Grant’s Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy

Grant Museum of 
Zoology & Comparative Anatomy

In keeping with my weird and wonderful interest in natural history and its evolution during the Victorian period, I had wanted to go to the Grant Museum of Zoology, part of UCL, for quite a while. So imagine my excitement when, while sat eating lunch after a very interesting seminar at the British Library, I discovered it was in fact only just around the corner! That was it, my three willing accomplices and I had a destination and we set off, too tick yet another thing off the history ‘bucket list’.

The museum was established in 1827 as a teaching collection for the newly founded University of London by Robert Edmond Grant, himself a Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. Grant struggled to find the resources he needed to successfully teach his classes and began to amass his own collection for the purposes of dissection, diagrams and lectures. The collection was bequeathed to the university after Grant’s death in 1874, and has been repeatedly expanded upon by a number of his predecessors, including E. Ray Lankester and W.F.R Weldon.

My first impression of the museum was that it was much smaller than I had imagined – the whole contents, office included, confined to a medium size room in the Rockefeller Building. But what I immediately loved was the nostalgic feel to the place; it was almost as though I had stepped back in time. “Hypocrite!” I hear you cry; given last week’s blog you’d be fully justified in making such comments, but in this case I found that to be a positive experience. The glass cabinets, remnants of what I imagine a Victorian museum to have looked like, were crammed with weird and wonderful specimens from the natural world; some preserved in liquid, others with bones and skeletons, as well as mounted animals and examples of taxidermy. It felt very authentic and yes, ‘refreshingly old fashioned’.

I think what really stood out for me was the opportunity to see animals, well at least bits of them, that are now extinct and that I’ve only read about or seen in very early photographs. Take for example, the Quagga (a subspecies of a zebra), a Thylacine (a carnivorous marsupial, known as the Tasmanian Tiger) and the Dodo. I mean one jar had parts of the Thylacine in formaldehyde…. A real Thylacine! Tell me that, that isn’t cool! Natural history is still incredibly relevant and I believe there are still a lot of lessons to be learnt about conservation, that linger on from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Seeing specimens of extinct species, those we as humans have been involved in killing off, is quite a poignant experience, especially given the current threat to a wide number of species. It was a weird sort of place, there were exhibits that made you want to recoil in horror - hey Katy? But generally I found it to be incredibly fascinating.

Katy not sure what to make of it all

Quagga Skeleton

Thylacine Skeleton and jar of parts

It has to be said, for a moment I did stop and wonder where the historic value was in what I was seeing, it was a fascinating curiosity, but how is it a museum? I suppose this comes down to our definition of a museum, but I thought the question over its relevance and place, has been answered in a particularly interesting and quite modern way. Topical and contemporary issues are juxtaposed against the specimens, though the use of modern technology, which is interspersed throughout the museum. In amongst the jumble of artefacts, there were a number of Ipad’s which posed thought provoking questions about the morality and purpose behind what you were witnessing. The museum encourages public participation in the debates that surround the themes of the museum rather than hiding away from the more controversial elements. As visitors, we were encouraged to type comments on the Ipads, or use social media and tweet our responses using a hashtag.

I think that is perhaps what for me swayed me into feeling more positive about the nostalgic feel to this museum; the merging of both old and new techniques for a positive visitor experience. We may not have spent particularly long in this museum, but it provided thoughtful stimulation about natural history both in the past and in today’s world. This, in my opinion, gave the Grant Museum an edge over other museums I’ve visited and one that I was particularly fond. I am definitely glad I took the time to visit!

A quick further note - a read of the website reveals more details of the museums interesting history and can be found here -  http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology/about/history. The museum’s use of this website in ‘outreach’ is also interesting, for example ‘collection highlights’ and ‘specimen of the week’ which make the exhibits and interesting features of this museum more accessible to the wider public.