Day to Polar day. Rebecca (the Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences) has been doing stirling work documenting the collection which is fundamental in making the collections available for researchers, exhibitions, learning and the public.

I was very sorry to hear that one of our regular researchers Roger Jacobi died last week. His research pushed forward our understanding of the Last Ice Age and he was a genuinely nice man.

In the last couple of months have been focused on research for the new Mammals Gallery. This has been really interesting and promises to transform this part of the museum in the next couple of years.

Thanks to everyone here at the museum who I have worked with over the last year from staff to volunteers. I look forward to exciting things to come next year.

Happy Christmas!

Christmas cheer from 1875

I thought you’d like to see some Christmas cards from our William Boyd Dawkins archive here at the museum. Some of them date back to 1875.

Christmas card sent to William Boyd Dawkins in 1875

William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929) was Curator of Natural History at Manchester Musum from 1869 until he retired in 1908. He undertook pioneering work on early humans in Britain (especially at Creswell Crags), coal deposits and was even commissioned to produce some plans for the Channel Tunnel in 1882.

He obviously liked Christmas and kept his favourite Christmas cards in a album which is now in the archive which accompanies his collection here at the Manchester Museum. See more cards on Flickr.

This card, from 1880 shows a cartoon of a hippo, elephant, wooly rhino and wooly mammoth all of which lived in the last Ice Age

This Christmas card sent to William Boyd Dawkins 1912, shows a cartoon of Australopithecus an early himinid

Happy Christmas everyone!