brilliant beautiful bizarre
Unravel the epic story of birds and discover the secrets of their success in our new exhibition
Welcome
A summer of wonder awaits!
Did you know that great tits sometimes feed on bat brains, that zebra finches sing to their unborn young, or that vampire finches feed on blood? All these fascinating stories and more can be found in our latest blockbuster exhibition, Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre
Produced in affiliation with the RSPB, it draws on the Museum’s cutting-edge research into birds’ physiology and behaviour, and showcases rare specimens from our unrivalled bird collection, including an egg from the now-extinct great auk and a spectacular Philippine eagle. The exhibition also explores birds’ extraordinary survival story – from outliving the dinosaurs to diversifying into an incredible 11,000 species alive today and the challenges they face in our rapidly changing world.
As well as captivating specimens and hands-on exhibits, we’ve commissioned three spectacular immersive experiences. Lift your senses with the joy of birdsong from around the world, witness the mesmerising motion of a starling murmuration, and – through a reimagined dawn chorus – explore the positive futures we can create for our feathered friends.
Find out more about Birds – Brilliant and bizarre on page 24 and then come and enjoy our exhibition, which is free for members and Patrons (with a 20 per cent discount for RSPB members).
‘Lift your senses with the joy of birdsong and witness the mesmerising motion of a starling murmuration’
We’re also celebrating our Nature Discovery Garden, supported by The Cadogan Charity – one of two outdoor galleries opening this summer – on page 38, and introducing our latest art installation, an immersive experience exploring the soundscapes of the River Thames on page 8. We look forward to welcoming you to the Museum this summer. We hope you’ll enjoy our new experiences and join us in celebrating the incredible biodiversity that surrounds us and reminding ourselves of the continued need to cherish the natural world.
AlexBurch, Director of Public Programmes
MAKE THE MOST OF BEING A SUPPORTER
The Anning Rooms
Named in honour of legendary fossil hunter Mary Anning, this suite is exclusively for your enjoyment. Tuck into tasty lunches and snacks in the restaurant, take in the views from the lounge, or read a book in the study area.
Exhibitions
Get free, unlimited entry to all of the Museum’s ticketed exhibitions, such as Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre, and guaranteed entry to our free exhibitions and installations, including The River. Exclusive events
Enjoy private exhibition views, workshops and a new series of talks, Dig Deeper, led by Museum scientists. As well as discounted tickets you will also receive priority booking and access to a special Members’ Bar on the night.
Shop and café discounts
Receive a 20 per cent discount in the Museum’s shops – which are stocked with a wide range of inspiring gifts, books and clothes – as well as a 10 per cent discount in our cafés and restaurants.
The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD
The Natural History Museum at Tring, Akeman Street, Tring, Hertfordshire HP23 6AP
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Never miss an issue of Natural History Museum magazine
Find back issues on the Hive, an exclusive digital hub especially for you. Starting from the February 2020 issue there are over 800 pages to enjoy, featuring the Museum’s research, exhibitions and events. nhm.ac.uk/the-hive
Issue 55 Summer 2024
This issue’s experts
Emilie Pearson Emilie is a Collection Moves Assistant on the NHM Unlocked project, working to survey and prepare the collections moving to our new site.
Josh Davis Digital News Editor for the Museum’s website, Josh writes, edits and publishes stories about the research being done by our scientists.
Victoria Thomson Communications Manager for the Urban Nature Project, Victoria aims to inspire and empower people to make a difference for nature close to home.
Features
24
Birds – Brilliant and bizarre
Discover why we’re getting all aflutter about our new exhibition, which reveals how birds have survived for millions of years thanks to their surprising abilities and extraordinary behaviours
32 Our ever-changing story
Find out how new dating techniques are transforming our understanding of how Homo sapiens and our relatives evolved, and updating timescales that reveal how we came into existence
38 Explore the Museum’s new gardens
Discover what awaits you in the Museum’s new gardens when they open this summer. Travel through geological time, explore our nature-friendly planting, and discover our living green laboratory
46 Here be monsters
Roaming the grounds at Crystal Palace Park are extinct beasts. Fabulously inaccurate in many ways, Karolyn Shindler explains why these magnificent sculptures offer a snapshot of the cutting-edge science of their time
52 Standing up for nature
Naturalist and conservationist Lucy Hodson AKA Lucy Lapwing (below) tells us how nature aided her recovery from illness and why she wants everyone to tell their stories about local wildlife
56 The eternal quest for answers
From unlocking the past to decoding life on Earth, we explore why the Museum’s work is focused on answering some of the most critical questions facing humanity and the planet
Journal
12
New at the Museum
Learn about how we’re cleaning the Museum’s terracotta facade, glimpse the future in our Images of Nature gallery, and more
16 What’s on
Find out about all the Members and Patrons events, plus a 60-second chat with Pauline Robert
18
Science in focus: New pterosaur discovered Middle Jurassic pterosaurs were more diverse than previously thought
20 Inside story: Alex Waters
Our Retail Assistant Buyer develops unique sustainable products and gifts for the Museum’s shops
22
Exceptional specimens: Urial sheep skull Sheep might be the first known animal to have genuinely gay individuals
Every issue
6 Viewfinder
See. Learn. Be amazed by three extraordinary images that inspired everyone at the Museum
62 Winged beauties
52
Take a closer look at the butterflies and day-flying moths that brighten our outdoor spaces
66 Book reviews
Our experts consider the latest and greatest natural history titles that are available to buy now
69 In our shop
Make the most of your 20 per cent discount with a range of beautiful items from our shops
70 From the Archive
How the Children’s Centre shaped future visits to museums for children everywhere
Senior Editor Helen Sturge
Editorial team Kevin Coughlan, Ollie Crimmen, Josh Davis, Adriana De Palma, Alessandro Giusti, Dr Peter Olson, Jennifer Pullar, Emilie Pearson, Dr Helen Robertson, Professor Sara Russell, Dr Tom White and Colin Ziegler
For Our Media
Editor Sophie Stafford
Art Editor Robin Coomber
Production Editor Rachael Stiles
Account Manager Debbie Blackman
Editorial Director Dan Linstead
Contributors Lu Allington-Jones, James Ashworth, Professor Paul Barrett, Jennifer Benson, Dr Alex Bond, Georgie Britton, Alex Burch, Paolo Cocco, Dr Joanne Cooper, Noelia Galan, Andrea Hart, Lucy Hodson, Elle Kaye, Paul Kenrick, Dr Liz Martin-Silverstone, Giulia Masci, Tom McCarter, Lizzie Reay, Pauline Robert, Kathryn Rooke, Karolyn Shindler, Professor Chris Stringer, Evie Smith, Natalie Tacq, Victoria Thomson, Marita Tsagkaraki, Helen Wallis, Alex Waters, Chrissy Williams
With thanks to Professor Ian Barnes, Matt Clark, Ella Davies, Kate Franklin, Dr Adrian Glover, Lucie Goodayle, Gerry Hey, Susan Holmes, Dr Ellinor Michel, Joe Millard, Joseph Morrin, Dr Ken Norris, Dr Paola Ricciardi, Vince Smith, Christine Strullu-Derrien, Kate Whittington
The views expressed in Natural History Museum magazine do not necessarily reflect those held by the Natural History Museum. Produced in association with Our Media. ourmedia.co.uk
All photographs and copy © 2024 The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London unless otherwise stated. If you would like copies of any Museum images please contact the Museum Picture Library on 020 7942 5401.
2044-7582
History Museum magazine is mailed in packaging using potato starch along with other biological polymers. It
Viewfinder
Extraordinary images of our natural world
Remembering Leopards
‘The mystery surrounding snow leopards always fascinated me,’ says photographer Sascha Fonseca. ‘They are some of the most difficult large cats to photograph in the wild.’ Undeterred, Sascha followed this elusive feline into its icy mountain home on his quest for the perfect portrait.
All of the photographers in Remembering Leopards have demonstrated equal determination, commitment and fortitude in creating the breathtaking images in its pages. Their photos
reveal the many faces and landscapes of these adaptable species – the book features all eight subspecies as well as snow and clouded leopards – and transport the reader around the world from the cloud forests of Malaysia to the dry plains of Africa.
The Remembering Wildlife book series raises awareness and funds for conservation projects around the world. Every page reminds us of what’s at stake – but it’s not too late to save them.
Find out more at rememberingwildlife.com
Dive into the sounds of the Thames
Dive deep into the heart of the River Thames in the middle of the Museum. Our upcoming audio installation, by sound artist Jana Winderen in collaboration with spatial sound specialist Tony Myatt, immerses audiences in the rich tapestry of sounds that echo through this iconic waterway, from its source to its sprawling estuary amid the din of urban activity.
Noise pollution threatens all freshwater ecosystems and affects aquatic wildlife. Jana’s work captures the river’s essence using hydrophones,
providing a unique perspective from a fish’s point of view. She weaves a sonic journey that explores the river’s history and inhabitants – from the wildlife living under the surface to the people who live, work and play on its waterfront.
In a dimly lit gallery, this three-dimensional sound experience reveals the diverse soundscape of an underwater world that’s teeming with life, as well as the noise pollution that threatens it.
The River opens at the Museum this summer in the Jerwood gallery.
Meet the water balloon of death
Pufferfish have an iconic defence mechanism. They inflate themselves by sucking water into their incredibly elastic stomachs. Thanks to specially modified gill muscles and a lack of ribs, they can swell to an almost spherical shape, three or four times their usual size. However, inflation comes at a cost. Scientists have found that it takes a lot of energy for the fish to inflate, that swimming while puffed up is more difficult, and that staying inflated
uses five times more oxygen than when resting. So while it’s a useful strategy to avoid being eaten – as demonstrated here by a guineafowl pufferfish in Hawaii – it’s not in their best interests to stay inflated for long. Most quickly return to normal size once the danger has passed.
Find out more about these famous inflatable fish at nhm.ac.uk/discover/ pufferfish-underwater-balloon-of-death.
Journal
A world of discovery awaits you in our round-up of Museum news
The Museum gets a facelift
In February, we began work to clean and conserve the beautiful facades of the historic Waterhouse building.
The Waterhouse building is the historic heart of the Museum, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and built at the end of the nineteenth century to house the British Museum’s growing natural history collections. Its first director, Professor Richard Owen, called it a ‘cathedral to nature’.
Waterhouse’s architecture mixed Gothic Revival and twelfth-century Romanesque styles.
Above and above right
The Waterhouse building as it looks today, with terracotta animals, both real and mythical.
It was enriched, both internally and externally, with sculptural ornaments inspired by the natural world that added aesthetic variety and interest and helped educate visitors.
Waterhouse’s designs were based on the most up-to-date anatomical knowledge of species available at the time. To achieve his design, Waterhouse used terracotta in an innovative way. Previously, the use of terracotta had been limited to decorative elements, but the Natural History Museum is the first building where terracotta was used as a construction material for the entire main facade and the interiors. The reasons for his choice were practical – producing sculpted or moulded elements with terracotta was cheaper and quicker than using stone, and terracotta was less affected by the polluted air of Victorian London.
More than 140 years later, the building and its decorations still stand, a testament to the validity of Waterhouse’s choices, but they’re in need of
‘It’s the first time the facade will be fully conserved, including all the terracotta and the cast-iron windows’
some TLC. At over 200 metres long and 60 metres high at its pinnacles, this is an ambitious project. It’s the first time the facade will be fully conserved – including all the terracotta, the cast-iron windows and the conduits that channel rainwater from the roof.
Previously, only ad hoc repairs have taken place on various different elements of the building, including a full clean, almost 50 years ago, carried out using an acid solution that left permanent streaks that are still visible. Our approach today will be much gentler, using steam to remove dirt and pollution.
The project is expected to take 14 months, until late March 2025, and will use an innovative, free-standing, rolling scaffolding that is not fixed onto the structure and is concealed by a life-size print of the building. It forms part of a programme of works to ensure the Museum is looking at its best for our upcoming 150th anniversary in 2031.
YOUR MUSEUM IN NUMBERS
10
This year the Museum is celebrating 10 years of digitisation. With nearly six million specimens digitised, including over two million insects and a million plants, it will help scientists around the world understand how biodiversity is changing.
Putting nature in focus
16
6
It took conservators six weeks to spruce up the four whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling of the Museum’s whale hall. The last time the skeletons were cleaned was 16 years ago, in 2008.
100
The Perseid meteor shower is expected to feature 100 meteors per hour at its peak. One of the best celestial events of the year to watch, it takes place from 17 July to 24 August as Earth passes through the trail left by the comet Swift-Tuttle.
The 60-year history of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition has inspired a new display in the Museum’s Images of Nature gallery. From stunning cyanotype prints (above) to a 3D-printed cardboard head of Dippy – the Museum’s iconic dinosaur – the new display will trace the history and use of photography in natural history and explore the development of modern-day imaging techniques used in science and storytelling.
The new display also explores the close ties between science, photography and art, showcasing how the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition reveals the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world while advancing scientific knowledge.
See how artists and scientists view the natural world through more than 100 images from the Museum’s collection in the Images of Nature gallery (Blue Zone) from 12 July.
Inspiring the scientists of tomorrow
Winner of ‘Hero Toys for 2024’ London
The Museum has teamed up with Galt Toys to develop a new range of inspiring activity kits. The ‘Let’s Learn’ range combines richly detailed illustrations with scientific accuracy to engage younger children in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. Each sustainable kit includes six projects designed to inspire future scientists. The first two kits –Dinosaurs and Tiny Creatures – are available now. Let’s Learn Animals will follow later this year.
Journal Museum news
For the curious and interested
A new touring exhibition is exploring how and why collections of Sir Hans Sloane were created, and offer new perspectives on entangled collecting histories and their legacies.
Sir Hans Sloane was one of the most influential men of early eighteenth-century London. He amassed one of the greatest private collections of plants, animals, antiquities, coins and other curiosities. These items became the founding core of the British Museum and later the Natural History Museum, and the British Library. But Sloane did not work alone in the assembly of these collections – more than 300 named contributors were recorded in the Herbarium and there were many others that were not named. Enslaved and Indigenous
Above and right Items in the exhibition from the Museum’s collection of Sloane’s Vegetable Substances, including the pod, seeds and fine, silky hairs of the Jamaican climbing plant, and a pressed cake of tea leaves, known as a Tuo-cha.
People contributed valuable knowledge, but were rarely recorded or acknowledged.
Akosua Paries-Osei, a researcher at Royal Holloway, is working on specimens in the Sloane Herbarium. ‘I use botanicals to bring to life the hidden world of enslaved women’s botanical knowledge,’ she says. For example, gossypol is a compound found in cotton that acts as a contraceptive and, in high-enough doses, as an abortive agent. With cotton a staple of the slave trade, the slaves who tended these plants used their indigenous knowledge of cotton to manage and control their fertility.
‘Enslaved women were valued for their ability to produce and reproduce,’ says Akosua. ‘By restricting their reproductive capacities, enslaved women directly resisted slavery as they impeded the ability of slave owners to profit from their reproductive capacities and increase their human stock.’
As slave owners learned about the anti-fertility properties of cotton, the act of reproductive resistance risked severe violence, with the plant black haw utilised to counter the abortive effects of cotton. But this did not stop the enslaved women. While slavers came to recognise the properties of cotton, other plants such as okra, which also contained gossypol, continued to be used.
Histories of science and natural history are intimately entwined within histories of enslavement and resistance. But enslaved women were not passive recipients of enslavement. They were active agents who used their skills and knowledge not only for subsistence, but also to disrupt and dismantle slavery.
The exhibition will explore these narratives with museums across the UK and is on tour until 7 September. Find out more at britishmuseum. org/ exhibitions/ curious-andinterested
NEWS SHORTS R
Tiny is mighty
Big-headed ants are changing the food chains of the savannah. These little but fierce insects have led to the loss of cover for lions from which to ambush zebra, forcing them to target buffalo instead.
Early whale
Fossils found in Peru of a new species of early whale might be the heaviest animal that’s ever lived. Possibly weighing as much as 340 tonnes, its unusual bones suggest it was no ordinary cetacean.
Drying up
New research reveals water levels in as many as a third of the world’s aquifers are declining faster now than they did 40 years ago, as we take water out of the ground faster than it can be replaced.
Feed your fascination
Have you ever wondered where a snake’s head ends, and its tail begins? What the deep-sea floor looks and feels like? Or how we know the age of meteorites?
From discovering new species of dinosaur and revealing the origins of the Solar System to tracking diseases and countering the biodiversity crisis, the more than 350 scientists working at the Natural History Museum are at the forefront of contemporary natural science.
Dive deeper into the natural world with our new online learning platform, Naturally Curious, and find answers to these questions.
WIN TALES OF THE EARTH
COINS
In late 2023, The Royal Mint’s Tales of the Earth series returned for its third season. An ongoing collaboration with the Natural History Museum, this series of collectable coins celebrates the groundbreaking discovery of some iconic specimens that lay buried in the earth for millions of years.
These pre-recorded courses on topics ranging from the biology of snakes to the future of the green economy are led by our world-leading experts and supported with detailed course notes.
New courses are released monthly with exciting topics coming soon, sign up to be the first in the know. Listen to the introduction of any course for free or dive deeper into a topic of your interest.
Use the discount code MEMBERS10, to get 10 pent cent off any of the courses and indulge your natural curiosity today at naturallycurious.nhm.ac.uk.
This latest collection pays homage to some of the bestloved dinos from the Museum, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus. The series was designed by palaeoartist Robert Nicholls, with the guidance of Museum expert Professor Paul Barrett.
To be in with a chance of winning one of three sets of the coins, simply tell us where The Royal Mint is currently located. To enter, email your name, address, phone number and answer to magazine@nhm.ac.uk and put ‘Coins’ in the subject line. Or post your answer to ‘Membership’ at the address on page 3.
Journal What’s on
Exhibitions
Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre
Until 5 January 2025, normal Museum opening times
From £16.50 Adults / £9.95 Kids / £13.20 Concessions / £29–£50.25 Families
Members and Patrons go free Unravel the epic story of birds, discover the secrets to their success and learn some of their surprising and often shocking tactics for survival. nhm.ac.uk/birds-brilliantbizarre
The River
Coming soon, normal Museum opening times Free
This upcoming audio installation immerses audiences in the tapestry of sounds that echo through the underwater world of the iconic River Thames. nhm.ac.uk/the-river
Other
activities
Dino Snores for Kids
Every month, 18.45–10.00
£80 non-members / £72 members
Ever wonder what happens in the Museum when everyone’s gone home?
During this action-packed sleepover, you’ll take part in fun, educational activities, discover our T. rex hidden in the shadows of the Dinosaurs gallery, follow a torch-lit trail, create your own dinosaur T-shirt and experience a live science show with a Museum expert. In the morning there will be breakfast and a live animal show. For ages 7–11. nhm.ac.uk/dino-snores
Dino Snores for Grown-ups
Various dates, 18.30–9.30
£220 non-members / £198 members
Pull an all-nighter at the Museum and experience an unforgettable evening of comedy, food, science and cinema. You’ll enjoy live shows, a delicious threecourse dinner, live music, an eye mask decorating activity and a monster movie marathon, followed by a hot breakfast the next morning. For ages 18 and over. nhm.ac.uk/dsgu
Find out what’s on at the Museum, and plan your next great day out, by visiting nhm.ac.uk/whats-on
Museum Highlights Tour
Various dates and times
£15 non-members / £12 members
From the awe-inspiring blue whale skeleton suspended from our ceiling to the largest blue topaz gemstone of its kind, the specimens we care for are full of wonder. Join one of our knowledgeable guides to explore the best highlights. nhm.ac.uk/events/museumhighlights-tour
Behind the Scenes Tour: Spirit Collection
Various dates and times £25 non-members / £20 members
Go behind the scenes in the Museum’s Darwin Centre for a look at our fascinating zoology collection preserved in spirit. Explore some of the numerous treasures among the 22 million specimens. nhm.ac.uk/events/behindthe-scenes-tour-the-spiritcollection
Women in Science Tour
Various dates and times Free
Hear the gripping histories of several women scientists from history including some who’ve worked at the Museum, and learn about the Museum’s displays and our cutting-edge science. nhm.ac.uk/visit/whats-on (search free events).
Members events
Dig Deeper: Clever Crows and Remarkable Ravens 2 July 18.30–20.00
Join Dr Joanne Cooper, Senior Curator of Birds, and Professor Nicky Clayton from the University of Cambridge as they discuss corvids and their remarkable intelligence.
Anning Room Session:
Charles Darwin
13 July, 11.00, 12.15, 14.00, 15.15
Bring the kids along to our Anning Rooms workshop to learn about Charles Darwin’s adventures on board HMS Beagle and the incredible discoveries he made along the way about the creatures we share the planet with.
Dig Deeper: Deep Sea 25 September, 18.30–20.00 Ever wondered what mysteries lie at the bottom of the sea? Join Dr Adrian Glover, deep-sea ocean scientist, as he takes us to the Pacific Ocean’s floor for a glimpse into his latest expedition, which chartered new territory and aimed to protect the biodiversity of the seabed.
Anning Room Session: Mary Anning 28 September, 11.00, 12.15, 14.00, 15.15
Bring the kids along to our Anning Room workshop to learn all about Mary Anning’s fossil hunting adventures.
Member Preview Evening: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 60 11 October, 18.30–20.00
Please note: Some dates and times are subject to change. For further information on members events, visit nhm.ac.uk/membership
Buzz along to the Hive
An exclusive digital hub especially for our supporters, the Hive is filled with exciting videos, articles and activities to help you stay connected with nature and the Museum. Here you’ll also find an exclusive virtual events programme, bringing you closer to our world-leading scientists through a series of lectures and workshops. Discover it all at nhm.ac.uk/the-hive
60 SECONDS WITH… PAULINE ROBERT
By Lizzie ReayPatrons events
Private View of Birds:
Brilliant and Bizarre
Open to All Patrons
2 July, 20.00–21.30
Join us straight after the Dig Deeper Talk to experience the newly opened exhibition and take a tour with our experts who helped curate it.
Urban Nature Project: Private Tour and Coffee Morning
Open to All Patrons
18 July, 8.30–10.00
Be one of the first supporters to explore the gardens in full bloom with a private tour, followed by coffee and cake in our new Garden Café.
Patrons Night at the Museum
Open to All Patrons
2 September, 19.00–22.00
Ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes to keep the Museum running?
Don’t miss Experts uncover the marvels of science on Earth and beyond at Dig Deeper: Scientific Surprises and Accidental Discoveries. Catch up on the Hive.
Back for a second year, join us as night falls to see just what it takes.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year 60 Awards Ceremony
Open to Platinum Patrons
8 October, 19.00–01.00
Experience dinner in Hintze Hall where the winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 60 competition will be announced.
Wildlife Photographer of the Year 60 Launch
Open to Platinum and Gold Patrons
9 October, 19.00–21.30
Enjoy a glamorous drinks reception in Hintze Hall and explore the exhibition before it opens to the public.
Please note: Some dates and times are subject to change. If you have any questions about upcoming events, please contact patrons@nhm.ac.uk.
As a Patron, you’ll enjoy all member benefits, as well as discounted access to visitor and members events plus your specially curated programme.
What do you do?
I’m the Head of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year (WPY) programme. I drive the strategy and reach of the annual competition, exhibition and related global activities.
Tell us about 60 years of WPY
We are celebrating 60 years of excellence in wildlife photography and environmental storytelling. Photography has advanced dramatically over this time, from film to digital, black-andwhite to colour and new technologies such as drones and camera traps.
WPY and our global community has grown exponentially too. The awarded images reach millions of people around the world every year, inspiring awe and sparking action to protect the natural world. This year, a new Impact Award will encourage and recognise hopeful stories and conservation successes.
How has the number of entries changed?
In its first year it had 361 entries. Now we receive nearly 60,000 from more than 110 countries and territories. Our ambition is to keep growing and encourage entries from
regions the competition has historically received fewer entries from. This year we increased the number of countries benefiting from the entry fee waiver across Africa, southeast Asia and Central and South America.
How difficult is judging?
The jury has a huge task of selecting only 100 images from so many stunning photographs. The process takes weeks and culminates with the vote for the category winners, then Grand Title winners. Thanks to a great diversity of nationalities, expertise and interests among the jury members, conversations remain fascinating and lively.
Favourite image?
I love a surprising one that pulls you in and draws your attention to different elements. So I find the young Grand Title winner from our fifty-ninth competition incredibly unique and powerful.
SEE THE EVENT
Don’t miss your chance to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 60 exhibition before it opens to the public at our preview evening. Details to the left.
Journal Science in focus
The lowdown
Where Near Elgol, on the southwest coast of the Isle of Skye, in Scotland.
What A new species of pterosaur, Ceoptera evansae, has been discovered. This species would have been alive around 165 million years ago.
Why This discovery has shown that advanced Middle Jurassic pterosaurs were more diverse than previously realised.
When The fossil was discovered in 2006.
A paper describing the new species was published in early 2024.
New pterosaur discovered
A new species of Jurassic pterosaur has been described from the Isle of Skye. Still inside a rock, the remarkable specimen can only be studied by CT-scanning, reveals Collection Moves Assistant Emilie Pearson.
Awell-preserved fossil uncovered back in 2006 on the Isle of Skye in Scotland has been revealed as a new species of pterosaur, Ceoptera evansae.
The Museum’s Professor Paul Barrett was the leader of the expedition that resulted in the discovery, and is co-author of the paper describing the new species.
‘This new species is the first of its particular group to have been found in Scotland,
and is only the second flying reptile to be named from the country,’ Paul says. ‘It reveals that these animals were much more widespread than would otherwise be expected from their generally patchy fossil record, and it dates important events in pterosaur history to an earlier time.
‘Pterosaurs have a very poor fossil record in general, as their bones are quite fragile. As flying animals, they didn’t spend as much time on the ground near
Fast fact
Pterosaurs were flying reptiles and some of the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight.
the rivers and lakes where fossils usually form. Most of what we know about pterosaurs, especially in the Early and Middle Jurassic, comes from a handful of sites known as Lagerstätten, where fossil preservation is exceptional. Almost everything we know about pterosaur biology and evolution comes
‘CT scans revealed a bony shoulder flange that set this pterosaur apart from others’
from only eight or nine of these key areas around the world.’
The area where the fossil was found is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, so the expedition team could only collect specimens from rocks that had fallen naturally onto the beach. It was while crawling over these fallen boulders that the team noticed some bones sticking out. They collected the top of the boulder so that it could be brought back to the Natural History Museum and stabilised for further study.
This task fell to Senior Conservator Lu Allington-Jones, who went on to spend over a year working on the specimen, using a variety of techniques to expose the bones for study. In order to study bones too fragile to be removed from the rock matrix, CT scans were carried out. This process helped to reveal features such as a bony flange on the shoulder, which set the specimen apart from other pterosaurs.
Dr Liz Martin-Silverstone, a palaeobiologist from the University of Bristol and lead author on the new paper, says, ‘The fossil is from one of the most important time periods in pterosaur evolution, so it was already a significant find. To later discover that there were more bones embedded within the rock made it even better than initially thought. It brings us one step closer to understanding where and when the more advanced pterosaurs evolved.’ ●
Revealing the mystery in the matrix
Due to the fragility and fragmentary nature of the pterosaur bones, combined with the density and hardness of the rock matrix, a combination of techniques was used to get the specimen to a state where it could be studied further by the team.
Blast off the barnacles
When removed from the beach, the rocks were covered in a crust of barnacles. They were rinsed with methylated spirit to remove dust and other debris, and the surfaces were cleaned using abrasive air techniques to remove carbonate deposits. A protective plaster jacket was made for the lime mudstone block to protect the underside and then it was immersed in acetic acid, a weak organic acid often used in fossil preparation.
Scanned and modelled
To visualise the preserved remains, including those still encased in the rock, the specimen was CT-scanned at the Museum’s Computed Tomography Facility. Later scans, which enabled scientists to describe the specimen, were carried out at the University of Bristol. The different elements of the specimen were then grouped into vertebrae, forelimb, hind limb, metatarsal/ metacarpal, unknown fragments, and identified bone groups.
Rinse and repeat
After being immersed in acid, the rocks were rinsed in running water for six days to remove any excess acid and calcium salts. The softened layer was then removed with a brush and lowpressure water jet. The blocks were dried in an oven for five hours at 50°C to limit crystal growth. When dry, they were photographed and exposed bones were treated with acid-resistant resin to protect them. This whole process was repeated 29 times over a period of 12 months.
4
Next, we created a phylogenetic tree for the specimen, a branching diagram that shows the evolutionary relationships between different species with a common ancestor. In this study, we drew on information about 69 species (including 67 pterosaurs and two nonpterosaurs – the reptile Euparkeria and a reptile-hipped dinosaur Herrerasaurus) and used 136 skeletal characters to infer the relationship between our specimen and other known species. 1 3
Exploring the family tree
Journal Inside story
‘Thanks to our dinosaur hood, lots of human T. rexes roam the Museum’
As one of the Museum’s Assistant Buyers, Alex Waters is responsible for keeping our shops stocked with interesting, sustainable and unique gifts. He reveals what it takes to create and curate a world-class retail range for a world-class Museum.
My life in a nutshell
I’ve always worked in retail. Before the Museum, I was in the homeware- and accessories-buying team at a high-street department store.
Like a lot of people at the Museum, I’m a big fan of spending time in nature.
I love working at the Museum at dusk. Being the only one standing under Hope the whale, experiencing my very own Night at the Museum, is incredible.
What do you do at the Museum?
As an Assistant Buyer in the Retail Team, I typically select and develop products for our Museum shops across our core and seasonal ranges. This includes taking inspiration from our exhibitions, the building and big calendar moments such as Christmas, Eid, Easter and so on.
From books and merchandise to replicas and prints, everybody has their favourite area to work in – mine are the adult gifting and Christmas ranges. Most of our products are developed entirely from scratch and can be bought nowhere else! A huge part of my job is talking to Museum scientists to ensure our products are scientifically accurate. I started the job with no real knowledge of dinosaurs, but after three years of working with the palaeontologists, I’ve learnt a lot.
What’s your favourite part of your work?
I love that when we’re developing a new range, we can search for suppliers who share our values in sustainability and responsibility – and, in turn, make a big difference to their business. To create a recent range inspired by Hope the whale, we partnered with a small company in India that supports amazing local artisans to make fairtrade jewellery.
Not only do we champion independent creators, but our customers can enjoy knowing that the profits from their ethical purchases support the Museum’s work to find solutions from nature for nature. I’m proud that the Museum is leading the way in more sustainable and responsible gifting.
How do you keep up with trends in retail?
Most of the time we have our finger on the pulse, watching social media to get ahead of the next big thing. But trends sometimes take us by surprise! Our dinosaur hood is hugely popular at the moment, so there are lots of human T. rexes roaming around the Museum. When stocking our shops, we’re often guided by upcoming exhibitions and other things going on at the Museum. By the time you read this, you might have spotted some new products inspired by the addition to our gardens.
How do you work with the Museum’s scientists?
There is a whole range of replicas in our shops that are based on real specimens. First, we think about what is most likely to inspire visitors to the Museum, then we work with scientists to dig around in our vast collections and make a shortlist of specimens – there are 80 million options, so it’s not easy. Our amazing Imaging and Analysis Team then make meticulous 3D scans and print out the models, which are sent off to our suppliers who create and paint the replicas for us. A short while later, the product appears in the shop.
What’s the best thing you work on?
I enjoy working on the print range. Few people know the Museum has more art in our Archives than most art galleries. Being able to explore the Libraries and Archives and look through all the old adverts for the Museum, ticket stubs and vintage designs is always a source of inspiration for our next range. But my most favourite is definitely the Christmas jumper. It’s not often you get to develop a product that’s so highly anticipated by our customers and part of an annual tradition. Plus, it’s another great example of the Museum supporting a UK-based, sustainable business.
What inspires you most about the Museum?
There’s a lot of inspiration in the Museum – the architecture alone is awe inspiring, there’s nowhere like it in London. Our history is interesting but so is the groundbreaking science happening behind the scenes. In the face of the planetary emergency, the Museum is more important today than ever before. ●
Journal Exceptional specimens
Can animals be gay?
Could domestic sheep be the first known animal, apart from humans, that can be genuinely gay?
And if so, what about their wild cousins?
Scientific name
Urial, Ovis vignei Chosen Josh Davisby
Science Background Science writer
The urial is a species of wild sheep usually found grazing across the high, grassy plains of central Asia. Also known as the arkar, it typically lives in herds segregated by sex, with males forming bachelor groups. Within these groups there’s a social hierarchy in which older rams – which sport the bigger, more impressive curling horns – are usually at the top.
But, as with other species of wild sheep, the males in these groups frequently engage in homosexual behaviour, including courting, mounting and penetrating each other. Their behaviour raises an interesting question: can animals be gay?
When talking about the queerness of animals, scientists frequently refer to an animal displaying homosexual ‘behaviour’ or gay ‘activity’. This is because it’s impossible to ask an animal about their sexuality and difficult to follow a single individual for its entire life to observe its mating habits. This makes it exceedingly hard to know if an animal
‘When male sheep have the option to mate with a female in heat or another ram, eight per cent prefer other rams’
The lowdown
Wild origins
The domestic sheep is most likely descended from the mouflon, Ovis gmelini, which lives wild throughout central and southwest Asia. They were domesticated around 10,000 years ago.
is truly gay or not. If we were to use human definitions for animals, then most would not be classified as gay or lesbian but something more akin to bisexual. But even this becomes problematic when trying to assign sexuality to an individual animal. The domestic sheep, Ovis aries, however, offers us a unique opportunity.
Studies have found that when rams are presented with the option to mate with a ewe in heat or another ram, roughly eight per cent of all males show a consistent preference for other rams over time. This suggests that sheep may be the first known animal, apart from humans, in which genuinely homosexual individuals have been identified – though it’s important to note we can still never be 100 per cent certain.
Intriguingly, the gay behaviour of sheep is not limited to domesticated animals. Research has found that their wilder cousins are also incredibly queer, including the urial shown here.
Another wild species, the bighorn sheep Ovis canadensis, has even been described as living in ‘homosexual societies’. The rams in these herds regularly engage in homosexual courtships and sexual activity. The rams bow their heads, rub their horns against each other’s bodies, and taste their partner’s urine in a behaviour known as ‘flehmen’, which is usually thought to be a way for males to detect if a female is on heat. This is often done while the ram is fully erect, before it mounts and penetrates the younger animal.
Whether, like their domestic cousins, some of these rams are what we would consider gay, with a continual preference for other males, is still tricky to answer. Nonetheless, the parallels between the wild and domestic species are notable. ●
World domination
Today sheep are one of the most numerous vertebrates on the planet, with around 1.24 billion animals. The most sheep are in China, followed by India, Australia, Nigeria and Iran.
Bigger is better
In domestic sheep the presence of horns is variable, but in wild animals both male and females have them. Horns are often bigger in males, which will use them to fight for dominance.
Heavy lifters
In some species of sheep, such as the urial and bighorn sheep, the males’ horns can get truly massive. One bighorn sheep had horns weighing 14kg – as heavy as all its other bones put together!
DID YOU KNOW?
Sheep are intelligent animals with great memories. Research shows they can recognise up to 50 other sheep faces and remember them for two years. They can even recognise human faces!
Spiralling growth
The outer horn layer is made of keratin, the same protein as your fingernails. The keratin growth is not even on all sides. The outer edge of the horn grows faster, so it creates a curve as it grows.
Courtship behaviour
A female urial in estrous will be claimed by the dominant male. After mating, he guards her from other males until she’s no longer receptive, then he leaves in search of another female.
Discover more exceptional specimens in A Little Gay Natural History. Pick up a copy, priced £9.99, from the Museum Shop or online at nhmshop.co.uk.
Both rams and ewes use their horns as tools for eating and fighting. The horns help absorb the impact during head butting and reduce the risk of brain injury.
Gay activity
Male urials engage in a range of homosexual behaviours similar to how bighorn sheep rub each other with their horns during courtship before mounting. One species is said to live in ‘homosexual societies’.
Seven species
There are seven species of wild sheep in the world. They can be found across much of the northern hemisphere from North America through Russia and Asia down into the Middle East.
Brilliant and bizarre
Unravel the epic story of birds, discover the secrets to their success and learn some of their surprising and often shocking tactics for survival in the Museum’s exciting new exhibition.
Birds are everywhere; from grassy steppes to humid jungles, baking deserts to icy ones, open oceans to town centres; from half a kilometre deep in the ocean to over 11 kilometres up in the sky. Globally, nearly 11,000 species of bird live across all continents and countries, all finding ways to survive with an astonishing array of senses, skills and behaviours.
Their ubiquity means that most of us probably encounter birds regularly, but they’re often just part of the background to our busy lives. During the lockdowns triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the presence of birds took on a new
MUSEUM EXPERT Dr Joanne Cooper
Senior Curator of the avian anatomical collections at the Natural History Museum, Joanne works across both the avian osteological and spirit collections, this includes some 35,000 specimens in total.
significance for many people. Being able to watch them became a vital connection to nature. The awareness of our bird neighbours was heightened further by the sudden loudness of their songs, as the usual din created by humans was dampened. Even though we value birds, living alongside us is taking its toll on them. Almost half of bird species worldwide are declining, with one in eight globally threatened. Our connection with nature is more crucial today than ever, as conservation organisations engage people to reverse declines.
Early birds
In 1861, the discovery of the 150-millionyear-old Archaeopteryx lithographica in a German quarry stunned palaeontologists. Its combination of a small reptilian skeleton surrounded by the imprint of feathered, birdlike wings and a long, plumed tail was the first evidence of a link between birds and dinosaurs. Intensely researched, it held a pre-eminent position as the earliest bird for well over a century.
Over the past few decades, our understanding of the evolution of birds has advanced rapidly, underpinned by an expanding trove of Jurassic
Above Archaeopteryx shows evolution in action: the transition between dinosaurs and birds.
and Cretaceous fossil birds, especially from northeast China where many finds include wellpreserved plumage. Discoveries in dinosaurs have also been crucial, particularly of feathered dinosaurs from the same Chinese fossil horizons. The now thoroughly tested conclusion is that birds are dinosaurs, sharing features such as feathers, warm-bloodedness, bipedalism, laying eggs and wishbones that place them in the theropod group with Tyrannosaurus. Archaeopteryx has been joined by several other long-tailed and winged species and is now recognised as being closer to dinosaurs
DID YOU KNOW?
With their long tail and similar body size, reconstructions of Archaeopteryx often resemble a Eurasian magpie. Analysis of a wing feather has revealed it did have black plumage, but the pattern is unknown.
– l r l i f the ancestor of birds, but not a direct ancestor itself.
a close t ve of he an sto f irds, ut no direc ncesto t lf.
oothless, beak d b rd bout ago
Toothless, beaked birds appear about 131 million years ago, with some sporting tail feathers longer than their bodies. The first bird group known to have gone global were the successful Enantiornithines. With some internal features marking them apart from true modern birds, they would look familiar – until you saw their teeth, which some birds had until about 66 million years ago. By this time, hundreds of species had evolved. Flitting through forests, swimming in seas, birds were thriving alongside dinosaurs and the flying reptilian pterosaurs. Then, about 66 million years ago, an asteroid collision triggered changes in the global environment and a resulting mass extinction of over 70 per cent of species on the planet. Non-bird dinosaurs and pterosaurs were wiped out, along with most birds. But some did survive – small, ground-dwelling species that could weather the devastating loss of forests.
Amazing adaptations
The species that survived the asteroid collision were highly specialised, shaped already by the demands of their high metabolisms and flight. They all shared hollow bones, highly efficient breathing systems, feathers, toothless beaks and relatively large brains. Despite all the apparent diversity in today’s birds, their basic body plans are remarkably similar, a reminder of the evolutionary bottleneck they passed through.
Nevertheless, in the first few millions of years after the strike, birds evolved rapidly through innovative adaptations to take advantage of new ecological opportunities. The huge range of external shapes, sizes, behaviour, plumage and colour we see today is the result of millions of years of subsequent refinement of this initial explosion. The fossil record provides the physical remains of ancient birds and evidence of their appearance and lifestyles, but to fully appreciate birds’ extraordinary abilities, we must look at their modern descendants.
Super senses and smart skills
Wherever they live, birds share a need to find food and mates, raise young and for those young to stay alive long enough to launch a next generation of their own. Every species has its own unique set of adaptations and strategies, some of which we appreciate when we watch birds, such as flight and complex courtship displays, or listen to songs and calls. However, much of the world of birds lies outside our comprehension.
For example, birds can see four channels of primary colour (humans see three) and many birds can also see into the ultraviolet spectrum, adding another layer of brilliant colour perception. One way in which birds exploit this ability is with UV reflective areas of plumage that send signals about their health to prospective mates.
‘After the asteroid strike, birds evolved rapidly to take advantage of new ecological opportunities’
For most birds that don’t make a significant seasonal migration, they may need their wits to survive a tough winter, using their intelligence to solve problems or remember their way to food. Birds have tightly packed brain neurons, meaning that despite their overall small size, bird brains can be brilliant brains.
Flight brings different sight needs. Birds can not only resolve rapid movement, distinguishing detail when flying that would be a blur to humans, but can also detect slow movements, such as the track of star constellations at night or the sun by day, which they use to navigate. It’s even possible that birds can ‘see’ the earth’s magnetic fields with a specialised form of light receptor cell, which gives another way to navigate, helping them build up sensory maps. Such super-senses allow migratory birds to follow seasonal changes, seeking breeding ground or food when local sources decline.
Above Birds are a hugely diverse group, ranging from a 2.5 gram bee hummingbird to the 150kg common ostrich. The Philippine eagle (left) is one of the world’s largest eagles, while the Sri Lankan jungle fowl is from one of the earliest known modern bird groups.
Some members of the crow family have overall intelligence measuring close to great apes. Common ravens can deceive each other and plan their way through a challenge to a food reward; Eurasian jays can remember where thousands of acorns are hidden in autumn to retrieve them in winter. Even small birds can surprise us with the capacity for smart innovation. In especially harsh conditions, a population of great tits in Hungary has learnt the gruesome habit of pecking out the brains of bats hibernating in a cave, a trick being passed along through their social networks.
FOCUS ON: Blue bird-of-paradise
Male birds-of-paradise sport an extraordinary range of colours, plumage, displays and calls to attract females. Research shows that species with the most complex colours, such as the blue bird-of-paradise, also have the most complex vocal performances.
FOCUS ON: Kaua’i ‘Akialoa
This is an extinct species of honeycreeper from Hawaii, distinguished by its long bill for probing for insects. Since humans arrived, 30 out of 50 honeycreeper species have become extinct, wiped out by habitat loss, invasive species and the diseases carried by introduced mosquitoes.
The dazzling diversity of bird beaks
Studying the diversity in the shapes and sizes of bird beaks helps us understand evolution, but has often focused on a relatively few species at a time. Using the collections at the Museum, a team of researchers from the University of Sheffield analysed beaks from over 8,500 species across 200 bird families, using high-resolution 3D scanners to create virtual models.
With such a huge number of scans to process, the team turned to citizen scientists online to help landmark the models, highlighting key features on the beak such as the tip and edges, which allowed all beaks to then be measured and compared. Using this unprecedented dataset, the team is exploring the timing and rate of evolution in modern birds. One study compared beak shapes to a DNA-based evolutionary tree, revealing rapid diversification after the dinosaurs died out, followed by slower rates as evolution became more about fine tuning.
FOCUS ON: Common swifts
For hundreds of years, swifts have nested harmlessly in the roofs of old buildings. In our modern world, they are kept out of new buildings, and lose old sites to refurbishment or demolition, contributing to their ongoing decline. Swift bricks built into new developments are a simple solution to offer new nest sites. Steps like this are conscious actions we can take to help birds live alongside us.
Under threat
The greater adjutant stork is poisoned by rubbish dumps, where pollutants are disposed of with food.
Puffins rely on small, proteinpacked sandeels to feed their chicks. But the decline in sandeels due to rising sea temperatures is causing chicks to starve.
Despite their long history and accumulated amazing survival strategies, most birds are struggling to cope with human impacts, with more than 1,400 species threatened with extinction and many more declining. With many extinct species known from millions of years of fossil record, why does this matter?
Extinction rates and risk are difficult to measure, but researchers agree that modern birds face an unprecedented extinction threat, with some suggesting that current rates of extinction are over a thousand times greater than natural background rates. Since about 126,000 years ago, 1,300–1,500 bird species have gone extinct, almost all human-caused, driven by habitat loss, introductions of non-native species and overexploitation. Already, we have pushed more than one in nine bird species to extinction, most recently the Alagoas foliage-gleaner of eastern Brazil, last seen in 2011.
‘Most birds are struggling to cope with human impacts’
FOCUS ON:
Albatross chick
Chicks of the largest albatrosses are left for days at a time while their parents forage over thousands of kilometres of ocean. At sea, albatrosses are threatened by entanglement in commercial fishing gear. Since 2005, the Albatross Task Force has been working globally with fisheries to prevent albatross deaths through education and switching to bird-safe practices, reducing the death tolls in some fisheries by 95 per cent.
Birds provide vital ecosystem services, helping create and balance functioning habitats with their activities, such as fertilising forests and coral reefs, dispersing seeds, pollinating plants and disposing of carcasses. Birds are also a ‘barometer for planetary health’ – indicators for the overall state of the natural world. Losing birds not only contributes to the unravelling of the interconnecting webs needed in fully functioning ecosystems, but also acts as a warning of the damage being done –which impacts us as well. The connection humans have had with birds for millennia goes deep.
New birds for modern times
EXPERT BIO
Elle Kaye
An award-winning bird taxidermist, Elle concentrates on naturalistic taxidermy. Her pieces fill homes across the world and she fulfils requests for film sets, interior designers and museums.
Taxidermy allows us intimate insights into birds’ unique physical adaptations, while serving as an educational resource and taxonomic record.
Unusually for the Museum, new taxidermy was commissioned for Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre, including nine specimens – a rose-ringed parakeet, three common swifts, a red kite, a house sparrow, a grey squirrel, and two white-tailed sea eagles.
The white-tailed eagles dominate both in size and in labour. Processing the eagles begins with the removal of the skin from the carcass, a delicate and time-consuming craft of unravelling the skin like a jacket from the body. The skin is peppered with organic material: sinews, fascia, fats and meat, which all needs to be carefully removed by hand – aided by a de-fatting machine –to allow optimal results. As the dermis becomes cleaner and more fragile, we move to preservation. Long soaks in concoctions of non-toxic chemical compounds and treatments are needed for such big
skins. I aim to change the skin’s properties from organic, which can rot, to something more stable, closer to a material or fabric. Dirt is scrubbed out of the feet, and the skull is flushed clean.
Now it’s time to start rebuilding the bird’s impressive stature. Using the carcass as a reference and callipers to check measurements – such as length of the femur, the width of the eye sclera and so on – I build an anatomically accurate representation of its internal architecture from balsa wood, pine inserts, wooden dowel and threaded bars.
Next, I unite the body with the preserved, washed skin, complete with fluffedup feathers, colour and shine restored. Using photos, I set the eyes in a way that communicates an expression, the brow forward and intense, the head feathers alert and dynamic. Manoeuvring a bird of this size and weight, with a wingspan of almost three metres, demands a lot of physicality and strength. The bird now undergoes a period of ‘drying’, allowing
all the mechanics to set in place under a skin that encases it like a shell. Only then will this great bird be ready for display. It’s a privilege to work on such remarkable specimens, knowing they will be placed in the Museum’s collections after the exhibition and become part of a unique legacy.
‘Birds face their greatest challenges today. But actions great and small are making a difference’
Hope for the future
Birds offer not just warning, but also hope. Given a chance, their resilience can be remarkable. Birdof-paradise populations recovered after industrialscale exploitation for their plumage was stopped in the 1920s. The tiny black robin or karure of Rēkohu Chatham Islands was down to one breeding female in the early 1980s, but now there are more than 300 in its island reserves. On the former intensively farmed Knepp estate in West Sussex, critically endangered turtle doves and nightingales breed successfully, while other birds thrive in its rewilded scrubland at densities not recorded anywhere else in the UK. With resources and will, actions can be taken to prevent extinctions and and reverse declines. While
Below Habitat loss and fragmentation from timber cutting and hunting for food and casque ivory are the greatest threats to Asia’s forest
organisations such as the RSPB and BirdLife International co-ordinate efforts on a large scale, the determination of individuals or small groups to buck the trend can also be decisive. Two examples are the Hargila Army movement in Assam, initiated by Dr Purnima Devi Barman to protect the nesting and roosting sites of the greater adjutant stork, or the pioneering efforts of Roy Dennis in reintroducing red kites and white-tailed eagles to the UK.
Birds have survived through 150 million years, but face their greatest challenges today. With human impacts unchecked, some species will adapt and cope, but they will represent a fraction of their dazzling diversity. Their loss will be our loss in so many ways. But all over the world, actions great and small are making a positive difference. There are ways for birds and humans to thrive together far in the future; it’s up to us, from governments to individuals, to choose to make them happen. ●
Discover the Museum’s bird collections and science
With over one million specimens representing 95 per cent of bird species, the Natural History Museum houses one of the largest and most comprehensive bird collections globally.
It includes study skins (specimens preserved using a style of taxidermy that differs to the poses you normally see), mounts, skeletons, spirit specimens (preserved in fluid and stored in glass jars), eggs and nests. They span the history of the Museum, from rarities over 270 years old, to specimens being cleaned in our beetle colonies today.
The collections hold many historically important, extinct and endangered taxa, many of which are rare or even unique in museums. Since the early 1970s,
the bird collections have been located at Tring, Hertfordshire. Looking after them, creating records and digitising all of them ensures they’re all available for research, outreach and exhibitions.
Nearly 200 visitors a year from around the world use the collections in person, while staff help many more researchers with loans and enquiries. Our team of curators, researchers and scientific associates also carry out wide-ranging research, not only on birds across the whole planet, but also across thousands of years.
The bird collections are used for all sorts of studies including taxonomy, comparative anatomy, zoogeography, genomics, archaeology evolution, ecology, palaeontology and art.
FOCUS ON:
White stork
In 1822, a white stork shot in Klütz, Germany, was carrying a 75cm long arrow in its neck. The arrow revealed it had flown 2,000 miles from Africa after surviving the injury. It was the first evidence of how birds moved with the seasons on migration. Two hundred years later, white storks from the Knepp Estate are tracked on their journeys to Morocco using GPS tags.
THE MUSEUM IN ACTION
See the exhibition
Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre
Until 5 January 2025
Explore the incredible story of birds – from how they have used brilliant and fascinating techniques to adapt to a changing world, to how we can help them in the future. nhm.ac.uk/birds-brilliant-bizarre
Members and Patrons get free, unlimited entry, do not need to book and have priority access.
Buy the book
Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre reveals how birds have survived for millions of years and describes their surprising and sometimes extraordinary behaviours, such as zebra finches that sing to regulate the temperature of their eggs.
Priced £9.99, Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre is available from the Museum’s Shops and online at nhmshop.co.uk. Members and Patrons receive a 20 per cent discount.
Our everc i g story
In the past 20 years, the puzzle of human evolution has become ever more complicated. To work out how new species, unknown migrations and ancient tools fit together, it’s not only a question of space – but also of time.
WORDS: JAMES ASHWORTH
Imagine trying to finish a jigsaw without a clue what the finished puzzle should look like. There are no edges to guide you and many pieces are missing or damaged. Now, replace these jigsaw pieces with fossils. This is the challenge faced by experts in human evolution, or palaeoanthropologists, as they try to work out where our species comes from.
Fortunately, the broader picture is starting to become clearer, thanks to the development of dating technology. Recent advances are providing an unprecedented insight into the origins of Homo sapiens and our relatives, revealing that they are much more complex than first thought.
Before the first dating technologies were developed, studying the past was a matter of
MUSEUM EXPERT
Professor Chris StringerResearch Leader for our Centre for Human Evolution Research at the Museum, generously supported by The Calleva Foundation, Chris has spent his career investigating Homo sapiens and close relatives to find out how humans spread around the globe.
Neanderthals were humans like us, but they were a distinct species called Homo neanderthalensis. They ‘overlapped’ with modern humans (left) for over 10,000 years.
Human evolution
educated guesswork. While finds from the recent past might be able to be dated by archaeological remains or written records, the age of early humans was much harder to infer. When the first Neanderthals were uncovered in the 1800s, for instance, geologists had to rely on comparing the sequence of rocks to work out what was older. The lower the layer, the greater the age.
It would take around a century before fossils could be dated more precisely. In the 1940s, scientist Willard Libby finally hit upon a reliable way to date the remains of once living things. Professor Chris Stringer explains: ‘Libby realised that living things stop taking up carbon-14 when they die, and that this decays at a set rate. This means that the amount of carbon-14 left in fossils can be used to calculate their age.’
Unfortunately, radiocarbon dating, as the process is called, only works on organic materials from the past 50,000 years or so. Beyond this point, there’s so little carbon-14 left in a sample that it’s virtually impossible to date. Fortunately, life has another unique property that can be used to date it – the direction of its molecules.
One direction
‘While an organism is alive, all of its amino acids are oriented in one direction,’ Chris explains. ‘After death, the amino acids gradually begin to flip the other way, and eventually stabilise with equal amounts pointing in either direction. The proportion facing in each direction can, in principle, be used to work out how old a fossil is.’
This process, which can be used to date shells associated with human artefacts or fossils, has some differences to radiocarbon dating. One of the most important is that carbon-14 decays at the same rate, no matter the conditions, but higher temperatures can cause the amino-acid flipping to speed up, while cooler conditions slow it down. This makes it difficult to make direct comparisons between the dates for fossils found in warmer continents like Africa to those found in cooler Europe. Fortunately, scientists have other dating techniques in their arsenal.
With the drawbacks of biological dating methods, researchers also rely on inorganic tests like U-series dating to work out the age of fossils. Uranium is naturally found in small amounts in water, and once it gets into the body it tends to end up in the bones. As this radioactive element’s half-life is much longer than that of carbon-14, U-series dating can be used on fossils that are older, up to hundreds of thousands of years old. However, just as uranium can get into bones during life, it can also enter after death and this can pose issues for getting an accurate date.
‘When there’s movement of water, any uranium that is in a fossil may be washed out, or more may be added to it,’ Chris says. ‘To date these bones,
Rewriting the evolution timeline
Homo naledi
Homo naledi is currently dated to between 335,000 to 236,000 years ago. Narrowing or extending this range would reveal what species H. naledi lived alongside, and provide context to controversial claims on its culture.
Homo luzonensis
The best-known Neanderthals lived between about 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, after which all physical evidence of them vanishes.
Originally dated to around 65,000 years old, Professor Rainer Grün’s recent dating doubles this to about 130,000. This makes it less likely Homo luzonensis lived alongside our species, though more fossils could change this conclusion.
Neanderthal, Krapina
These remains are currently dated to around 130,000 years old. But unpublished work by Stringer and Grün, and similarities to much older remains found elsewhere, suggest these fossils could be over 100,000 years older.
Omo-Kibish 2
Ethiopia’s Omo-Kibish 1 is about 200,000 years old, making it one of the oldest fossils to look recognisably like we do today. Omo-Kibish 2, found nearby, is often assumed to be the same age, but could be older.
Homo longi
Uncovered in China, this species, dubbed ‘Dragon Man’ is thought to be at least 146,000 years old. But further work on this discovery is needed to provide a more accurate estimate of its age.
More than 100 Homo floresiensis fossils have been unearthed from at least 14 individuals in Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia.
Neanderthal, Tabun
A skeleton discovered in this Israeli cave is one of the most complete ever found, but its age isn’t well established. Rainer and Chris’ research suggests it might be around 170,000 years old, but this needs further confirmation.
Apidima 1 and 2
A ~210,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull was found alongside a ~170,000-yearold Neanderthal skull in the eponymous Greek cave. It reveals that our species was leaving Africa long before the major migration out of the continent.
Sima de los Huesos
Deep in a Spanish cave, dubbed Pit of Bones, 29 fossil hominins, thought to be early Neanderthals, were found. Age estimates range from 250,000600,000 years old, and further direct dating would help to confirm a more precise figure.
you have to take multiple samples from different layers of the bone and model the way the uranium has been taken up. By studying how much uranium has decayed, you can estimate the age of the fossil.’
However, U-series dating can only provide a minimum estimate of how old a fossil is. So it’s often accompanied by other techniques, such as electron spin resonance (ESR) dating. This process, which is mostly used on fossil teeth, relies on natural radiation from the surrounding environment bombarding the atoms inside a fossil tooth. This displaces the electrons in tooth enamel, where they get trapped. The more that are trapped, the longer the process has gone on. After estimating the previous radiation dose from the sediment surrounding the fossil, researchers can put an age to the sample.
The holy grail of dating
With their ability to help date fossils many hundreds of thousands of years old, ESR and U-series dating have become popular among palaeoanthropologists. But the gold standard of this field is a process known as argon-argon dating, which calculates an age for an object using the decay of a radioactive form of potassium to the gas argon. The technique is able to estimate the age of items millions, or even billions, of years old, allowing it to date not just fossils, but also Moon rocks and other ancient geological specimens. There’s just one catch – you need a volcano for the process to work. ‘After volcanos erupt, the argon in the lava is dispersed,’ Chris explains. ‘As the rocks cool, the argon starts to reaccumulate
DID YOU KNOW?
Facial modification was one of the first steps in the evolution of the Neanderthal lineage, pointing to a mosaic pattern of evolution, with different anatomical and functional modules evolving at different rates.
at a constant rate, providing us with a long-running clock to put a date onto fossils. Important sites like Olduvai Gorge, in Tanzania, experienced eruptions that allow us to date some of its fossils with great precision. Unfortunately, many of our fossil human sites in places such as Europe and China just don’t have the necessary volcanic activity.’
Together, these dating methods have enabled experts to firm up the ages of fossils from around the world, confirming when and where important events took place. Researchers aren’t resting on their laurels, though, as they continue to refine and improve these processes.
One big advance has actually been quite the opposite – miniaturising the process. While precious human fossils once had to be sectioned or drilled into with large tools in order to take samples, today’s lasers can make tiny pinpricks that work just as well for dating.
Meet a new, small, ancient human
In 2019, a groundbreaking discovery was announced – the unearthing of Homo luzonensis. Found in a cave in the Philippines, this diminutive species is one of our most recently discovered relatives.
Its discovery was important for many reasons, not least of which is because it’s a new species from southeast Asia –a region of the world which, historically, has not been well explored for human fossils.
It’s not just southeast Asia, either. While Europe, Siberia and eastern and southern Africa often attract attention in the search for our ancient relatives, other parts of the world tend to be overlooked. Studying these areas could lead to the discovery of more fossils, and even new species.
Professor Chris Stringer believes western and central Africa might be a promising place to start. ‘Not many people
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A small-bodied hominin – identified from seven teeth and six small bones – lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago.
have looked for human fossils in these heavily vegetated and hard-to-access regions,’ he says.
‘However, the discovery of stone tools suggests that humans were living in western and central Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. Promising sites might be found near lakes and rivers, as the water can help to expose fossils buried in the ground.’
Scientists are also expanding the range of materials they can date. ‘Amino-acid dating has mostly been used on molluscs, as their remains are often found alongside human fossils,’ explains Chris. ‘A team at the University of York are now working to create methods that would allow the teeth of mammals such as mammoths to be dated. This would help put an age to important sites in Africa and Europe where these remains are a common find.’
A changing picture
As more and more fossils have been dated, they’ve built up an unexpected picture of our evolution. It seems that, before migrating out of Africa all in one go, small groups of pioneering Homo sapiens made multiple forays out of the continent. One of the most exciting finds is in Apidima Cave, in Greece, where two supposed Neanderthal skulls were found close to each other. However, later studies showed that one of them was actually the rear part of a Homo sapiens cranium.
While it was assumed the Neanderthal population came first, and was later replaced by our species, U-series dating reveals this wasn’t the case. ‘The Homo sapiens fossil is at least 210,000 years old, which makes it the oldest-known member of our species outside Africa,’ Chris says. ‘Not only that, but it’s probably 40,000 years older than the Neanderthal fossil found nearby.’
This finding was controversial, and not without good reason. While dating techniques can provide accurate ages for fossils, researchers have to be certain what exactly they’re measuring. ‘You have to assess how a fossil has been deposited, as this can affect attempts to date it,’ says Chris. ‘If a fossil has been redeposited in a different layer of sediment, either naturally or by human burial, its age could be completely different to its surroundings.’ Differently aged sediments can also sometimes end up in other layers, a factor that affected the discovery of Homo floresiensis. Initially thought to be less than 20,000 years old, it turned out that much younger sediment had been deposited near the fossil, which is now thought to be around three times older.
In the case of Apidima, Chris’s colleague Professor Rainer Grün recently redated the bones and their surroundings to confirm their findings. ‘While it had already been suggested that the skulls had different ages, we confirmed they were buried at different times,’ Chris says. ‘It was only around 150,000 years ago that they were cemented together in the rock, many thousands of years after their separate deaths and deposition.’
With more careful dating, the future seems bright for the study of human evolution. As scientists continue to narrow down where and when our ancient relatives were living, we’ll get closer to understanding how our species first came into existence. ●
Reimagining our ancestry: the Kabwe skull
In the early 1920s, miners made a startling discovery – an ancient human skull and fragments of bone – in the Broken Hill mine in what is now Kabwe, Zambia. The importance of these fossils was quickly appreciated, and they were donated by the mine’s owners to what was then the British Museum, but is now the Natural History Museum. Here, they were studied by Arthur Smith Woodward, the Keeper of Geology, who declared the bones to be from a new species - Homo rhodesiensis. Since then, other scientists have classed the bones as belonging to Homo heidelbergensis. Comparisons with other sites in Europe and Africa suggested that the fossils were likely around 500,000 years old, but the bones had never been formally dated.
One of the main reasons for this is because nothing of the original mine now remains, leaving little for scientists to date. Instead, Chris and the team of researchers working on the dating used a combination of U-series and ESR dating to narrow down the skull’s age.
‘As the surrounding site had been quarried away, we had to look for other ways to get samples,’ Chris says. ‘We used small parts of the cranium, sediment scraped off it, as well as animal fossils taken from the mine, to date the skull to around 299,000 years old – much younger than expected.’
Instead of linear evolution, human species such as ‘Rhodesian Man’ and early Homo sapiens probably lived side-by-side in Africa.
The skull’s new age changed our outlook on human evolution. When it was dated to 500,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis became a likely candidate for being a direct ancestor of not just our species, but also of the Neanderthals. But after the reassessment, Homo heidelbergensis became a less likely ancestor for our species, something that is backed up by new studies examining the species’ distinctive anatomy.
An age of around 300,000 years means it was co-existing with early Homo sapiens-like humans in the continent, as well as Homo naledi in southern Africa.
At the same time, Neanderthals and Denisovans were also evolving elsewhere in the world, making it difficult to pin down how exactly the species are related.
This shatters historic views of human evolution, which saw Homo sapiens and our ancestors as a series of discrete species who gave way to their successors over time. Instead, different species went in their own evolutionary directions, occasionally interacting and interbreeding.
Redating other important specimens like the Kabwe skull would give researchers further insights into the evolution of our ancestors, and how our species came to be.
RETURN TO ORIGIN
Since the 1970s, the Zambian Government has asked for the Broken Hill skull to be returned. In 2018, it was agreed that Zambia and the UK would pursue bilateral discussion, which has been started. The Museum is committed to constructive participation in this ongoing dialogue.
Explore the Museum’s ne gardens
We’ve been transforming our five-acre gardens into a haven for people and wildlife as part of our work to support the recovery of urban nature across the UK. Find out how we did it and what you can see in the gardens when they open this summer.
WORDS: VICTORIA THOMSON
BOOK NOW
Be one of the first to see the new gardens at our members preview on 17 July. nhm.ac.uk/ the-hive
When the Museum first opened its doors in 1881, formal Victorian gardens were planned to accompany the magnificent building designed by architect Alfred Waterhouse. Unfortunately, these designs and countless others over the decades were never realised, and the gardens evolved into two distinct outdoor spaces – the vast lawn on the east side and the Wildlife Garden on the west.
Over the past 143 years, our gardens have served many purposes – as tennis courts, as a space to bury whale carcasses and excavate their bones years later, and as a Dig for Victory garden during wartime. Our small one-acre Wildlife Garden was added in 1995. Now, for the first time, the Museum gardens have been completely redeveloped into an extension of the Museum itself. Our new, immersive outdoor galleries tell the incredible story of our changing planet and our living laboratory will aid our research into UK urban nature recovery.
‘One of the biggest challenges was to create a space for nature to thrive that’s also accessible to millions of visitors every year’
The time to act is now
After years of industrialisation, intensive farming, expanding urbanisation and a warming climate, the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. The 2023 State of Nature report found that one in six species were threatened with extinction, 95 species of animals, plants and fungi have already disappeared, and key habitats are being lost or are in need of protection.
With no time to lose, we knew we needed to act now to play our part in supporting the recovery of the UK’s nature. Where better to start than our own doorstep? By developing our gardens into a long-term, collaborative space, we can research nature and the interactions between the natural world and people in an urban environment.
As the plans for the gardens developed, we realised this wasn’t enough. The project to transform our gardens became a UK-wide initiative to inspire and empower people to protect the nature on their doorsteps.
Nature first
Creating a garden that puts nature first was no mean feat. It took years of planning and many iterations to come up with the
Above The gardens have taken around two years to transform and include a log amphitheatre.
Below A bronze Diplodocus will be revealed in the gardens. The Diplodocus and the Jurassic Garden are supported by Kusuma Trust.
right design – one of the biggest challenges was to create a space for nature to thrive that’s also accessible to millions of visitors every year. ‘For the gardens to be truly ambitious and pioneering, we needed to collaborate, drawing on expertise, creativity and advice from both inside and outside the Museum,’ explains Programme Manager Natalie Tacq. ‘We visited other gardens, learning spaces and ecology centres; we spoke to scientists, conservationists, geologists; and we learned from our communities, teachers, families and accessibility experts. Finally, we sought out the best design team, who were equally inspired to deliver a sustainable, accessible and wildlifefriendly design.’
Sustainable by nature
With our gardens already home to some important nature, we had to make sure our design worked with the landscape and had a positive impact on the environment.
We set ourselves some ambitious sustainability goals. At the heart was a habitat protection programme, designed with our science team. Every decision was scrutinised against what was best for existing and future wildlife.
Step into nature’s classroom
Explore, reflect and connect with nature in the Museum’s new Nature Discovery Garden, supported by The Cadogan Charity.
The Nature Discovery Garden is a living research garden. Here, scientists will monitor and study how urban nature is responding to change, while you can stop, look and listen to the nature all around you.
Discover the extraordinary lives of the plants and animals living right on our doorsteps, and learn what actions you can take to support urban nature at home.
Nestled within the garden is a purpose-built building designed specifically for best practice in outdoor learning. With natural materials, natural light and views of the garden, The Nature Activity Centre, supported
by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is intended to make you feel outside even when you’re indoors.
Through this new outdoor space, we’ll be able to support even more people to build their identification and practical conservation skills. A new outdoor lab will be available for those studying
LOOK
OUT FOR
The patterns of leaves from community gardens across the borough, captured in a series of tiles.
and documenting nature, and provide a space for naturalists and staff to work together to monitor the wildlife found in our gardens.
We now have a room for the gardens team and volunteers responsible for caring for our new garden, and a hub for our exciting programme of volunteer-led family activities, self-guided activities and new school sessions that will take place in our outdoor spaces.
To complement the building, the Nature Discovery Garden also includes three purpose-built outdoor classrooms designed to host school groups as well as volunteers.
DID YOU KNOW?
We searched the UK to find incredible geology for the garden. More than 26 types of stone of different geological ages feature in the Evolution Timeline, supported by the Evolution Education Trust, as well as specimen boulders and benches. Find out how we sourced the stones:
Big ideas, small space
Designing a garden to represent 500 million years of life on Earth was a challenge embraced by our landscape architects. Each area in the garden has been designed to invoke the feel of a particular period with carefully curated plants.
BY TOM MCCARTER, HEAD OF GARDENSBryophytes
Starting in the east, the planting narrative begins with the relatives of the earliest-known land plants – lowgrowing mosses and liverworts creeping across the rocks.
Carboniferous tree ferns
From small-statured miniatures to giants, plants diversified and grew in size during the Carboniferous Period, 358–298 mya. The dominant plants of this period, such as giant lycophytes and seed ferns, don’t exist in the present day, so large Dicksonia antarctica tree ferns and an understorey of smaller ferns and horsetails are used to recreate the wet and dense coal forests of this time.
Species-rich lawn
Moving across the central courtyard from east to the west, we step from the past to an exploration of the world today. The Nature Discovery Garden is full of native British plants, and demonstrates the varied habitats that surround our towns and cities. A gentle hill of speciesrich lawn provides a place to picnic, but also shows how we can make our gardens better for wildlife. The grass is cut slightly longer and less frequently to allow clovers, selfheal and common daisy to flower, providing food for pollinators.
GETTING STUCK IN
No stranger to getting his hands dirty, Tom carries a huge mat of weeds out of the pond for storage until they can be returned to the new pond.
Urban meadow
Nearby is a new urban meadow habitat. Over the years, this will be managed to allow wildlife-friendly plants such as black knapweed and bird’s-foot trefoil to thrive.
Cycads and Wollemi pine
In this area, you’ll find our bronze Diplodocus. The plants surrounding the cast represent a drier climate with lowgrowing ferns, cycads and the appearance of cone-bearing plants such as monkey puzzle and the living fossil Wollemi pine.
Flowering plants, grasses and daisies
Later eras of the Evolution Garden introduce flowering plants, the dominant group of plants in the present day, with their evolution and diversity illustrated by small shrubs and herbs, and later by grasses and daisies in a prairiestyle planting.
Tropical London
Enter tropical London, a small but unique corner of the garden filled with plants like palms and witch hazel. These are relatives of plants that were preserved as fossil seeds and fruits in the Eocene, 56–49 mya. They show the climate of London at this time was sub-tropical.
Ponds
As part of the project, three ponds were replaced. To protect their biodiversity, we temporarily stored the sediment, water and plants while the new ponds were constructed. Quite unexpectedly, this allowed some plants that weren’t in the ponds, such as curly pondweed, to reseed themselves. We even found a previously unrecorded species of stonewort.
Suburban edge
The suburban-edge garden is located next to the Darwin Centre. This south-facing and once barren area has been replanted to represent what our towns and cities might look (and feel) like in the future. It now homes a mix of native and non-native, ornamental and edible species.
London 2050
Another area has been de-paved and planted up with cork oaks, stone pines, lavender and Cistus. These plants are mainly of Mediterranean origin and can withstand a harsh urban climate and the future impacts of climate change.
TAKE A BREAK IN OUR NEW GARDEN KITCHEN
Enjoy tea and cakes – and a sustainable design – in our new Garden Kitchen, which is nestled in an ancient tree fern forest.
We also had a 100 per cent diesel-free site, sent no waste to landfill, reused or recycled excess materials, and our two new buildings include rainwater capture, clever heat retention and circulation design and air source heat pumps. Our construction team even created their own vegetable patch in a spare plot of land and volunteered at local gardens.
Creating a world-leading living laboratory
Studying urban nature can provide valuable insights into the effects of climate change on towns and cities. This helps inform how urban spaces are managed, ensuring they continue to support a wide diversity of life into the future.
Since our Wildlife Garden opened to the public in 1995, volunteers and scientists have studied its flora and fauna. This long-term recording is vital for helping our teams track the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and urbanisation. Through the work in the gardens, the recording is now entering a new phase. The records collected to date include insects and other animals, plants and some fungi – basically, anything seen in the garden. Now, the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) is helping us unlock a whole new unseen world of life within our gardens, including hundreds of
‘Enter
the Evolution Garden and witness the explosion of life on our planet’
tiny insects, microscopic fungi and other microorganisms. From the sampling we’ve done so far we’ve seen some incredible results and have only just begun to understand the life in our gardens.
On top of this, a network of 25 sensors positioned across the gardens will capture natural sounds such as rain and wind, the calls of birds and bats, as well as human-made noise such as traffic. The sensors will also collect environmental data such as temperature and pollution. Together with Amazon Web Services, we’re building a new technology solution – a Data Ecosystem – to bring together all of this vital information, and to help scale up and accelerate the speed at which our science can happen. Having all this biodiversity data at our fingertips will allow us to understand the full diversity of species living in our gardens and how they are faring over time.
10 hidden highlights to spot
On your next visit, look for these jewels, which can be found around the gardens
1. Lewisian gneiss
This is Britain’s oldest rock, at more than 2.7 billion years old.
2. Giant millipede
Inlaid in brass on a pathway, Arthropleura armata lived 305 million years ago and is the largest-known land invertebrate.
3. Small, shrew-like animal
One of the earliest-known mammals, Megazostrodon rudnerae lived 200 million years ago.
4. Ammonite pavement
These pieces rescued by the Museum from Lyme Regis, in Dorset, show cross sections of an ancient sea bed.
5. Wollemi pines
These trees were once thought to be extinct, but a chance finding in a canyon in the Australian Blue Mountains in 1994 proved they were still alive.
6. Dinosaur tracks
See three-toed prints belonging to two different groups of dinosaursornithopods and theropods.
7. Human footprints
These prints were cast from a group of young people who took part in a photography project in the gardens.
8. Listening and viewing funnels
Listen to water moving through a tree and stag beetle larvae munching on the dead wood of a log.
9. Malaise traps
These large, tent-like structures catch flying insects so Museum scientists can study the species that live in the gardens.
10. Planters
Co-designed with community group Grow to Know and students at Morley College, these include plants with meaning and personal stories.
Walk through time in the Evolution Garden
No story is more dramatic than the story of our planet. Enter the Evolution Garden and you’ll step back in time to watch the explosion of life on our planet 540 million years ago to the present day. A totally immersive experience awaits, with bronze sculptures designed to be touched, brass inlays and informative panels that bring the past to life.
As you stroll through time, the landscape, stones and plants change with you. Plants and animals move from the sea to life on land. Look for corals in the limestone and rocks as you explore a time when much of central England was covered in shallow seas. Walk through a coal forest, and discover a time when some creatures were able to grow a lot larger than their modern relatives.
At the age of dinosaurs, meet our new bronze Diplodocus grazing in a Jurassic garden, supported by Kusuma Trust. Follow an ammonite pavement formed 199 million years ago. Witness the moment flowering plants first appeared 125 million years ago, and watch how life recovers after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. In the centre of the garden, your journey through time brings you to the present age – the age of humans.
Through the story of Earth’s history we can start to see how much people have changed life on land, air and oceans in the short time we’ve inhabited the planet. By understanding changes in the past, we can plan a future where planet and people thrive. ●
Above The Gardens will be somewhere visitors can learn more about the incredible diversity of life on Earth, and our scientists can develop best practices to protect urban nature.
Thank you to everyone involved in the project
The Urban Nature Project has been one of the Museum’s biggest ever projects and has been achieved thanks to the hard work and dedication of so many staff, volunteers, consultants, external experts, partners, design team and the contractors carrying out the gardens’ transformation.
A wide variety of trusts, foundations, companies and individuals are supporting the Urban Nature Project including Amazon Web Services, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Evolution Education Trust, The Cadogan Charity, Garfield Weston Foundation, Kusuma Trust, The Wolfson Foundation, Charles Wilson and Rowena Olegario, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, Clore Duffield Foundation, Workman LLP and Accenture.
Community partners: Nova New Opportunities, Grow to Know, Meanwhile Gardens, Trees 4 Grenfell and Hope Garden, Acava, Bubble and Squeak Eat, Community Centered Knowledge, Pepper Pot Centre, St Thomas Primary School, Morley College, Midaye, London Sports Trust, Voyage Youth, Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, Youth Action Alliance, Action for Conservation. Prince’s Trust (Youth Programming), Crown Estates Paving Commission (Apprenticeship), VocalEyes and Totally Inclusive People.
Visit our gardens when they open this summer nhm.ac.uk/visit
Make the most of your visit
An audio guide will bring the stories of the gardens to life, featuring interviews with Museum scientists and poetry co-produced with blind and partially sighted young people.
H e monsters
When Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins unveiled his magnificent reconstructions of extinct beasts in 1854, they dazzled visitors to Crystal Palace Park. Today, they have survived neglect, and their international scientific importance has finally been recognised.
WORDS: KAROLYN SHINDLER
Two hundred years ago the first dinosaur, Megalosaurus bucklandii, was named. In 1824, the huge fossil bones and lower jaw found near Oxford were described as belonging to an animal of ‘enormous magnitude’ at least 40 feet long. No-one then could have foreseen that 17 years later, Megalosaurus would be the first of the three giant, lizard-like species from which the comparative anatomist, Professor Richard Owen, would describe a new order of animals – the ‘Dinosauria’. Thus he created dinosaurs and ignited a global passion, both popular and scientific.
beSo fascinating were these ancient monsters to the Victorians, that in 1854, huge life-sized reconstructions of these three dinosaurs, and more than 30 other prehistoric animals, were exhibited in their geological settings in the fabulous grounds of the vast new Crystal Palace in South London, which was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. Its purpose was to inform, educate, entertain – and make money for its new owners, the Crystal Palace Company. In 1936 the Palace was destroyed by fire. Today the spectacular gardens are hidden beneath Crystal Palace Park and the National Sports Centre.
Ironically, the only survivors of this once-great enterprise are the extinct monsters, now known as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, though only four of them are true dinosaurs; the rest are other reptiles and mammals. They survived because they were far from the Palace on islands in the lake.
A labour of love
The beasts were designed by the natural history artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, whose artistic and scientific skills were much in demand by the scientific community – his clients included Charles Darwin. The scientific adviser to the project was Richard Owen.
Illustrations of what extinct monsters might have looked like weren’t new in the 1850s, but the Crystal Palace sculptures were the first ever three-dimensional models of animals from the prehistoric past. Nothing like them had ever been
‘The Crystal Palace sculptures were the first ever 3D models of animals from the prehistoric past’
attempted anywhere before. Today, it’s too easy for us to forget the wonderment these magnificent, life-like monsters inspired in Victorian visitors – and subsequent generations – to the Crystal Palace.
Between 1852 and 1855, Hawkins created reconstructions of more than 20 species. They include Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, pterosaurs and ichthyosaurs, pterodactyls, teleosaurs, a giant sloth, Irish elks, the camel-like Anoplotherium and tapir-like Palaeotherium. He studied papers by Richard Owen and also the great French anatomist Georges Cuvier, and made preliminary drawings after meticulously measuring fossil bones in scientific collections.
Then, using his scientific knowledge and artistic imagination, he painted sketches of the animals as they might have been in life, interpreting their flesh, muscle and skin. Next, he produced a small, scale model in clay, which ‘I submitted in all instances to the criticism of Professor Owen, who with his great knowledge and profound learning most liberally aided me’. Only when he had Owen’s ‘sanction and
Previous page Iguanodons and Hylaeosaurus (right). With Megalosaurus, these were the three lizard-like giants from which Richard Owen described the ‘Dinosauria’. Image from Matthew Digby Wyatt’s Views of the Crystal Palace Park 1854
Above
Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, the Palace was transported in 1852 and reconstructed on Sydenham Hill.
approbation’, would the full-sized clay mould for the animal be made, using the largest-known bone of the species to ensure the correct proportions.
Inside his wooden workshop, crowded into every corner and towering to the roof, were what the Morning Post in 1854 called Hawkins’ ‘grim monsters’. All seemed to ‘snarl and glare upon you’, as they were chiseled and modelled in clay and stone by ‘dusty-frocked artists’. Hawkins himself added the fine details ‘in all instances’.
A giant undertaking
Dominating the room was the clay mould of a standing Iguanodon. It was nine metres long and nearly four metres high – so huge that on New Year’s Eve 1853, Hawkins held a dinner inside the mould to honour his friend Owen. It was a fantastic publicity stunt and the papers loved it, but it was also necessary. As Hawkins acknowledged, it was only an enterprise with the resources of the Crystal Palace Company that could fund his re-creations of ‘those vast forms and gigantic beasts’, but the company needed a return on its very considerable investment. It needed the ticket-buying public.
When the Crystal Palace opened in June 1854, it was far from finished. The prehistoric beasts were organised on their islands according to their geological age, but only Secondary Island containing the dinosaurs and other reptiles was anywhere near complete. Work on Tertiary Island, home to the more recent ice-age mammals, was paused in April 1854 so Hawkins could concentrate on the
1852 August
Evolution of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
Minutes of the Crystal Palace Company record that ‘a Geological Court be constructed containing a collection of full-sized models of the animals and plants of certain geological periods’. (1)
1852 September
Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (2) was contracted to design and build the models. Professor Richard Owen (3), who has worked with Hawkins, is appointed scientific consultant.
1853 May
Hawkins invites the press to his ‘ugly looking shed’ where they see an Ichthyosaur, Megatherium, an Iguanodon, Plesiosaurus, ‘etc…being wrought into form as they are supposed to have lived’.
1853 August
The Irish elk, Megaloceros, and hind are almost finished. Having complete modern skeletons to work from eased the task. The sculpture’s antlers were actual fossils.
1853 November
Queen Victoria and a royal party visit Hawkins’ shed (4) and are ‘astonished’ at the ‘antediluvian wonders with which they were surrounded’,
including Iguanodon and Palaeotherium.
1853 31 December
Hawkins holds a New Year’s Eve dinner for 21 people in honour of Richard Owen in the clay mould of the Iguanodon. It’s a brilliant publicity coup. (5)
1854 April
About 20 beasts are in place on their islands, including the dinosaurs, but not all are finished. Work continues on site on Megalosaurus and another seven sculptures.
1854 10 June
40,000 people attend the opening of Crystal Palace and Park by Queen Victoria. The geological restorations are greeted with awe and wonder, Hawkins’ work acclaimed ‘beyond all praise’.
1855 September
Hawkins is working on a model of an enormous mammoth when he is dismissed by the Crystal Palace Company because of their financial problems. The mammoth was never finished.
1855–present
After decades of uncertainty and neglect, it appears that support and funding are now in place to ensure the future of Hawkins’ spectacular, life-like sculptures.
earlier, more sensational reconstructions. It was never completed. Popular though the Palace was, the public never came in the numbers needed for the Crystal Palace Company to start recouping the enormous costs of the enterprise.
In 1855, the Company had to make cuts – and one of them was Hawkins. He was dismissed, not even allowed to complete the mammoth on which he was working. In October he sent a plan of his proposed sculptures for the Tertiary Island to Owen, indicating those he felt were essential additions so that ‘all that has been done may not be said to have been wasted’. It was in vain. As well as the mammoth, the animals never made included a moa, the armadillo-like Glyptodon, elephantrelative Deinotherium, Mastodon, aurochs, a dodo and turtles. It would have been magnificent.
Dilapidation and decay
Hawkins’ dismissal marked the beginning of more than a century of decline and neglect for his spectacular creations. His career continued in France and America, but when, in 1875, he learnt of the state of disrepair of his sculptures, he offered to renovate them for free. His offer was refused.
In 1894, Richard Owen’s grandson wrote that when he visited the sculptures, he found them ‘slightly dilapidated’, and the ‘total absence of anything like explanation, or even names of the creatures’ meant the public didn’t know what they were looking at, or whether they were ‘inferior imitations’ or ‘fantastic visions’ caused by too much ‘spirituous liquors’. Their huge popularity of the 1850s was long gone and forgotten.
Hawkins’ unique installation that had once been at the cutting-edge of Victorian science became little more than a quirky curiosity, derided as inaccurate. Science has moved on, but the dinosaurs are an unequalled insight into palaeontological thinking of the mid-1850s – five years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
Vandalism and neglect
Over the decades, weather, neglect and vandalism have caused huge damage to the sculptures. Some are known to be missing, including two Pterodactyls, an Irish elk, and three camel-like Anoplotherium gracile. Rain seeped through cracks in the concrete coatings and rusted the internal iron structures. Heads, tails, teeth and toes fractured and broke off – either through heat and cold or vandalism and theft.
Left uncared for, shrubs and trees grew unchecked so that by the 1920s the sculptures were so overgrown a reporter could only just see ‘a gigantic iguanodon’ glaring at him through the undergrowth. It didn’t help that they were irresistible to children, who were allowed to play and climb on them unrestrained.
‘Hawkins’ dinosaurs are an unequalled insight into palaeontological thinking of the mid-1850s’
Above An Ichthyosaur seemingly being hauled from the lake by the London police in 1927. Behind it to the right can be seen a toad-like Labyrinthodon and the long neck of a plesiosaur.
Right In 1932, clambering up Hylaeosaurus and the other sculptures must have seemed irresistible, but the damage caused is still being rectified today.
A children’s zoo introduced on Tertiary Island in 1953 meant new landscaping that destroyed some geological features, while sculptures were moved or incorporated into animal enclosures. They were also renovated and painted in bright colours. By 1959, significant damage had been done to at least 16 of the statues. A major renovation was needed, and this was overseen by Museum palaeontologist and dinosaur expert William Elgin Swinton. But, according to experts, not only was one plesiosaur given a new head from a different species, but many mammal sculptures were also incorrectly ‘restored’ with inaccurate replacement body parts.
Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
In 2013, the Friends started as a group of residents living close to Crystal Palace Park, concerned at the deteriorating state of the sculptures. Today, they are a key part of efforts to conserve and promote the dinosaurs and their historical and scientific importance. Find out more at cpdinosaurs.org
Magnificent
The
Left In 2023, palaeoartist Bob Nicholls created a faithful copy of Hawkins’ Palaeotherium magnum model, which disappeared in the 1960s.
Below Chair of the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, Dr Ellinor Michel, is a taxonomist and evolutionary biologist at the Museum.
A new era
In the past year, the fortunes of the dinosaurs have dramatically improved. Not only is there now funding from a National Lottery grant for their renovation and preservation, but in 2023, as featured in the February issue of Evolve, Palaeotherium magnum, whose statue disappeared probably in the 1960s, has been resurrected (left). The magnificent monsters now, at last, have real support from a number of organisations, including Historic England, Bromley Council and the charity Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.
All the sculptures are now on Historic England’s ‘Heritage at Risk’ register. First given Grade-II listing by English Heritage in 1973, this was upgraded to Grade-I in 2007 because of their international importance. They are now protected monuments. Major renovations were undertaken in the early 2000s, but critical damage continues to occur –not least to the jaws of an Iguanodon in 2010 and Megalosaurus in 2020. Cracks and flaking paint are endemic. Detailed work is going on to examine why and how they are deteriorating, and the best means of preserving them.
Looking at these magnificent reconstructions, it is invidious to criticise them in the light of what we know now. They are, quite simply, marvellous – an exceptional and remarkable triumph of scientific knowledge, artistry and scientific imagination. They have survived for 170 years. Now, with new support, expertise and funding, they may well outlive us all.
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Standing up for nature Lucy Hodson
‘Sharing your love of nature with people around you is a powerful thing to do’
Naturalist, conservationist, science communicator and self-confessed nature nerd, Lucy Hodson (AKA Lucy Lapwing) tells us about her passion for nature, the importance of rewilding and how you can help make an impact.
How did you get into nature?
Every child on the planet is naturally drawn to nature and fascinated by it – it’s innate. Unfortunately, modern Western society pushes people away from the natural world more than other cultures. In the UK, it’s normal to be disconnected from nature, so those of us who are interested in it are seen as nerds and weirdos.
I was lucky that my parents were happy for me to just muck around in the garden, eating worms, playing with slugs, tickling frogs and doing whatever else I wanted to. If you let a child do that, they naturally will. It just so happened that nature was something I loved, and it stuck with me through fortune and circumstance.
What inspired your birdsong tutorials?
I’ve always been a sensory person and listening is a big part of that. My first job was with the RSPB and outside the office I could hear this racket of birdsong. I was lucky enough to work with people who could pick out and identify the calls of individual birds. It seemed impossible to me –
I was amazed that anyone could do it. Slowly, bit by bit, my colleagues taught me funny little ways to remember bird songs and calls. It was a different way to learn from what you find in books. I realised that anyone can do this – it unlocked a whole hidden way of interpreting nature. When you use a different sense, like sound, you realise how often you’re in the presence of birds you might otherwise not notice.
My YouTube channel offers a way of learning that’s less formal and serious, funnier and more light hearted. It helps if you can inject humanity and humour into teaching – that’s how I learn. Thinking something is impossible and then learning how to do it is a huge personal achievement. I started practising during the dawn chorus, when most birds are singing the loudest. Any knowledge takes time and hard work to learn.
The wonderful thing about nature is that it’s like a reliable old friend – it’s seasonal and predictable. You get to know the birds as characters, you get to recognise the rhythms of nature. The first song I learned was the wren because it’s the loudest singer. Blackbirds and woodpigeons are the soundtrack to summer, we them hear all the time and we instinctively recognise them, even if we can’t put a name to the voice.
You taught yourself about wildlife when you were ill. How did nature help your recovery? When I was 23, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, which meant eight months of chemotherapy. The care I received from the NHS made me physically well, but I also gave myself a daily green prescription – I started teaching myself about wildlife.
Your mental health can have an enormous effect on your physical health and the power of your body to heal itself. If you’re stressed and upset, you might need to distract yourself –ploughing into nature seemed an obvious thing to do. I would walk around and just be nosy. You could use the word mindfulness, but it was almost like mindlessness as well. It’s a process that takes you out of your own head and into a flow state, like when you’re collecting pebbles on a beach, or strolling through an autumn wood picking up leaves of different shapes and colours.
I’d be out walking, find a bug and think, ‘What is this?’ Then I’d take a photo of it on my phone and try to identify it online. It became almost like a ritual, and I just found that the information was going in. When you’re interested in something, learning about it isn’t a chore. →
Standing
Everyone should feel safe in nature. How can we help to stop people feeling vulnerable? We need to be careful not to put the onus to solve an issue on the people most affected by it. There are obvious actions you can take to stay safe when being out in nature, such as telling somebody where you’re going and when you’ll be back, but I love being somewhere and nobody knowing I’m there. You could go with someone else, but there’s a lot of joy to be found in solitude in nature. Taking personal protection or going to well-populated places arguably also takes something away from the experience.
I’ve talked to men who speak about the joy of camping alone under the stars or sleeping under a woodland canopy at night. As a woman, I would feel vulnerable in a tent on my own, so even though I would argue that women shouldn’t have to change our behaviour, I’m already doing things
My life in a nutshell
I’m a science communicator.
I blog about wildlife and nature in the UK, teaching people about the nature on their doorsteps in a fun and informal way.
Growing up close to WWT Martin Mere, in Lancashire inspired my love and interest in nature as a child. I served as an ambassador for WWT in 2023.
I love the Museum’s invertebrates section. Their alien and intricate anatomy astounds me, and I’m naturally drawn to wildlife we tend to think of as less ‘sexy’.
I love how grumpy toads look. They’re wonderfully ugly –lumps, bumps and warts, with eyes of molten lava that melt your heart.
You can find out more about my work at linktr.ee/ Lucy_Lapwing
differently. I’ve not changed my ways – I’ve never done it to begin with.
A lot of work has to be done by society. This isn’t a quick fix and is not unique to nature watching, nor to women. There are lots of ways we can make society kinder, more just and equitable to improve this; even just talking about it helps.
You’ve spoken against industrial farming – what kind of food and farming system would you like to see replace it?
Our entire food system needs a radical rethink; it’s not working for farmers or for the people eating the food. It certainly isn’t working for wildlife. We need to rebuild an equitable food and farming system, moving away from our reliance on supermarkets.
We spend so much time working to pay for food. But what if we work less and grow our own food? We can use our imaginations – give more people the knowledge and resources to grow their own food, doing it in a slower way, moving back towards seasonal eating and less intensive processes. Of course, this is only available to people who have the time and resources.
I’d like to see access to land redistributed, with people having more common rights to grow food themselves and doing that as a community. I’d like to see people working together to provide everything their community needs, bringing people together, growing healthier food with a lower carbon footprint that’s better for wildlife.
I buy a local vegetable box – some of the veg may be battered or covered in mud, but it forces me to be more creative in the meals I make, and when the summer veg arrives, it’s so exciting. These types of schemes should be accessible and affordable for everyone.
You were an ambassador for The Beaver Trust in 2020. Why are reintroductions important? Beavers are the archetypal ecosystem engineer. Over the decades, we’ve become used to their absence from the UK, so their presence feels dramatic because they have such an obvious physical impact on the land – just like humans.
I’ve visited places where beavers have now been established for a few years, and they feel so different! The still water pools created by the dams are really clear compared to the water flowing through, because the silt has settled. There’s lots of standing deadwood, where trees have been flooded and died. It’s rare to see deadwood left in the environment these days, but it’s fantastic for all sorts of wildlife. These places feel magical, different from anything you’ve experienced before.
Though keystone species like beavers make a big difference, their reintroduction can be
controversial. I think we could start at the other end of the food chain and work at restoring our wild plants. If we restore a healthy vegetative biome, this will allow birds to nest where they want and provide more insects for them to feed on, essentially underpinning a great web of life.
We need to make the landscape more complex and diverse in terms of its texture and structure, and nature will follow.
Do programmes like Springwatch help excite people about the joy of local nature?
Trying to get people to connect with nature on their local patch can be really hard, as this relationship is often completely taken away from us as children. I went to a state school and nature
Above: Lucy describes herself as an all-out funguspoking, bug-ogling wildlife wierdo.
Top left: The feeling of being alone in nature is freeing, but Lucy was rattled after an unpleasant experience while out birdwatching.
Bottom left: Lucy is not afraid of mud and she likes to get up close with wildlife to appreciate it.
wasn’t even on the curriculum. Programmes like Springwatch are just one tool, but there are many. As individuals, the biggest positive impact we have for nature can be in our local communities and on the people around us. We need to slow down, consume and waste less, and connect with each other more. The natural world needs people like Greta Thunberg at the forefront, but it also needs everyday people to tell stories locally.
As a species, humans rely on storytelling, and instilling a passion and love for nature in the people around you is a powerful thing to do. It’s the people who have taken time to show me something cool, or teach me the name of a flower or insect, who have changed my life the most. We’ve all got that power. ●
eternal quest answers for The
The Natural History Museum has more than 350 scientists working on hundreds of research projects. From restoring biodiversity to achieving food security, our work focuses on finding solutions to key challenges facing our planet.
WORDS: JEN PULLAR,
SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS MANAGERThe Museum aims to use its unique collections, world-class expertise and cutting-edge scientific techniques to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the world today. From meeting the mineral needs of a net-zero world to tackling climate change, we work to offer insights into how we can create a brighter future for both people and the planet. Last year, we announced 10 research themes that provide a focus for our work. Here are just five of them. →
GENOMICS: UNRAVELLING THE CODE OF LIFE
The Museum aims to understand and describe species by looking at their genetic makeup. The improvement of DNA-sequencing technology has given scientists an entirely new way to monitor nature and understand biodiversity.
For example, the Darwin Tree of Life Project aims to sequence the full genomes of all animals, plants and fungi within the British Isles. In 2023, the project sequenced its 1,000th genome, the purple bar moth. Merit Researcher Ian Barnes says, ‘While the Human Genome Project took 13 years, the Darwin Tree of Life Project is releasing a genome every day. Museum scientists are central to the team, and our expertise in collecting, identifying, recording and archiving genome-ready specimens from all over the UK has underpinned this landmark.’
EVOLUTION OF PLANETS AND LIFE: UNLOCKING THE PAST
We’re studying natural-history specimens to reveal the past, present and future of the solar system and life on Earth. Our collection allows us to tell the story of how the Earth and its natural systems formed over the past 4.56 billion years.
From studying meteorites and searching for water in the early solar system, to understanding extinction events and the evolution of ancient humans, our investigation of natural-history specimens will reveal knowledge that could ultimately secure our future.
For example, research using detailed 3D reconstructions of fossil bacteria discovered in Scotland is helping scientists to understand more about how microbial life affected early terrestrial ecosystems. Cyanobacteria are an ancient group of microorganisms that are known to be responsible for helping to create our oxygen-rich atmosphere. They probably originated in freshwater environments but, recently, an ancient species called Langiella scourfieldii that lived over 400 million years ago has been discovered to be among the first of its kind to colonise land.
Throughout their long evolutionary history, cyanobacteria have been fundamental to the health of our planet, and they still are today.
Scientists at the Museum have also been adapting ancient DNA analysis techniques, traditionally used for studying woolly mammoths and ancient humans, to apply to other areas of the collection. In 2022 this was done for the first time for insects.
‘Insect collections enable us to study how the genomes of populations and species have been affected by environmental changes over time,’ says Ian. ‘We now have a much better idea about DNA preservation in insect collections, which is a huge boost to our work to understand the history and predict the future of insect populations.’
Researchers identified genetic changes in red-tailed bumblebees that likely help them forage further for food in response to habitat loss and climate change.
Cyanobacteria – or blue-green algae – form the slippery ‘green slime’ in stagnant water, riverbeds and seashores.
We are digitising more than half a million British and Irish butterflies and moths.
DIGITAL, DATA & INFORMATICS: SHARING DATA WITH THE WORLD
We’re leading the way in increasing access to natural-history collections. By digitising and releasing data about the 80 million items in our collection, we can share the information needed to tackle fundamental challenges of our time – from finding new ways to combat disease to extracting mineral resources. At present this information is contained within hundreds of millions of specimens, labels and archives across the globe, yet available only to a handful of scientists.
Less than 10 per cent of the UK’s natural-history collections has currently been digitised and made available on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, but, together, science collections hold more than 137 million items, spanning an incredible 4.56-billion-year history.
We want to unlock this treasure trove so that everyone, including citizen scientists, researchers and data analysts can access it.
Our scientists found that, in 2022, data from the Museum’s digital collection was downloaded on average every three minutes and 24 seconds, and found its way into 2.2 scientific publications
every day. So we know our digital collections have helped assess plant biodiversity in the Amazon, find wheat crops that are more resilient to climate change, and reveal the potential zoonotic origins of COVID-19.
Dr Ken Norris, Deputy Director of Science, says, ‘It’s estimated that over 50 per cent of the world’s GDP, or around $44 trillion, is dependent on the natural world. By understanding what is in collections now, both on a national and international scale, we can identify trends, necessary actions, and what we need to collect to underpin policy and investment decisions for a future where people and planet thrive.’
We’re also applying new technologies to increase the information we share about the natural world. Innovations in technology such as machine learning have given scientists new ways to engage with collections and help save time and money. Researchers studying how climate change is affecting butterflies didn’t have to painstakingly measure thousands of specimens by hand – they were able to access a dataset of more than 180,000 butterflies using an algorithm called ‘Mothra’.
FIND OUT MORE
In just a few months, this sort of novel software can achieve the type of information gathering that would once have been a lifetime’s work.
Learn more about the Museum’s research at nhm.ac.uk/ourscience/research/ themes →
Our impact
BIODIVERSITY CHANGE: TACKLING THE BIODIVERSITY CRISIS
The Museum is working to improve our understanding of why and how biodiversity is changing, so that we can find solutions to halt its decline and help its recovery. Using information from our collections, we can learn more about past and ongoing changes to predict and mitigate future impacts.
Research has found that climate change and habitat loss will limit the reproduction of tropical crops such as cacao, coffee, mangoes and watermelons. The cacao tree – from which cocoa beans are used to make chocolate – is almost exclusively pollinated by a certain type of midge. But the regions in which cocoa is grown are warming, and as a result its pollinators are likely to be declining in abundance.
Joe Millard and his team use the PREDICTS database to identify which regions of the world might be most affected by falling numbers of pollinators. PREDICTS is a global dataset put together by Museum researchers to understand how biodiversity is changing in response to changes in land use.
‘Cocoa is experiencing a perfect storm of threats that means it’s at high risk of losing its pollinator,’ says Joe. ‘But there are solutions. It may be possible to breed varieties of some tropical crops that can reproduce without pollinators.’
Another option is to pollinate crops by hand or through artificial means, something that’s already done for crops like vanilla.
Farmers could also allow patches of natural habitat to grow among cropland, to provide a refuge for pollinating
insects and help maintain a more suitable microclimate for them.
However, the main way to reduce these risks is to tackle them at the source. Significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will help limit the worst effects of climate change, while preserving and restoring habitats will help pollinators recover.
‘Cocoa is experiencing a perfect storm of threats and is at risk of losing its pollinator’
The abyssal plain might not look like much, but it’s teeming with life unlike anything found anywhere else on Earth.
RESOURCING THE GREEN ECONOMY: NATURE-POSITIVE SOLUTIONS
Our scientists are working to develop sustainable solutions for achieving net zero and food security. The global surge in demand for metals such as cobalt and nickel has created unprecedented interest in deep-sea habitats with mineral resources, as countries look to become carbon neutral. The largest area of this activity is a six million km2 region known as the ClarionClipperton Zone in the central and eastern Pacific. But almost nothing is known about the biodiversity of this area. At first glance, this deepsea abyssal plain might look hostile to life, bathed in eternal darkness. But it’s actually teeming with life, from tiny, hairy worms burrowing through the sediment, to ghostly white sea anemones drifting on the current, and deep-purple sea cucumbers sauntering along the bottom.
To try and fill some of the gaps in our knowledge, a team of Museum researchers has produced an inventory – a Clarion-Clipperton Zone Checklist. ‘There are 438 named, known species from the zone,’ explains Adrian Glover, Merit Researcher. ‘But then there are 5,142 unnamed species, with informal names.’ An
‘Taxonomy is the most critical knowledge gap we have when studying these unique habitats’
estimated 92 per cent of species identified from the area are new to science and, based on the data, Museum scientists predict there are a further 6,000–8,000 unknown animal species down there.
‘Taxonomy is the most critical knowledge gap we have when studying these unique habitats,’ Adrian explains. ‘We have to know what lives in these regions before we can begin to understand how to protect such ecosystems.
‘Huge deep-sea mining operations are on the cusp of being approved. So it’s imperative we work with companies looking to mine these resources to ensure that any such activities are carried out in a way that limits their impact on the natural world.’ ●
SUPPORT OUR SCIENTISTS
Your support is vital in helping us create a future where both people and the planet can thrive. We strive to create advocates for the planet in everything we do, and your support is more important now than ever. Find out how you can get involved at nhm.ac.uk/ support-us
Winged beauties
Butterflies and day-flying moths brighten our gardens, inspire and delight us. Their amazing metamorphosis is celebrated worldwide. Museum Gardens Volunteer Manager, Helen Wallis, takes a closer look.
DID YOU KNOW?
The silver-studded blue is often found on brownfield sites, which are a haven for rare insects.
The UK is home to 59 butterfly species and more than 2,500 species of moth, some of which (over 100) are day-flying and are as beautiful as butterflies. Most UK butterflies belong to four families: the whites, nymphalids, blues and skippers. The whites are white, yellow or with orange marks (or forewing tips). Many have caterpillars that feed on plants in the cabbage family. These contain mustard oil that make the larvae distasteful to predators. The large and small whites, ‘cabbage whites’, are notorious garden pests, but others feed on wild plants.
The nymphalids walk on four legs – their shortened front legs are adapted to sense taste. Four groups of nymphalids occur in the UK –vanessids, browns, fritillaries and emperors. Vanessids are multi-coloured butterflies like red admirals, commas and peacocks, often seen sipping nectar from garden flowers. The caterpillars of many species eat stinging nettles. Browns are mostly brown, such as gatekeeper and speckled wood. They inhabit moist, shady habitats like woodland glades and lush meadows. Most of their caterpillars eat grass. Fritillaries are spotted or checkered orange butterflies. Some are very rare because they live in threatened habitats such as chalk grassland or marsh. Emperors have only one UK species, the large, dazzling purple emperor, which lives at the top of oak trees, feasting on honeydew – the syrupy poo of aphids. Their caterpillars eat willow.
Blues and hairstreaks are small butterflies of the open countryside, many of which have a symbiotic relationship with ants. The blues comprise several species with blue males and brown females, though some orange and brown species are also in this family. Skippers are small, orange or brown butterflies that zoom about and rarely settle. They live in grassy meadows and hedgerows and their caterpillars feed on a variety of wild plants.
Circle of life
Most people are familiar with the butterfly life cycle of egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult. But the reality is more complex, with successive generations of butterflies carefully timed to maximise survival. Particular species fly at different times of year. Early spring butterflies include the Vanessids and the brimstone. They hibernate as adults and emerge as soon as the weather warms up, laying eggs that hatch in the summer. Butterflies such as the whites and holly blue, which spend the winter as pupae, will emerge later in the spring.
Most species overwinter as larvae and will be on the wing between late spring and midsummer, with many of the blues and hairstreaks that overwinter as eggs not becoming adults until July. Migrant butterflies such as red admirals and →
Marbled white
SIX SPECIES TO SPOT
Cinnabar
Once a rare chalk-grassland species, this butterfly is now found anywhere with tall, unmown grass. Its caterpillars eat wild grasses; adults prefer purple blooms.
Holly blue
This shade-loving butterfly inhabits urban parks and gardens and both sexes are blue. It’s often seen flying around its main caterpillar foodplants, holly and ivy.
Painted lady
Migrating between Africa and the Arctic, butterflies from Morocco and Spain breed in Northern Europe in summer; the offspring return to Africa to breed again.
Bright colours warn birds that this moth and its caterpillars taste bad. The larvae absorb bitter ragwort toxins, making themselves and later adults unpalatable.
Narrow-bordered bee hawk-moth
This bumble-bee mimic is found in damp pastures and chalk grasslands across the UK, but is nationally scarce. Its caterpillars eat scabious.
Jersey tiger
This moth flies day and night and has spread across the southeast over the past 20 years, as the climate warms. Its caterpillars eat ground ivy, bramble and nettles.
Living with nature
painted ladies start to arrive in the spring and will breed here, though many don’t survive the winter.
The wings of butterflies and moths are covered in tiny, overlapping scales, which, among other functions, create colours used to protect them from predators and attract mates. Scales are very fragile, appearing as a powdery residue when wings get damaged.
The emperor moth’s dramatic eye spots scare off potential predators.
Wing patterns encompass a range of defence strategies. Most moths and butterflies are excellently camouflaged. Muted shades blend in against vegetation, while complex patterns break up an easily visible silhouette. The emperor moth has dramatic eye spots that make it look like a bigger carnivore, scaring off potential predators. Many species have small eye spots on the edges of their wings that are thought to distract predators – birds pecking the wing edges will cause less damage than if they attack the body or head. Some species are coloured black with red or yellow to warn predators that they are poisonous
‘Climate change is pushing butterflies and moths to their limits’
or unpalatable. Cinnabar and burnet moths absorb toxins from their larval food plants to make themselves distasteful to birds – they advertise this with their black and scarlet wings. Then there are harmless species that protect themselves by mimicking toxic or stinging insects. Day-flying moths are particularly adept at this strategy. Clearwing moths look like wasps, and bee hawkmoths resemble bumblebees, while the Jersey tiger moth is resplendent in vermillion-and-black warning colouration. Vanessid butterflies combine these defence measures with dark underwings that look like dead leaves, and colourful upper wings they flick open to dazzle predators with warning colours, or in the case of peacock butterflies, flashing eyespots.
DID YOU KNOW?
The swallowtail is our largest butterfly, with a wingspan of almost 10cm.
Though many butterflies and moths have similar wing coloration in both sexes, some, such as the blues, have more brightly coloured males. Female blues tend to be brown, possibly because they need to be better camouflaged while laying their eggs. They prefer to mate with males that have the most intense hue.
As well as colour, male butterflies often use perfume to attract females and have adapted wing scales that produce pheromones. These are visible as a dark line on the wings of skipper butterflies. Some species have pheromones that even a human can detect – for example, the green-veined white smells of lemons!
Barometer of life
Butterflies and moths are excellent indicators of environmental health – if they’re declining, other wildlife will soon follow. Insects have short life cycles, so they respond more quickly to environmental change than plants and vertebrates do. Butterflies are particularly sensitive because of their precise habitat and foodplant requirements, and their need for warm, dry weather.
Unfortunately, data shows that butterflies and moths are in trouble. Five species of butterfly and 51 species of moth have gone extinct in Britain in the past 150 years. The risk of extinction is increasing, due to habitat loss caused by agricultural intensification and urban development. More than half of the UK’s breeding butterflies are now classed as threatened or near threatened. So it’s vital we all do our bit to help. ●
Climate change: winners and losers
Climate change affects butterflies and moths in different ways. Many, such as the comma butterfly (below) are expanding their range. Once confined to the southwest, the comma has spread across Britain as the climate warms. It now breeds in Scotland and is moving north by around 10km per year.
Some species formerly extinct here have recolonised Britain from Europe. The large tortoiseshell butterfly went extinct in the 1960s but now small populations are establishing themselves in suitable habitat across southern England.
Though some butterflies and moths can adapt to climate change, the overall decline in numbers means they’re spread thin. It’s also
generalist species, which eat a wide range of food plants as caterpillars, that are most able to move. Species limited to one foodplant, found only in a specific type of habitat, can only move to areas of similar habitat.
Species adapted to cold or wet conditions are particularly at risk. The mountain ringlet butterfly is confined to Scotland and the Lake District, and could struggle to move north. Other specialists such as the marsh fritillary are already declining across Europe and could go extinct if their wetland habitat dries out.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP BUTTERFLIES WHERE YOU LIVE
Green up gardens or balconies
Plant hanging baskets with nectar-rich flowers such as marjoram and thyme. Perfume your space with night-scented stock, evening primrose and tobacco plants to attract moths.
Grow flowers all year round
Provide a wide range of flower shapes, full of seasonal perennials that offer nectar for early arrivals such as brimstones, through to ivy flowers for the last red admirals in autumn.
Help survey butterflies
You only need to learn to ID a few species to survey your local park or community garden. Help your local Wildlife Trust and take part: gardenbutterflysurvey.org
Provide water
Butterflies sip moisture from mud and wet surfaces, so a shallow container with water and pebbles allows them to drink without drowning. Leave fallen apples on the ground.
Be a laid-back gardener
Allow lawns to grow lush with dandelions and daisies, tolerate weeds, which provide caterpillars with foodplants and benefit the soil. Allow foxgloves and honesty to self-seed.
Stay curious
You can find lots of information on the websites of Butterfly Conservation and UK Moths. Or learn first-hand by volunteering in the Museum Gardens. Find out more: bit.ly/nhm-volunteer
Museum experts review their pick of the latest books on natural history
Habitats:
Discover Earth’s Precious Wild Places
By DK, with a foreword by Chris Packham Penguin, £35
Have you ever wondered why proboscis monkeys have a pot belly? How Antarctica watermelon snow is formed? Or which creatures call the Atlantic coast saltmarshes home?
Answers to these questions and more make up the bulk of this visually arresting book, along with facts and stories about natural ecosystems, from the Arctic tundra to the Waitomo glowworm caves of New Zealand. It also includes a foreword by environmentalist and broadcaster Chris Packham.
This is truly a book for everyone to enjoy. Children and adults alike will be fascinated by the magnificent illustrations and the detailed but clearly presented facts on the Earth’s varied habitats. This book explores each one in detail and delves deep into the relationships and interdependencies between the animals living there.
For readers with some knowledge of the subject, this book works as a great reminder of the beauty and complexity of the Earth’s habitats and all their characteristics. Personally, it reminded me of the encyclopaedias I read as a child, the books that first taught me about plants, animals and the environment in a non-didactic way that both informed but also excited me about the subject matter. The book can also be used as an encyclopaedia, in the sense that you do not need to read it in a linear way or all in one go, but can refer to it whenever you feel like learning something new or remembering a fact about a specific habitat or one of its residents.
Habitats succeeds in taking its readers on a fascinating journey across the Earth, and serves as a poignant reminder of the planet’s fragility and the need for us all to do our best to protect and restore those precious and unique places we’re lucky to call home.
Marita Tsagkaraki, Project and Partnerships Officer (UNP), Estates, Projects and Masterplanning
‘This book is a great reminder of the beauty and complexity of the Earth’s habitats, and a poignant reminder of the planet’s fragility’
VISIT OUR SHOP
These books are available from all good bookshops. Other great natural history reads are available in the Museum Shop, and at nhmshop.co.uk. Members and Patrons receive a 20 per cent discount.
The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate
By Nicolas Mathevon Princeton University Press, RRP £28The Voices of Nature offers the reader privileged insights into the secret lives of animals by combining first-hand anecdotes with an insider’s explanation of the latest research in the field.
Nicolas Mathevon is your highly adept guide to the world of bioacoustics. Much of the book is devoted to his impressive fieldwork and through its pages you witness key events in his life and work. You huddle in a canoe with him in the Arctic, waiting expectantly to hear the cries of a bearded seal, and in Botswana you witness the antics of thieving honey badgers. He describes the staggering auditory variety of the natural world, from the pre-hatching communications of the superb fairywren mother to the effects of human noise pollution on the hunting habits of fish.
Mathevon acknowledges the mysteries that remain unsolved, such as the purpose of complex communications between cetaceans. The reader is taught how animals use sound to communicate sophisticated ideas, how they adapt to variable habitats and how they learn to vocalise. The hint of riddles unravelled further enforces the notion that the animal kingdom is full of complexities yet to be fully explored. For those inspired to further study, the thorough bibliography at the end of the book provides an easy starting point.
If there is a criticism, it’s that the content could have benefited from some extra illustrations to better explain the habitats of some of the animals discussed or the organs they use to vocalise. These would have made a welcome accompaniment to the characterful illustrations that are included.
Overall, this book serves as a wonderful introduction to bioacoustics for amateur enthusiasts and an engrossing read for any seasoned researcher.
Chrissy Williams, Science Coordinator, Science OperationsWATCH THIS
Discover the Museum’s collections, projects and world-leading research in our Dig Deeper talk series. Don’t miss 200 Years of Dinosaurs: Their Rise and Fall and Rebirth at nhm.
ac.uk/the-hive
The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables
By Adam Alexander Read Media, £12.99
In The Seed Detective, Adam Alexander drives us beautifully towards an exciting and unknown green world. From the first page, he highlights how detached from the land people have become, and why these vegetable stories and the cultural facts associated with them are vital to fully understand the world we live in.
LISTEN TO THIS
How many geese? is a comedy-nature podcast for grown ups. This wild show looks at stories and science from across the natural world. Available on all streaming platforms.
The narrative follows the author’s journeys around the globe, adapting to local conditions as he strives to save heritage seeds. The portrayal of this quest is proof of his extraordinary curiosity and resilience, as he tries to inspire others to grow their own food and help preserve our biodiversity.
Alexander’s excitement about how etymology and history intertwine with mass production, and heritage and heirloom seeds (pre-war varieties of cultural or ethnic importance), is infectious. Latin jargon and taxonomy are integrated in his narrative, an essential part of understanding the different layers in his stories, and in this way, we come to understand that how we name our crops is key to the relationship we have with them.
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A Little Gay Natural History is the LGBT history of the natural world. It reveals ‘queer’ animal behaviour and challenges our assumptions. Pick up your copy from the Museum Shop or nhmshop.co.uk.
One of the book’s strengths is its impeccable pace. Every chapter is a new story revealing the reader´s connection with different crops, places, people, traditions and cultural knowledge. In this way, different readers might engage with different veggies and identify themselves with individual circumstances alongside the different chapters.
The Seed Detective is an ambitious book of hope. It’s a must-read for anyone worried about climate change and biodiversity loss. The author’s feelings are so ingrained in the book that they excite the reader about the genetics of crops. By the end, you’ll find yourself enthusing about endangered, old and traditional vegetable varieties, or even promising to start growing your own veggies. Noelia Galan, Collections Move Assistant, NHM Unlocked
Enjoy an Inspired by Nature afternoon tea in the Anning Rooms
Available Wednesday to Sunday, 12.00–15.00
Available Wednesday to Sunday, 12.00–15.00
Available Wednesday to Sunday, 12.00–15.00
Prices from £35
Prices from £35
Prices from £35
Members and Patrons get a 10 per cent discount
Members and Patrons get a 10 per cent discount
Members and Patrons get a 10 per cent discount
Book at nhm.ac.uk/visit/eat-drink-and-shop
Book at nhm.ac.uk/visit/eat-drink-and-shop Vegan menu available
Book at nhm.ac.uk/visit/eat-drink-and-shop
Vegan menu available
Vegan menu available
In our shop
Gifts inspired by Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre
1. DIY Log Cabin Bird House £5
Simple to assemble without tools, this DIY bird house provides a water-resistant shelter and a perch.
2. Recycled Rug £30
British made, by Tweedmill, from 100 per cent recycled wool, take this rug on your outdoor adventures.
Seen
you
and packaging
3. RSPB Handbook for British Birds £14.99
A guide to more than 300 resident and visiting species in Britain and Ireland.
4. Enamel Mug £12
Featuring a range of familiar garden birds, this enamel mug is ideal for use when exploring the outdoors.
5. Litter Picker £15
Help protect your local environment with this handy litter picker, made from 100 per cent recycled polypropylene fishing gear.
Members and Patrons get 20 per cent off all purchases (excluding personalised products). Find out more about joining at nhm.ac.uk/ membership.
A museum for children
It’s hard to imagine a visit to the Natural History Museum without the noise and bustle of excited children just about everywhere! But this was not always the case.WORDS: KATHRYN ROOKE, ASSISTANT ARCHIVIST
When the Museum first opened in 1881, only the most privileged children stepped through our doors. Archive photos reveal that they probably didn’t have as much fun as today’s young visitors. They entered an adult space – specimens were displayed without captions, the only information being an accompanying guidebook. There were no school groups, no snacks and certainly no animatronic Tyrannosarus rex. So how did things change?
In 1948, Jacqueline Palmer – a Cambridge graduate with a passion for children’s education – sparked new ways of thinking that paved the way for young visitors today. She wanted to make every child’s visit ‘an exciting adventure’ where they could learn to love the natural world around them.
Employed by London County Council to host school groups and weekend clubs, Jacqueline campaigned relentlessly for a ‘Children’s Centre’ within the Museum. Her plan wasn’t without resistance, but her persistence was rewarded with access to a taxidermy collection, a ‘Wonderbay’ in Hintze Hall (then Central Hall) and eventually office space to host her classes. In post-War London, her childcentred clubs were a symbol of hope for the future and photographs of children designing dioramas, drawing specimens and eating packed lunches soon
appeared in newspapers. Members of her Saturday club were even taken on field trips and camping weekends, but not without the expectation of keeping a neat and accurate nature journal.
The archives of The Children’s Centre preserve Jacqueline’s meticulous
The Museum’s Archive holds material relating to its history, including architectural plans, expedition reports, research notes and correspondence, specimen records and staff photographs.
Two schoolboys sketch Mantellisaurus, mesmerised by the amazing sights of the Museum.
lesson planning and school visits, examples of the children’s journals, sketches and newsletters, and photographs of youngsters captivated by the tasks she set. They also record its closure in 1956 and her heartfelt disappointment. Jacqueline passed away a few years later aged just 43. Sadly, she never knew her legacy would shape future visits to museums for children everywhere. ●
THE MUSEUM IN ACTION
Visit us
Our Archives are open to the public by appointment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 10.00–16.00. For more information, please email archives@nhm.ac.uk
JOIN OUR PATRONS CIRCLE
JOIN OUR PATRONS CIRCLE
Support our mission to inspire the next generation of advocates for the planet
JOIN OUR PATRONS CIRCLE
Support our mission to inspire the next generation of advocates for the planet
Support our mission to inspire the next generation of advocates for the planet
As a charity we rely on funding from many sources to fulfil our mission, including the crucial income derived from the Patrons Circle. With the help of our supporters, we can shape the world’s understanding of the natural world and inspire the next generation to protect our planet.
The Patrons Circle starts from £1,500 per year or £125 per month. Further information: patrons@nhm.ac.uk or 020 7942 5827
As a charity we rely on funding from many sources to fulfil our mission, including the crucial income derived from the Patrons Circle. With the help of our supporters, we can shape the world’s understanding of the natural world and inspire the next generation to protect our planet.
The Patrons Circle starts from £1,500 per year or £125 per month.
Further information: patrons@nhm.ac.uk or 020 7942 5827