Museums & Things

Gift Shop (Thrift Shop Parody) Damn, that’s a cold ass...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:20:55 +0100

Damn, that’s a cold ass snow globe.

Museum-humour of the month.

Horniman Museum Natural History Bioblitz The Horniman Museum and...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Horniman Museum Natural History Bioblitz

The Horniman Museum and Gardens is currently carrying out a review of its Natural History collection. Inspired by outdoor ‘Bioblitz’ events, the project aims to review specimens from the collection in a series of short, concentrated bursts, with the help of expert reviewers.

With over 250,000 taxidermy, osteological and fluid-preserved specimens, mostly in storage, the team have got their work cut out!

The hope is that by learning more about what they have in the collection, the museum can make better decisions about how to use it, what to celebrate and what to share with the world.

Visit the museum website to find out more about the project, check out its blog, or read a fantastic blog post from Project Coordinator (and my colleague), Russell Dornan, to hear about the ‘blitzes’ that have already taken place.

You can see many more wonderful photos from the Bioblitzes on Flickr, and keep up to date with the project by following @HornimanReviews on Twitter.

Photos by Russell Dornan

andrewfishman: Marina Abramović, “Rhythm 0,” 1974 Marina...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 13:00:58 +0000

andrewfishman:

Marina Abramović, “Rhythm 0,” 1974

Marina Abramović is best known for her performance pieces, in which she tries to explore what is possible for an artist to do in the name of art. Her best known piece was the recent “The Artist Is Present,” in which she sat motionless for 736.5 hours over the course of three months, inviting visitors to sit opposite her and make eye contact for as long as they wanted. So many people began spontaneously crying across from her that blogs and Facebook groups were set up for those people.

Her bravest piece, however, is my favorite. This piece was primarily a trust exercise, in which she told viewers she would not move for six hours no matter what they did to her. She placed 72 objects one could use in pleasing or destructive ways, ranging from flowers and a feather boa to a knife and a loaded pistol, on a table near her and invited the viewers to use them on her however they wanted.

Initially, Abramović said, viewers were peaceful and timid, but it escalated to violence quickly. “The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed… I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.”

This piece revealed something terrible about humanity, similar to what Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment or Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment, both of which also proved how readily people will harm one another under unusual circumstances.

This performance showed just how easy it is to dehumanize a person who doesn’t fight back, and is particularly powerful because it defies what we think we know about ourselves. I’m certain the no one reading this believes the people around him/her capable of doing such things to another human being, but this performance proves otherwise.

scientificillustration: The Cuming Museum, London, England

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:00:59 +0000

scientificillustration:

The Cuming Museum, London, England

thebrainscoop: Skulls from the permanent collection; figuring...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:01:08 +0000

Bobcat - Lynx rufus.

Turbinate and nasal bones of a bighorn sheep - Ovis canadensis

Dental abscess and impacted premolar of a whitetail deer -- Odocoileus virginianus.

Skull of a black swan -- Cygnus atratus.

thebrainscoop:

Skulls from the permanent collection; figuring out my new camera. I’ve been too shy to post any of the videos I’ve been practicing shooting. Filming yourself is very different than having someone else behind the camera helping to direct.

Check out the impacted premolar of the deer, third image down. It unsuccessfully lost the deciduous tooth; instead of falling out, it became wedged against the premolar behind it, and the adult tooth failed to adequately erupt. This caused the large abscess and bone loss of the second premolar.

thebrainscoop: wysiwyg88 asked ehmeegee: Has your line of work...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:00:59 +0000

William Hogarth -- Painter and his Dog, 1745.

Pug from about 1885.

Derp derp derp

thebrainscoop:

wysiwyg88 asked ehmeegee:

Has your line of work altered the way you think about or your attitude towards pets?

Yes — especially concerning purebred animals, or any type of pet which has been selectively bred in order to highlight superficial aesthetic traits for our own selfish enjoyments. Evolution is an incredibly long process when occurring naturally, yet we have forcefully pushed the morphological transformation of a few of these breeds without giving any consideration to the health problems associated with these choices.

Take the pug: it looks entirely different today than it did a short 300 years ago. That’s because we have been breeding them to accentuate their wrinkly faces, floppy ears, and most significantly their characteristic squished faces. The ‘squished face’ means that the pug has an extremely high cranial index, a ratio calculated by the maximum width of the head x 100 / maximum length. Dogs with extremely high or extremely low cranial indexes are subject to corresponding health problems. Pugs, with their extreme brachycephalic index, have an incredibly difficult time regulating their body temperature because of the lack of surface area in their mouth allowing for enough space to evaporate adequate amounts of moisture in order to cool down while they pant, meaning they are prone to overheating. They also have exaggerated ocular orbitals which give them their soulful baby eyes, but that also means their eyes are at eminent risk of popping directly out of the sockets if they sustain any amount of trauma to their heads. Throw into this equation the fact that we’ve shortened their legs and exaggerated their stature to give them a stocky build, and it means they have an even more challenging time getting enough exercise so many become terribly obese.

We see this snorting, panting, grunting little creatures as ‘adorable’, but I think it’s kind of sadistic and cruel in a way. I don’t put the blame on the dog, nor the people who adopt these creatures from shelters to give them good lives — after all, the dog didn’t choose to be this way, we did. I hope with some education about these topics humans can begin to curb their excessive need to continuously dominate over nature.

Sources:

1. William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745.
2. Pug from about 1885.
3. Pug from the Pug Dog Page.
4. List of dogs with variable cephalic indexes.

atelierentomologica: The Wagner Free Institute of Science,...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:00:59 +0000

atelierentomologica:

The Wagner Free Institute of Science, Philadelphia, Photo Credit: John Woodin

ibstock: good book. will review when done. (prediction:...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:01:13 +0000

ibstock:

good book. will review when done. (prediction: 5/5)

Next on my list of books to read. After I’m done with Life of Pi.

catsareassholes: ave-atque-vale: peepswitch: (via Twitter /...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:00:52 +0000

catsareassholes:

ave-atque-vale:

peepswitch:

(via Twitter / erik_kwakkel: Wow, 1500 followers: thank …)

Ink cat pawprints in a 15th c. book. I was just wondering today if calligraphers of the past had problems with cats walking across wet ink and ruining things.

#celebrating hundreds of years of cat jerkitude #cats are the best

(via yukidama)

so cats have been assholes for even longer than I thought

museumsandstuff: via museumnerd This could be quite...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:01:02 +0000

museumsandstuff:

via museumnerd This could be quite interesting. I put this into Austrian google and it offered me:

From Museumsandstuff.org

“Museums are there for the masses”, “Museums are cathedrals for the modern era” and “Why are museums important?” Can anyone offer any other languages?

The Oxford Museum of Natural History is hitting the road! The...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:41:04 +0000

The Oxford Museum of Natural History is hitting the road!

The museum is closed for 2013, in order for much-needed repairs to its glass-tiled roof. Most of its specimens have been wrapped up and ushered of to storage, but the museum remains as active as ever, venturing out to bring the collections to the people in their very own custom van!

“Our Education team will be zooming off to small, rural schools that are often unable to visit the Museum. We’re providing workshops on skeletons, rocks and minerals and evolution. Bones, stones and specimens are wrapped and packed ready to get out onto the road.
…
Collections staff will also be using the van to transport objects between locations. This will be especially important for a couple of special projects in the summer”

You can follow the story of the museum during its closure on the blog, Darkened not Dormant.

How nifty is that van?

theoddmentemporium: Plague Village In order to satisfy our...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:01:04 +0000

theoddmentemporium:

Plague Village

In order to satisfy our morbid curiosity my friend and I visited Eyam plague village today. It has quite a fascinating story:

Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, England, also know as the “plague village” which chose to completely isolate itself when the plague was discovered there in 1665.

The plague was brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth delivered from London to the tailor, George Viccars. Within a week, he was dead. Within two months 28 others also died. It was suggested that the villagers flee to the nearby city of Sheffield, however the rector, Rev. Mompesson, feared that they would spread the disease to the North of England which had, for the most part, escaped the plague.

Instead, the village decided to cut themselves off completely from the outside world, introducing a number of precautions to prevent the spread of illness, for instance, people were to bury their own dead and church services were moved from the local church to field area called Cucklett Delph, which meant villagers could separate themselves.

The village was supplied with food by [outsiders]. People brought supplies and left them at the [boundary stone] that marked the start of Eyam. The villagers left money in a water trough filled with vinegar to steralise the coins … In this way, Eyam was not left to starve to death [and] Those who supplied the food did not come into contact with the villagers.

The plague raged in the village for 14 months and when the first outsiders visited Eyam a year later, they found that around a quarter of the village had survived the plague. The church in Eyam has a record of 273 individuals who were victims of the plague.

Images: [1-3 are my own] 1: Plague Cottages: This was where the plague began, the righthand cottage was where the tailor, Viccars, lived. 2: The Riley Graves: Situated in a field just outside Eyam (in order to prevent the spread of infection) these are the graves of the Hancock family. Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children within eight days of one another but survived the plague herself. 3: Shows what is inside the walls in image two. 4: [Source] The boundary stone where food was left for the villagers.

"Friend: “YouTube seach ‘skinning the wolf’ by thebrainscoop…seems easy enough!"

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 13:01:06 +0000

“Friend: “YouTube seach ‘skinning the wolf’ by thebrainscoop…seems easy enough!””

-

Nailed it.

(via ileanderthal)

What.

(via thebrainscoop)

in-the-horniman: I just love this picture of the Naturalists...

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:49:52 +0000

in-the-horniman:

I just love this picture of the Naturalists office as it was in in around 1940ish. The Horniman did not always have a dedicated store and kept many of the reserved collections that were not on display in the museum until around the 1960’s.

Our collection of birds has just been reviewed by an expert as part of the bioblitz project. I wonder if they looked at any of these?!

Post from a colleague!

See more about the review of our bird collections on our website, blog, and Flickr.

And follow the project on Twitter. They’ve just finished the mammal review - so excited to see pictures.

laughingsquid: Name That Space Rock, A Handy Chart That...

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:13:48 +0000

laughingsquid:

Name That Space Rock, A Handy Chart That Explains Meteors & More

thebrainscoop: Pictures snagged while Dave was giving a tour to...

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:11:31 +0000

Teeth of a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos).

Eastern fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) in variable color phases.

Skulls and skeletons of black footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes).

Bobcat skulls and skeletons (Lynx rufus).

Quills of a North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum).

Horn sheaths belonging to bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis).

Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica)

thebrainscoop:

Pictures snagged while Dave was giving a tour to some visitors from Spokane, Washington, this afternoon.

I have not had the opportunity to spend time in the collections nearly as much as I would like these days! Although it’s still early in my semester, I look forward to the summer when I can get back into the lab and focus on weekly cleaning projects. So many brains to be scooped.

At the UM Zoological Museum

nictitating: george boorujy

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:44:20 +0000

nictitating: george boorujy:

nictitating:

i rarely post art that’s not my own, but George Boorujy is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and in a recent fit of boredom i found out he’s a pretty stand up person too. in his blog, nypelagic, he documents a small ongoing project wherein his original, pelagic bird…

quantumaniac: The Brontosaurus Never Existed Think of...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:00:56 +0000

quantumaniac:

The Brontosaurus Never Existed

Think of dinosaurs, and a few specific creatures inevitably come to mind -a T. Rex, maybe a Velociraptor, and probably a Brontosaurus as well. The Brontosauruses, due to their daunting size and impressive likeness, have been portrayed on TV and in films for decades. However, scientifically speaking - they don’t exist. While these long-necked dinosaurs exist in our culture, science abandoned them long ago, as the name is considered a junior (albeit redundant) synonym of the Apatosaurus.

According to Matt Lamanna, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the scientific community has known that the Brontosaurus was a fictitious dinosaur for more than a hundred years. But as with some popular trends, the Brontosaurus remained a cultural fixture until this very day.

Lamanna said the story of Brontosaurus dates back over a century, to a period known as the Bone Wars. This early period of paleontology in the US saw a wealth of new dinosaur fossils being discovered, with Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope at the forefront of most discoveries. The feud between them was called the Bone Wars, as they were frequently trying to outdo one another.

“There are stories of either Cope or Marsh telling their fossil collectors to smash skeletons that were still in the ground, just so the other guy couldn’t get them,” Lamanna said in a detailed interview with Guy Raz of NPR’s All Things Considered. “It was definitely a bitter, bitter rivalry.”

It was this heated race to get dinosaurs published that led to the unwarranted naming of the Brontosaurus. In 1877, Marsh, who had discovered numerous dinosaur fossils, discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. Since the fossil was missing a skull, in 1883 when he published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, he borrowed a skull from another dinosaur — possibly a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton.

A few years later his fossil collectors had sent Marsh a second skeleton he believed to belong to a completely new dinosaur, which he named Brontosaurus, according to Lamanna.

However, this new dinosaur was actually a more complete Apatosaurus. And in Marsh’s rush to outdo Cope, he carelessly mistook the dinosaur for something new, Lamanna added.

The dinosaur mistake was eventually spotted by scientists in 1903, but for some reason, the Brontosaurus named lived on in popular culture and children’s imaginations everywhere. It was not until another 67 years, in 1970, when two Carnegie researchers took a second look at the controversy and determined, once and for all, the Brontosaurus was a fictional-only dinosaur.

This conclusion was met due to a dinosaur skull discovered in Utah in 1910 that was correctly attributed to the Apatosaurus rather than Marsh’s defunct Brontosaurus.

“Brontosaurus means ‘thunder lizard,’” he said. “It’s a big, evocative name, whereas Apatosaurus means ‘deceptive lizard.’ It’s quite a bit more boring.”

Sources: RedOrbit, NPR

Image Sources: 1, 2

bibleschoolbabblings: love-1910: girloverhere: Three men who...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:00:47 +0000

bibleschoolbabblings:

love-1910:

girloverhere:

Three men who stood in the same line in Auschwitz have nearly consecutive numbers: From left, Menachem Shulovitz, 80, bears B14594; Anshel Udd Sharezky, 81, was B14595; and Jacob Zabetzky, 83, was B14597.

“We were strangers standing in line in Auschwitz, we all survived different paths of hell, and we met in Israel,” Mr. Sharezky said. “We stand here together now after 65 years. Do you realize the magnitude of the miracle?”

Amazing. And there should be more notes. Just saying.

Yes, amazing.

Photo

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:01:01 +0000