Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
Speaker 1: of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
Speaker 1: and today on the show, we are talking about the weirdest,
Speaker 1: most interesting stories that happen behind the scenes at museums.
Speaker 1: Natural history museums are an incredible resource to be able
Speaker 1: to go and visit and see some of the most
Speaker 1: amazing aspects of evolutionary biology, often brought right to your city.
Speaker 1: But there's so much that goes on that you may
Speaker 1: not even know about. So today I am being joined
Speaker 1: by the assistant director of the Museum of Zoology at
Speaker 1: Cambridge University and the author of the new book Nature's Memory,
Speaker 1: Behind the Scenes of the world's natural history Museum, Jack Ashby.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Hi, Kenchin, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited because I remember when I was a student,
Speaker 1: I had an opportunity to visit There's the Harvard Museum
Speaker 1: of Natural History, and it was really an amazing museum
Speaker 1: to go to, Like you could go see there's this seal,
Speaker 1: a camp that was suspended in this murky fluid. It
Speaker 1: was it was all very old and kind of creepy,
Speaker 1: but really cool. And then I had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: actually see in the archives, so stuff that was not
Speaker 1: available to the public, and there was so much more stuff.
Speaker 1: I had no idea that the museum was not just
Speaker 1: this kind of front facing thing for visitors to see
Speaker 1: and look at the interesting taxidermy and bones and specimens,
Speaker 1: but that there's like an incredible collection. Usually that the
Speaker 1: museum is has behind the scenes that they can't display everything,
Speaker 1: but they have so many weird, weird things exactly.
Speaker 2: I've be in that museum in Harvard is amazing. Ar
Speaker 2: could be the best plant display in the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the glass wow, is amazing.
Speaker 2: It is amazing. But yeah, like behind the behind the
Speaker 2: scenes that natiste. But honestly, I don't think there are
Speaker 2: more interesting places than whether you're in a room with
Speaker 2: literally millions of incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the weirdest collection of parts of animals, Like I
Speaker 1: remember there was a an entire collection of I believe
Speaker 1: it was moth and butterfly Genitalia, which was started by
Speaker 1: Nabokov because you know, he was a weird guy. He
Speaker 1: was also a lepidopterist and the author of Flowlitas, so
Speaker 1: interesting man. But like, yeah, just there they would have
Speaker 1: all these things that they couldn't display all of them,
Speaker 1: and then also it was a collection that would be
Speaker 1: uh was continuing. I remember seeing someone who was in
Speaker 1: the process of stuffing this little bird, so a collected
Speaker 1: specimen of this type of bird, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: here they are, you know, just stuff in the bird
Speaker 1: full of sawdust. Like it was kind of to see
Speaker 1: that this museum it's not just sort of a dusty
Speaker 1: old building full of stuff that just sits there and
Speaker 1: nothing happens, like there's so much activity. So can you
Speaker 1: tell everyone kind of about your role at the museum
Speaker 1: of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge.
Speaker 2: Sure, So I'm really lucky. My job is essentially working
Speaker 2: with the people who look after two million in speciments
Speaker 2: here and also the people look after what about visitors,
Speaker 2: So I've got a really diverse role across our museum.
Speaker 2: It's incredible. We have to say about two million specimens here,
Speaker 2: so they cover the whole of the animal kingdom, all
Speaker 2: of biological time over the last half a billion years
Speaker 2: or so, from all across the world. So it's yeah,
Speaker 2: it's pretty exciting place to be. And also as part
Speaker 2: of the University of Cambridge. There's really interesting research going
Speaker 2: on behind the scenes in the museum, and like you say,
Speaker 2: it's really important that the museums tell the story then
Speaker 2: that it's not just the galleries, it's also research communities,
Speaker 2: but also genuinely enormous store rooms of just loads of
Speaker 2: stuff that has changed the world and how we understand it,
Speaker 2: and it's used every day in groundbreaking research.
Speaker 1: I remember when I went to the back rooms of
Speaker 1: the Harvard Natural History Museum, there would be like a
Speaker 1: room that looked sort of maybe like a normal archive,
Speaker 1: just a bunch of drawers, a bunch of cabinets, and
Speaker 1: then open a drawer and then there'd just be a
Speaker 1: bunch of sort of either stuffed birds or taxi dermaine
Speaker 1: animal samples, or even just parts of an animal, like
Speaker 1: maybe maybe a pelt, like a bunch. They might open
Speaker 1: a drawer and just you see a bunch of little
Speaker 1: mice pelts, as if it's like for these are the
Speaker 1: rugs for some kind of like leprechaun or something. Just
Speaker 1: this the but it was for, you know, and then
Speaker 1: they would explain that it'd be for some research on
Speaker 1: the change and color of these these mouse pelts. Over
Speaker 1: seasonal changes for these field mice or something. There'd be
Speaker 1: all this amazing research. So take us sort of behind
Speaker 1: the scenes at the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University.
Speaker 1: What does it look like in what is what is
Speaker 1: kind of happening there a lot?
Speaker 2: It's like the first thing to say is and it's
Speaker 2: probably obvious as soon as we start thinking about it,
Speaker 2: but it doesn't seem to surprise people. Is that, you know,
Speaker 2: a tiny, tiny fraction of what we have in our
Speaker 2: collections is on display. So we have too many in
Speaker 2: speciments here in Cambridge. You wouldn't want to see too
Speaker 2: many specimens at once, so there's only a few thousand
Speaker 2: specimens in our gallery. So I think it's it's about
Speaker 2: a quarter of a percent of how collections are on display.
Speaker 2: You know, go to the Natural History Museum and in
Speaker 2: London they have eighty million specimens, so I think it's
Speaker 2: about three one thousands of a percent of their collection
Speaker 2: is on display. Wow, statistically almost nothing. You know. Smithsonian
Speaker 2: Museum in the US is the biggest museum in the
Speaker 2: world in the natural history collections, one hundred and forty
Speaker 2: eight million specimens. So just being here about the scale
Speaker 2: of what we hold like globally the distributed collections over
Speaker 2: a billion specimen. It is, you know, it's extraordinary to
Speaker 2: think of that, and so basically quite a lot of
Speaker 2: what goes into looking after those specimens. Think about natural
Speaker 2: history collections, particularly zoology and plants, is that they're all organic,
Speaker 2: so we have to stop them from rotting, stop them
Speaker 2: from being eaten by paths or being damaged by a mold,
Speaker 2: and so that's a pretty active role. But most people
Speaker 2: in the museums are here to share them like they
Speaker 2: are public spaces, both behind the scenes and kind of
Speaker 2: the public galleries public galleries where most people visit. But
Speaker 2: we have a really active set of things going on
Speaker 2: behind the scenes where either people are working to create program,
Speaker 2: exhibitions or events to share the collections, but also just
Speaker 2: to welcome researchers visiting from all over the world or
Speaker 2: having you know, we have about twenty five PhD students
Speaker 2: here in the museum's order in Cambridgry of six curators
Speaker 2: who are researching the collection, so we're doing research both
Speaker 2: in house. Also hundreds of thiss come to use the
Speaker 2: collections in their research.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so like, what's an example of how a
Speaker 1: researcher might use something a collection from a museum because
Speaker 1: I think you know, often when you think of say biology,
Speaker 1: research is something like maybe you go out and do
Speaker 1: an observational study in the wild and you watch an
Speaker 1: animal's behavior, or maybe you do some kind of research
Speaker 1: on a live animal, Like you you do some sort
Speaker 1: of mouse study, right like in medicine, where you have
Speaker 1: you have mice in a lab. So I think often
Speaker 1: the idea of research is like you either do something
Speaker 1: in a lab with sort of like live things that
Speaker 1: you've cut, or you go out into the wild and
Speaker 1: you sit for a really long time and hope you
Speaker 1: see something. But what in what way does museums can
Speaker 1: museum specimens be used in research?
Speaker 2: It's a lot of ways, you know, and their use
Speaker 2: has only ever grown over time. So since the very
Speaker 2: earliest days of that for history museums, the main kind
Speaker 2: of science that was done in them is still done
Speaker 2: in them is taxonomy, so describing the diversity of life
Speaker 2: on Earth. If you describe a new species, you have
Speaker 2: to base it on a single specimen or small set
Speaker 2: of specimens called type specimens, and those type specimens have
Speaker 2: to be deposited in the public Museum, so that forever,
Speaker 2: you know, hundreds of years in the future and hundreds
Speaker 2: of years in the past. People are saying, okay, if
Speaker 2: you're describing a new species, you have to compare it
Speaker 2: to all of the other known species. To say why
Speaker 2: your new one is different, you have to compared to
Speaker 2: the type specimens, and so without you know, without knowing
Speaker 2: what species exist, not much of biology makes sense as
Speaker 2: well as all as your bosom. It makes sense even
Speaker 2: today thinking conservation biology. We can't conserve what we don't
Speaker 2: know exist. So just describing diversity is fundamental to music inqulotions.
Speaker 2: But since that so much more is happening here in Cambridge.
Speaker 2: Our insect Ecology group are taking the data off of
Speaker 2: insect specimens that are collected in the eighteen twenties around
Speaker 2: Cambridge in the East of England and working with the
Speaker 2: local wildlife trusts for the local conservation bodies to share
Speaker 2: with them what was here two hundred years ago before
Speaker 2: our part of the country was drained. So Cambridgeshire is
Speaker 2: massive wetland. Naturally, the fens in the East of England
Speaker 2: is this big flat wetland and habitat which was drained
Speaker 2: during the industrial revolution. So the Wildlife Trust are now
Speaker 2: working to restore and those habitats, but they need to
Speaker 2: know what was there two hundred years ago. So the
Speaker 2: data and our specimens are absolutely valuable for that. So
Speaker 2: the kind of the very fundamentally, what have we got?
Speaker 2: What is the diversity of life? And then each of
Speaker 2: those data points, each of those specimens tell us where
Speaker 2: something lived when it was collected. So it's evidence for
Speaker 2: how biodiversity has changed over time, so particularly through human interactions,
Speaker 2: but also through climate change. So our collections in museums
Speaker 2: are the world's best data set for how the world
Speaker 2: has changed over the last two hundred years, particularly on
Speaker 2: those two issues that affect literally everyone on the planet,
Speaker 2: where biodiversity loss and time changed. We could we could
Speaker 2: not understand this that museum collections. But pretty much every
Speaker 2: week someone is coming up with a new way of
Speaker 2: using a collection in a way that the people that
Speaker 2: collected the specimens would have absolutely no idea what they
Speaker 2: were doing. Specimens collected in eighteen hundreds. People who work
Speaker 2: on genetics now are using those collections in ways that
Speaker 2: can't be imagined. But there's so many more kind of
Speaker 2: imaginative ways of using it. There's this really famous study
Speaker 2: where it turned out that the soot the pollution on
Speaker 2: the feathers of birds in museum collections ended up being
Speaker 2: the best evidence for the use of black coal in
Speaker 2: the US over the last one hundred plus years. So
Speaker 2: people can track and say, okay, look at the dirt
Speaker 2: on a bird feather and work out how much pollution
Speaker 2: was in the atmosphere, and then match that to the
Speaker 2: climate data from the date that the bird was collected,
Speaker 2: and track that over thousands of specimens over one hundred years,
Speaker 2: and you've got the best environmental record for air pollution
Speaker 2: in the US. And obviously I didn't even match that
Speaker 2: the specimen was a bird for that it was they
Speaker 2: weren't looking at the birdyliness of the specimen, they were
Speaker 2: just looking at the dirt on the bed. And there
Speaker 2: are loads of examples like that, or you know, there's
Speaker 2: there's a great one the Naturalist Museum did in London
Speaker 2: and a few years ago where the first thing you
Speaker 2: see when you walk into the museum is this blue
Speaker 2: whale that died in the eighteen nineties off the west
Speaker 2: coast of Ireland, and they took one of the sheets
Speaker 2: of Baileen from the whales mats, So this is you know,
Speaker 2: it's the big filter like civil like.
Speaker 1: Structure, the push room that they have in their mouths
Speaker 1: that they used to filter out krill exactly.
Speaker 2: So they'll take this massive gulp of water around krill
Speaker 2: or squirered of fish and then push that water back
Speaker 2: through these these brushes and hang out of their guns
Speaker 2: and the same and them they just live around the
Speaker 2: inside and how the biggest animals in the world eats
Speaker 2: and the smalllest animals in the world. But what they
Speaker 2: did was because by lean grows constantly throughout the animal's
Speaker 2: life like you know, fingernails or head does, it provides
Speaker 2: a record for the last they think six or seven
Speaker 2: years of that animal because it was growing incrementally. So
Speaker 2: they took a sample like let's say, every centimeter down
Speaker 2: the bailey and that proved that provided evidence for where
Speaker 2: exactly the whale was and the bailing group, because of
Speaker 2: course we are what we eat. Yes, the chemistry of
Speaker 2: the sea changes depending where on Earth it was, and
Speaker 2: whales are really hard to study despite the fact that
Speaker 2: they're massive, like they're super rare live underwater.
Speaker 1: We just cat we can't be like you know, when
Speaker 1: we think about studies and you're sitting there trying to
Speaker 1: observe what the animals are doing. We can't do that
Speaker 1: with whales, despite how big they are. It seems like
Speaker 1: they'd be very obvious to study. But we can't live,
Speaker 1: at least not yet, like in a bubble lab in
Speaker 1: the middle of the ocean, waiting around for a blue
Speaker 1: whale to do something interesting.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly so they could show. In the last six
Speaker 2: or seven years of her life she kind of the
Speaker 2: chemistry of her baileying, so the chemical isotopes of her
Speaker 2: bailey matched that for about a year she was around
Speaker 2: the subtropics or maybe around Cape Third in the Atlantic,
Speaker 2: and then she spent each year migrating back and forwards
Speaker 2: to the North Atlantic and the subtropics every year, and
Speaker 2: then they could find the hormones in her bailiing to
Speaker 2: so that she became pregnant and gave birth again in
Speaker 2: the in the subtropics before migrating north again and eventually
Speaker 2: dying and washing up on the on the west coast
Speaker 2: of the Island're thinking eighteen ninety one and not studying
Speaker 2: This wouldn't be possible without without takings from the Museum.
Speaker 1: That's amazing, I mean, and it ties into so much research,
Speaker 1: Like there's more modern research now on how whale urine
Speaker 1: is like one of the biggest contributors to nitrogen in
Speaker 1: the in more tropical waters, right. And then there's this
Speaker 1: sort of funnel, this like p funnel from the from
Speaker 1: the Arctic colder waters that actually have a lot more
Speaker 1: nutritional density in them, and then they take the whales
Speaker 1: feed there, then they migrate to these more tropical, warmer
Speaker 1: waters and then they'll they'll mate, they'll give birth, and
Speaker 1: so all the the leavings from them being there, like urine,
Speaker 1: even the placenta contributes to this nitrogen in these area.
Speaker 1: And then having this history of like, well we know
Speaker 1: that whales we're doing these migratory paths for a long time.
Speaker 1: It really contributes to our understanding of how they have
Speaker 1: historically been behaving and how how you know, before kind
Speaker 1: of humans started to do a bunch of whaling, how
Speaker 1: much more of this whale fertilizer essentially must have been
Speaker 1: in the ocean. So it gives us like a better
Speaker 1: idea of like how much more nutrient and some of
Speaker 1: these tropical regions probably were before we started our massive
Speaker 1: whaling campaign in the in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's such such a cool story that, Yes, Joe
Speaker 2: Roman has just written this book. I just read an
Speaker 2: Eat Poop Guy exactly about what you're talking about about
Speaker 2: this kind of contributions that different animals make. Particularly is
Speaker 2: a big section on whales to the kind of the
Speaker 2: chemistry of their environment and the nutrition of their environments. Yeah,
Speaker 2: really really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: There's an interesting also when you were mentioning the whale bailing.
Speaker 1: I remember reading about how there were various museums who
Speaker 1: would hold on to whale ear plugs. So like ear wax,
Speaker 1: which in whales isn't softer flake how it can be
Speaker 1: in humans, but it actually forms these really hard, almost
Speaker 1: like rock like chunks, and through its lifetime it forms
Speaker 1: these bands like kind of like tree rings, but this
Speaker 1: these sort of more horizontal bands as it is changing
Speaker 1: its seasonal nutrition and it builds up over a lifetime,
Speaker 1: and museums would get these from dead whales and they
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do with them. They didn't certainly
Speaker 1: like maybe they would put one or two on display,
Speaker 1: but they had so many of them, but they held
Speaker 1: onto it right, Like, this is one thing I love
Speaker 1: about what museums do is they'll just hold on to
Speaker 1: stuff and you know, without any guarantee that this is
Speaker 1: going to be really important. But it's like, hey, this
Speaker 1: is this seems very cool, very interesting, we don't know
Speaker 1: what to do with it. And then in you know,
Speaker 1: more recently, researchers are like, hey, actually we now know
Speaker 1: how to study the chemical composition of the earwax, and
Speaker 1: so we can track because like with the different bands
Speaker 1: of earwax, we know that this whale is this many
Speaker 1: years old, We know that it changes colors with the season,
Speaker 1: with the nutritional cycle, and now we can actually, like
Speaker 1: with the bay leen, we can look at hormone levels.
Speaker 1: We can know if this whale was like stressed in
Speaker 1: this certain season. And so all of this information like
Speaker 1: basically the whale's life story stored in its giant chunk
Speaker 1: of earwax that museums have been carefully taking care of
Speaker 1: tending to with no you know, like with no glory, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's not like you get an award for hanging
Speaker 1: on to old whale earwax. But then finally it becomes
Speaker 1: really important for research, Like are they do you have
Speaker 1: any other examples of like very like seemingly either unimportant
Speaker 1: or really strange or gross museum holdings that could actually
Speaker 1: be really interesting for research.
Speaker 2: Something were called the extended specimen concept, which is a
Speaker 2: not very inserting way of how exctually get about what
Speaker 2: is on our specimens. So, like I said, fundamentally, it's
Speaker 2: what is it, where is it from, and when did
Speaker 2: it die? Is that's the basic data of any specimen.
Speaker 2: But beyond that, we can you know, we can take
Speaker 2: the pollen off of the bee and work out what
Speaker 2: flowers it is visiting. We can take the stomach contents
Speaker 2: of any animal worked out what it was eating. We
Speaker 2: can take hormones, as you said, or chemical data and
Speaker 2: work out what was it, you know, what what how
Speaker 2: is it? How is it experiencing its life, and what
Speaker 2: what environments is it exposed to, which can tell us
Speaker 2: exactly where it's came from came from by matching the
Speaker 2: soil chemistry or water chemistry. And we can take its parasites.
Speaker 2: We can take a measure of how symmetrical an animal
Speaker 2: it is, which tells us how stress it was one
Speaker 2: of the growing They're so just infinite data on any
Speaker 2: of these specimens literally infinite data and if you take
Speaker 2: that across a billion specimens in the world, Yeah, it
Speaker 2: is genuinely endless. There's another story, a bit like the
Speaker 2: weal one, but perhaps less gross, and that's the longest
Speaker 2: living animal ever discovered, with a tiny species of Arctic
Speaker 2: clam and people realize that by sectioning, they're taking a
Speaker 2: slice across this clamshell. It too had growth rings from winter,
Speaker 2: summer and change. It's like a like a like a
Speaker 2: treatment and you can take the you could analyze the
Speaker 2: chemistry of each of those hundreds of bands. This this
Speaker 2: clam lift I think five hundred and seventeen years or
Speaker 2: something like that, and each of those bands providing an
Speaker 2: environmental record for the sea where it lived, so they
Speaker 2: can for the last night under years create a climate
Speaker 2: record of that of that little patch of sea, which
Speaker 2: is just present from one specimen. And yeah, well bailey
Speaker 2: whal ear whap is even cooler and bail because it's
Speaker 2: the whole the whole of the animal's like pretty long too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They don't they don't like lose. That's it's so strange
Speaker 1: because they don't like drop. Like as humans, we kind
Speaker 1: of lose our ear wax right, like it naturally sort
Speaker 1: of like our the cycle of the ear, like it
Speaker 1: gets pushed out with like the skin renewal inside the
Speaker 1: ear and then slowly and it comes out. And that's
Speaker 1: why you have gross earwax that comes out of your ears.
Speaker 1: It's normal and it's healthy. But for whales, it just
Speaker 1: sits in there and kind of gets and collects over
Speaker 1: time and it forms these hard plugs and they actually
Speaker 1: like use them to enhance their their hearing because like
Speaker 1: sound can travel through the ear plug into their skull
Speaker 1: and it's it's wild to me. That's something that it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: this thing that in human beings were just like, well,
Speaker 1: this is a gross waste product, and then it just
Speaker 1: becomes this fundamental part of a whale's anatomy throughout its life.
Speaker 1: But that's amazing about the I had no idea that
Speaker 1: there were clams that uh not only would could live
Speaker 1: that long, but then by looking at this, like it's
Speaker 1: such a humble little thing, right, like you don't a
Speaker 1: clam is something I feel like we barely register when
Speaker 1: when we're going along the beach. They're so common we
Speaker 1: eat them. But then too, it's like that just this
Speaker 1: humble little animal keeping such a detailed record of not
Speaker 1: only its life but the environment around it. Like there's
Speaker 1: so much understanding how much information is contained in like
Speaker 1: one animal, Like there's the genome, right, the DNA, which
Speaker 1: is vast and kind of an insanely insane amount of data,
Speaker 1: but then everything else as well, when you're able to
Speaker 1: study the chemical composition of say like it's shell or
Speaker 1: any anything else that you can preserve, is it is
Speaker 1: kind of mind blowing. Like you think of a library,
Speaker 1: right with like billions of books, and then each book
Speaker 1: is like hundreds of thousands of pages or or even
Speaker 1: more like when you're thinking about an animal, right, So
Speaker 1: it is it is just a bewildering amount of information
Speaker 1: that is collected in museums.
Speaker 2: Likely connection hey vers is coming along. It's something coming
Speaker 2: on with a really specific question, and we're just kind
Speaker 2: of waiting here for question, and we we can't anticipate
Speaker 2: what's there with asking me about dental calculus. So plaque
Speaker 2: on mammal specimen, mambal teeth in a collection like again,
Speaker 2: it's the kind of always prot back to your growth.
Speaker 2: Is that going to provide a record of the diet?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Also yeah, it's like, hey, you know what, we
Speaker 1: do have a bunch of plaque in our collection that
Speaker 1: you can come look at. Yeah, it's that's incredible. And
Speaker 1: only I think a fraction of these stories sort of
Speaker 1: reach the news, and usually it's something really sensational or
Speaker 1: fun to look at. Like how in a lot of
Speaker 1: music collections they started realizing that there were animal pelts
Speaker 1: from particularly from Australian marsupials, that would biofluoresse under UV light.
Speaker 1: And then they started going like, wait, you know, but
Speaker 1: we have to test this now on every animal we
Speaker 1: possibly can't to see which of these which of these
Speaker 1: mammals are biofluorescing, because I think we had already known that,
Speaker 1: like there is a lot of biofluorescence, say in scorpions,
Speaker 1: various arthropods, but then to find that there were a
Speaker 1: lot of mammals that also had this biofluorescence. And then
Speaker 1: of course how do you get access to being able
Speaker 1: to test a bunch of animal pelts, Well, museums have them,
Speaker 1: so like just going through these collections and then you know,
Speaker 1: turning on a little black light and seeing which glows.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's sort of fun to look at images
Speaker 1: of these like glowing platyplus pelts. But there's there's so
Speaker 1: much more that is happening all the time. I would
Speaker 1: imagine in terms of researchers suddenly being like, wait, actually,
Speaker 1: we have so many examples that we could go through
Speaker 1: and see if this new thing that we're discovering holds
Speaker 1: true for other species or other specimens exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, museums are really unusual places and that they bring
Speaker 2: together animals that you will never find together anywhere else.
Speaker 2: A worus and a platypust that have steered each other. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so my platypusts are actually my corner of zoology. So
Speaker 2: that was super interesting finding when we found out they're biofluoresce,
Speaker 2: and we have no idea why or even if there
Speaker 2: is a reason, you know, it could just be some
Speaker 2: random revolutionary spandrol wiggle them just it just is it's
Speaker 2: a byproduct or something else that doesn't have any evolutionary
Speaker 2: function because sistem most of the time daytime in their burrows,
Speaker 2: so they probably don't experience a love, if you like,
Speaker 2: so we don't really know what's going on there.
Speaker 1: Just so fun could just be a fun Easter egg, right,
Speaker 1: like it's a yeah, Like I know that they've been
Speaker 1: trying by kind of examining a bunch of specimens, there's
Speaker 1: been some attempt to establish some pattern of like when
Speaker 1: does this happen, why does it happen? But yet absolutely
Speaker 1: sometimes it can just be sort of a structural feature
Speaker 1: that has nothing like the biofluorescence, has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with why that feature is there. Like you said, the
Speaker 1: spandrel being that you have some structural feature of an
Speaker 1: animal for some other purpose, and then as kind of
Speaker 1: like a byproduct, you have this other thing because it
Speaker 1: refers to I believe, like when you would have like
Speaker 1: an archway in architecture, and then you have these two
Speaker 1: corners and the archways that are just there because of
Speaker 1: the structure. They don't actually serve any purpose. But in
Speaker 1: architectural history you'd have all these sort of like highly
Speaker 1: decorated spandrels just because it's like some space where you
Speaker 1: can do a little motif. And then in modern times
Speaker 1: and we're like trying to figure out, like what is
Speaker 1: the purpose of this spandrel, like what is it there for?
Speaker 1: And it turns out it's not there for anything. It's
Speaker 1: just there because it's a byproduct of how you build, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of a curve within a square archway and then
Speaker 1: that's it. So it's the same thing with animals, where
Speaker 1: it's like yeah, sometimes it's not. It's not there for
Speaker 1: any reason. Maybe there's a different reason that their fur
Speaker 1: has this biofluorescent property. Maybe it has something to do
Speaker 1: with like thermal regulation, but there's no actual purpose to
Speaker 1: the glowing, but it's it's fun to.
Speaker 2: See, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1: Uh So I one thing that I think is really
Speaker 1: interesting is that the idea that museums are not like, uh,
Speaker 1: there's no such thing as say, a purely objective museum. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and this is not like a criticism of museum,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the idea that a museum can have
Speaker 1: a viewpoints, so in the same way that a curator
Speaker 1: of an art museum might make decisions on which paintings
Speaker 1: or sculptures to highlight, which informs our understanding of art,
Speaker 1: you know, Like we know that the Mona Lisa is
Speaker 1: a big deal because when you go to the Louver,
Speaker 1: there's a giant room mostly just dedicated to her in
Speaker 1: a huge line, And so we have this cultural understanding
Speaker 1: of like she is a big deal, even though her
Speaker 1: painting's kind of small, And so the duration of a
Speaker 1: natural history museum, even though it's not art right Like so,
Speaker 1: I think we're more used to the concept of art
Speaker 1: being subjective, but with something like a natural history museum,
Speaker 1: I think there's often this idea like, well, science has
Speaker 1: sort of one answer, and everyone knows what it is
Speaker 1: if you do the research, and so that's just how
Speaker 1: these decisions are made, say in a museum. But that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily the case. So what are some examples of
Speaker 1: how natural history museum curation can either bias our views
Speaker 1: or change our views on the natural world in ways
Speaker 1: that are not always bad, but it can definitely interact
Speaker 1: with sort of our cultural biases that we already have.
Speaker 2: I think that's such an interesting question. It's something I
Speaker 2: spent a lot of time writing about in memory. It's
Speaker 2: just to think that visually, museums might be showing natural objects,
Speaker 2: but they are made by people. Both the objects that
Speaker 2: are not wholly natural they will be artifacted in some way,
Speaker 2: but the people that have prepared them and then they've
Speaker 2: chosen what to put on display. So it's I think
Speaker 2: it's an astonishing thing that although we might have a
Speaker 2: billion speciment in the world's naturalist museums, all of the museums,
Speaker 2: you know, despite that diversity of stuff, pretty much all
Speaker 2: show the same thing and they talk about the same
Speaker 2: animals in the same kinds of ways, and that kind
Speaker 2: of There are these just tropes and trends of how
Speaker 2: museums talk about nature and how museums display nature that
Speaker 2: I think are worth on picking it a little bit.
Speaker 2: And yeah, the first thing to say is that today
Speaker 2: most naturalism museums will say that their purpose, like their
Speaker 2: mission statements, will also something like we want to make
Speaker 2: our visitors encourage them to care about the natural world,
Speaker 2: encourage them to care about biodiversity. And I think, you know,
Speaker 2: they're really good at doing that. But what's interesting is
Speaker 2: when you go in to a natural history gallery, that's
Speaker 2: not what biodiversity looks like, you know, just in the
Speaker 2: animal I mean first amazonologists. So I'm affected by lets
Speaker 2: less than other people. But museums are really bad at
Speaker 2: play displaying plants. Normally, ants are only on displayed in
Speaker 2: relation to.
Speaker 1: Animals and kind of like a background background the carpet
Speaker 1: on which they say yes exactly.
Speaker 2: So this notion of plant line. This where we can
Speaker 2: look at a scene where you know, there's as a
Speaker 2: photograph with a leopard in the middle of a grass,
Speaker 2: and we ignore the grass. We just see the leopard,
Speaker 2: even though you know what grass is ninety eight percent
Speaker 2: of the picture. That happens in museums too. But even
Speaker 2: among animals. You know, we've so far as we have
Speaker 2: just described about one and a half million species of animal.
Speaker 2: And I always ask people to guess how many of
Speaker 2: those one and a half million species are mammals, And
Speaker 2: I think people are generally surprised that they but it's
Speaker 2: not that many. There's only about six and a half thousand,
Speaker 2: a few in seven thousand, zero point four percent of
Speaker 2: all life on Earth as a mammal. But what do
Speaker 2: we see when we go to naturalism museums. We've see mammals,
Speaker 2: We see loads and loads and loads of mammals, as
Speaker 2: insects make up sixty percent of that diversity. So almost
Speaker 2: a million species of insects has been described, But insects
Speaker 2: are given so little space in naturalist museums, and I
Speaker 2: think that's going to affect what people learn to value.
Speaker 2: So museums are culturally important in our relationship with the
Speaker 2: natural world, and we obviously we are mammals as humans,
Speaker 2: and we're going to be drawn to cute things with
Speaker 2: cute faces and fur. But if museums really are trying
Speaker 2: to make people care about their besty, they should probably
Speaker 2: do a better job of displaying insects.
Speaker 1: We've just got to convince people that tartar grades velvet
Speaker 1: worms are incredibly cute, and we got to.
Speaker 2: See that they are.
Speaker 1: They're so cute velvet if if I could have like
Speaker 1: one sort of a genie wish to like make an
Speaker 1: animal a pet that should not be a pet, like
Speaker 1: having a giant velvet worm as a pet would be amazing.
Speaker 1: They're these little pudgy animals. They're not They're just their
Speaker 1: whole They're kind of their own thing. They're not a worm,
Speaker 1: they're not an insect, they're not a caterpillar. They just
Speaker 1: look like these little soft, chubby pokemon like things that
Speaker 1: have a bunch of little legs, a bunch of little
Speaker 1: chubby arms, and then these two fat antenna and they
Speaker 1: are they they're very cute to look at. They're terrifying
Speaker 1: predators for smaller insects, but it's a yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: just I would love to see a museum have on
Speaker 1: display sort of like giant versions of say, arthropods insects,
Speaker 1: so that you can see kind of up close. Because
Speaker 1: if you're kind of looking at a display with a
Speaker 1: tiny beetle, maybe someone's like, you know, what is I
Speaker 1: barely notice that? But if but if you're looking at
Speaker 1: like a giant plant hopper, and how colorful and amazing
Speaker 1: it is, I don't know. I would love to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they are like obviously infectual, they have going
Speaker 2: against them. It's that they're tiny, yes, but there are
Speaker 2: ways of displaying, like there are ways of doing good
Speaker 2: insect displays, including and you say, giant things, but also
Speaker 2: just loads and special So what they make up for
Speaker 2: is what they do insights, they make up for it.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing in a natural history museum like this
Speaker 1: giant mandola of like various beetle species, just like kind
Speaker 1: of arranged by color, and that was that was very cool.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, they're beautiful, and so I think that's that's
Speaker 2: one bites is that we're not we're not reflecting the
Speaker 2: natural world taken well. And then there's another one that's
Speaker 2: slightly more insidious. And that's that we have way more
Speaker 2: male specimens on display in naturist museums than where do
Speaker 2: you females?
Speaker 1: He wants to see a girl lion? Nobody.
Speaker 2: I like that. You might think, you might think that
Speaker 2: you know it's justified, but and you know, it's a
Speaker 2: difficult decision. So you know, nature's men. We spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time talking about it, that people are making
Speaker 2: decisions about what on displayed, what stories are the most
Speaker 2: interesting or most like, to help people feel inspired all
Speaker 2: struck by the natural world. And yes, you can understand
Speaker 2: that given the choice between you know, a massive, brightly
Speaker 2: colored male bird and a kind of brown, small drab
Speaker 2: female bird, there is there is some sense in them
Speaker 2: showing the female. I would argue that it's interesting to
Speaker 2: show that males and females can be different.
Speaker 1: And it's also like the manner in which that like
Speaker 1: the manner in which they're displayed with male and female birds.
Speaker 1: Is One thing I've noticed is that the big maybe
Speaker 1: you have like a brightly colored male, and then they
Speaker 1: include the female, but she's kind of in the background.
Speaker 1: She's They don't really spend a lot of time preparing
Speaker 1: the taxidermad specimen she's just like and there's the female
Speaker 1: and she's brown and whatever and like and they have
Speaker 1: the male in this like glorious sort of you know action,
Speaker 1: pose wings out, you know, in a in some display,
Speaker 1: and it really makes you feel like the female birds
Speaker 1: are sort of just in the background, not doing anything,
Speaker 1: when in fact, these drab female birds are the whole
Speaker 1: reason in a lot of theories is that they're the whole
Speaker 1: reason you have these like male displays, and they have
Speaker 1: so much agency in picking mates and what they're doing
Speaker 1: in terms of, uh, care for offspring, or they may
Speaker 1: have some really interesting behavior and you're just not capturing that.
Speaker 1: If you have this big, you know, display of a
Speaker 1: truly beautiful male specimen, nothing wrong with doing that, but
Speaker 1: then the females just kind of like in the background.
Speaker 1: Like if you could maybe showing her that she's like
Speaker 1: really investigating this male, and you'd have to be a
Speaker 1: clever taxidermist to show that kind of action shot of
Speaker 1: like this female is actually very active in this courtship ritual.
Speaker 1: But it's is it is often just like, look at
Speaker 1: this amazing male and then she's back there doing something.
Speaker 1: Don't we don't really care about.
Speaker 2: I think it gets worse, it gets worse than that.
Speaker 2: So you know, I do write about this a lot
Speaker 2: in the book, but the bias, and it's particularly picked
Speaker 2: up by a colleague of mine called Rebecca Maten who
Speaker 2: who kind of noticed this, this this version what you're
Speaker 2: talking about, where it's not only that they're in the background,
Speaker 2: but the females are you know, lower on the shelf
Speaker 2: or sometimes mounted, like literally bowing down to the males.
Speaker 2: The males, as you say, be passed up domineering pose
Speaker 2: and the and the females are literally kind of head down,
Speaker 2: face on the floor. This is this is I say,
Speaker 2: how how dead birds prop up the patriarchy. And it's
Speaker 2: got absolutely nothing to do with natural history. It doesn't
Speaker 2: reflect what happens in the wild. What these birds are
Speaker 2: doing now.
Speaker 1: It's like like females are sort of like the Simon
Speaker 1: Cowell of animals, like in the in terms of these
Speaker 1: like they will be yeah, if you watch them, like
Speaker 1: if you want, you'll see like a bower bird really
Speaker 1: trying to impress a female and she is like scrutinizing him,
Speaker 1: judging him, and he's the one sort of like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: please stay like come back, like so it is. It
Speaker 1: is not it's not only uh, showing bias, but it
Speaker 1: is inaccurate, right, it is not it's not showing you
Speaker 1: the truth. Right. So I think like that's kind of
Speaker 1: an like it's an important point because I think sometimes
Speaker 1: people think, like, ah, you know, who cares about like
Speaker 1: you know, quote unquote feminism in museums, Like that's just
Speaker 1: that's not science. It's like no, Actually, if you're not
Speaker 1: paying attention to our kind of weird human gender biases, uh,
Speaker 1: that will distort what is actually happening in terms of
Speaker 1: actual animal behavior and what's happening in the natural world exactly.
Speaker 2: I think that actually goes beyond the specimens to what
Speaker 2: we write on the labels as well. So Rebecca mentioned
Speaker 2: the study of typical naturist museum labels and in those
Speaker 2: relatively row instances where you have females on display, male
Speaker 2: and females on display to look at them, the labels
Speaker 2: on a male specimen in it or say something like
Speaker 2: you know, this is how the animal eats or moves
Speaker 2: through its habitat or defends itself or general natural history
Speaker 2: facts are on the male specimens because on the female
Speaker 2: specimens its stories about how the species really produce it,
Speaker 2: and how they make babies, how they raise their babies,
Speaker 2: and of course female specimens also eat and move through
Speaker 2: the habitats and defend themselves, and male specimens also reproduce
Speaker 2: and once we're babies. But it perpetuates the very human
Speaker 2: social construct of what gender you know, gender roles are.
Speaker 2: So you know, it's it's pushing a human and social
Speaker 2: construct onto an animal in ways that you know, unhelpful,
Speaker 2: that it gives a very because an obvious but subconscious
Speaker 2: message to you any visitor reading that, including kids. So
Speaker 2: you know, museums do have a role in shape and
Speaker 2: what people think. And it's not just the specimens, it's
Speaker 2: also what people write on the labels. And not for nothing,
Speaker 2: but most people who work in that dressed to medium
Speaker 2: for women. So it's such an ingrained yeah construct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, well, you know how it is the
Speaker 1: the male crab goes out to his little job, and
Speaker 1: then the female crab stays at home in the in
Speaker 1: the kitchen, raising all the little crab baby. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we there are like specific examples in nature that seem
Speaker 1: to when it likes quote unquote subverts this expectation. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's like surprising or we see it as for example,
Speaker 1: like I think some of the myths about say, like spiders,
Speaker 1: uh is because like there are a few examples of like, yes,
Speaker 1: the female spiders tend to be larger than the males,
Speaker 1: So people have a concept that all female spiders will
Speaker 1: engage in uh, sexual cannibalism, and it's like, well, that's
Speaker 1: actually not true. I think it's just that it's surprising
Speaker 1: enough to people that female arthropod's female spiders tend to
Speaker 1: be larger than the males that a few examples in
Speaker 1: which there are female spiders who do engage in sexual cannibalism,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it's like it's not that they always do it,
Speaker 1: but they only do it in certain situations. Turns into
Speaker 1: this kind of like a myth of like, well, you
Speaker 1: know how spiders are they flip the script and because
Speaker 1: they're so big and so scary, they always eat the
Speaker 1: males after copulation, and so it's a you know, you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like even once you get an example
Speaker 1: of like, look, this clearly is subverting sort of the
Speaker 1: human cultural expectations, that too can become mythologized because we
Speaker 1: see that as an exception rather than something within the
Speaker 1: spectrum of many different types of animal behaviors that are
Speaker 1: very diverse. And there's a lot of different type of
Speaker 1: spider ma eating behaviors that is not just like a
Speaker 1: a giant evil female eating the poor little males exactly.
Speaker 2: And you know, there's a lot of animals in which
Speaker 2: the females is bigger than the males for obvious reasons
Speaker 2: where the one's producing the eggs. So for example, a
Speaker 2: lot of birds of prey, and most birds of prey
Speaker 2: probably even the females are bigger snakes and crocodiles as well.
Speaker 2: And what's interesting is not only that that gender bias
Speaker 2: I mentioned when more males are on display than females,
Speaker 2: that's also true in the stored collections. So it's not
Speaker 2: just kind of the curatorial bias in what's going on display,
Speaker 2: but on what science is being done as well. So
Speaker 2: there are way more males in the stored collections and females,
Speaker 2: and that bias is actually less strong for species in
Speaker 2: which females are bigger, ordet decorated. And but that that
Speaker 2: bias in the stalled collection is interesting and important to acknowledge,
Speaker 2: and the scientific point of view, because if you're making
Speaker 2: study based on, however, many thousand specimens of the given
Speaker 2: species or given group in a museum, and the majority
Speaker 2: of those specimens of male, you need to account for
Speaker 2: that bias in any conclusions you make. We might you know,
Speaker 2: in many species, males and females might eat different things,
Speaker 2: or behave differently, or have different but you know, if
Speaker 2: you analyze the chemistry, the chemistry will end up being different.
Speaker 2: So if we're not acknowledging that bias in the science
Speaker 2: that's being done, we're going to be misrepresenting what females
Speaker 2: animals are doing. The science gets corrupted too.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's it's that's really interesting because that's also
Speaker 1: the case in medical science that uses say mouse lineages
Speaker 1: or rat lineages, there's this, uh, this like weird rat
Speaker 1: sexism where rat or mouse sexism, where often medical studies
Speaker 1: will only use male male mice or male rats because
Speaker 1: it's like, ah, yeah, but the females have hormonal cycles
Speaker 1: that will interfere with our research, and it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: but you do realize that, uh, in humans, female humans
Speaker 1: also have hormonal cycles that might interfere with whatever medical
Speaker 1: concept that you're studying. So like there's this bias of like, well,
Speaker 1: we'll just use the male mice because or the male
Speaker 1: routes because we don't want to really have to have
Speaker 1: this other variable of the hormones and the female routes
Speaker 1: and the female mice. I've been hearing stories right in
Speaker 1: in terms of like the current sort of in the US,
Speaker 1: as people probably know, we've been getting this concept that
Speaker 1: we need to get rid of dei or quote wokeness
Speaker 1: in research. And so what's been happening is any research
Speaker 1: that deals with sex or hormones has been targeted for
Speaker 1: potential defunding. And so I have a friend who is
Speaker 1: telling me about she's an entomologist, and there's researchers in
Speaker 1: the US who their content got flagged because they were
Speaker 1: looking at sexual diversity in crickets. So this was this
Speaker 1: is looking at sex ratios in cricket species, and they
Speaker 1: are you know, we're getting sort of like targeted because
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well, you're doing something that is part
Speaker 1: of a this is not objective, right, You're doing some
Speaker 1: some sort of like social science with your research. And
Speaker 1: I think this is kind of a I think for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, now this is obviously strange and wrong.
Speaker 1: But for a while, even before this current political situation,
Speaker 1: I think that there's been this desire to completely separate
Speaker 1: the hard science, the hard science, from social sciences, or
Speaker 1: to have this concept of pure objectivity in say evolutionary biology,
Speaker 1: that is separate from culture, it's separate from society, and
Speaker 1: that we don't you know that is it's a political
Speaker 1: it's it's a kind of like thing on a in
Speaker 1: a vacuum. So what how do you think is like
Speaker 1: On the other hand, though, like it is important in
Speaker 1: science to have a certain element of objectivity. You want
Speaker 1: to do research, you want to keep like you said,
Speaker 1: like having collections that are more objective. Well is important
Speaker 1: for research in terms of having say like an equal
Speaker 1: balance of the sex of different specimens. So what is
Speaker 1: like a healthy way to balance objectivity with an understanding
Speaker 1: of how our culture and our society can influence our
Speaker 1: understanding of evolutionary biology, Like, is what is a way
Speaker 1: to both acknowledge sort of our biases but also try
Speaker 1: to achieve this this idea of scientific objectivity.
Speaker 2: And I think it goes a lot deeper than evolution
Speaker 2: biology certainly includes that I think not true His museums
Speaker 2: represent themselves. As you say, it's a political and scientific
Speaker 2: meaning that you know, they've excluded themselves from conversations that
Speaker 2: have been happening in every other kind of museum discipline
Speaker 2: about the human stories behind that collection. You know, if
Speaker 2: we pretend this is just a collection of hedgehogs and crickets,
Speaker 2: then we're ignoring the stories of the circumstances in which
Speaker 2: those hedgehogs and crickets are collected. You know, it is obvious,
Speaker 2: utterly obvious when when you start to think about it,
Speaker 2: that science is part of culture and is affected by
Speaker 2: the science society is that it's embedded in Societies are
Speaker 2: different in parts of the world at different times in history,
Speaker 2: so that what museums collect, how they display them, how
Speaker 2: they interpret them, how they study them, how they store
Speaker 2: them reflect the same prejudices and biases or priorities and
Speaker 2: interests as a society that they're happening in. So, you know,
Speaker 2: we've been starting to say this for the last few
Speaker 2: years that museum naturist mediums are you know, are starting
Speaker 2: to realize that. Yeah, so of course where human constructs, yes,
Speaker 2: museums are not neutral, and that's a good thing. But
Speaker 2: you know, what's happening in the US at the moment.
Speaker 2: It's an obvious example of that because they are directly
Speaker 2: controlling what science is happening at the moment. And that
Speaker 2: has always happened that it's in a democratic country, it's
Speaker 2: what's happening now is pretty extraordinary. So we you know,
Speaker 2: we're we're at this point and have been for the
Speaker 2: last really not that long seven or eight years. In
Speaker 2: naturists museums are kind of acknowledging the fact that science
Speaker 2: and science museums are not beyond politics. And and I'll
Speaker 2: say that that notion has kind of crumbled as soon
Speaker 2: as you start thinking about it. So we're going through
Speaker 2: a bit of huge piece of work to kind of
Speaker 2: add this layer of relevance. And as I said, we
Speaker 2: are naturist medium that are incredibly important. There's just relevance
Speaker 2: in tackling climate change by adversity of arts, but we
Speaker 2: also have a really important role in talking about social
Speaker 2: justice and the cultural history of our collections and the
Speaker 2: societies that we represent. So you know's there's two sides
Speaker 2: to this. I'd like to think that's why there's a
Speaker 2: whole trunk in unless in nature's memory, the suicide some
Speaker 2: one is acknowledging, like the circumstances in which collections were
Speaker 2: made often exploitative or you know, actively violent, but there
Speaker 2: were collections made during military campaigns where you know, where
Speaker 2: European countries or the US were invading other countries and
Speaker 2: taking that opportunity to build collections, just as they were
Speaker 2: in places like you know, the British Museum or other
Speaker 2: anthropology collections. Our Natrist museums represent the material will be
Speaker 2: that animal, vegetable and mineral that they're colonizing. The powers
Speaker 2: were investigating what could be, what would make money, what
Speaker 2: would be exploded there, and the museums were deliberately built
Speaker 2: to kind of house those repositories and then also present
Speaker 2: a positive view of colonization to their audiences and audiences
Speaker 2: obviously in the in the in the metropology and of
Speaker 2: the countries that were doing the colonizing. That's one side
Speaker 2: of it, just telling more honest stories about how our
Speaker 2: collections came together. And in doing so, you know, people
Speaker 2: are pushing against this push against the idea of rewriting history. Obviously,
Speaker 2: that's all what historians do. That's the job of history
Speaker 2: to work out what actually happened. And if it turns
Speaker 2: out that what we have been thought had been happening
Speaker 2: isn't actually what happened, then it is you can't really
Speaker 2: sensibly argue against not reflecting, Oh, we know a bit
Speaker 2: better about what the real circumstance is. That's one part
Speaker 2: of it, but very much related part of that is
Speaker 2: is you know acknowledging who was involved in those stories
Speaker 2: in the museums, Like some museums are places of storytelling,
Speaker 2: and whenever someone is telling a story, you need to
Speaker 2: think about who are they and who are they telling
Speaker 2: the story for, and that museums, like all museums, have
Speaker 2: been telling particular kind of story with a particular kind
Speaker 2: of audience in mind for very long. Those stories have
Speaker 2: elevated certain kinds of people whilst kind of diminishing other
Speaker 2: kinds of people. So what I guess I'm saying is
Speaker 2: that we're doing this piece of work to try and
Speaker 2: recognize and acknowledge and share that the big names behind
Speaker 2: major discoveries and the history of science didn't work alone,
Speaker 2: and then the story that we're telling there was a
Speaker 2: far greater diversity of characters than some we've traditionally told.
Speaker 2: So there are you know, countless people of color and women,
Speaker 2: local and indigenous collectors who have made huge contributions to
Speaker 2: the history of science and massive discoveries. And it isn't
Speaker 2: all just about you know, the Charles Darwins and that
Speaker 2: Alfred Russell Wallace is and the other rich white guys
Speaker 2: who made huge contributions. But they didn't work alone. And
Speaker 2: it does nothing to kind of diminish their accomplishments by saying, actually,
Speaker 2: that specimen was collected by you know, the local charactor
Speaker 2: who shared the coreactive of knowledge and expertise and labor
Speaker 2: in making those discoveries. So it's just as I said,
Speaker 2: a the relevance to museums because it means that more
Speaker 2: people will feel represented in those histories and feel like science,
Speaker 2: museums and science in general is a place for them
Speaker 2: and something that people like them have contributed to.
Speaker 1: It's also like an interesting like the idea that some
Speaker 1: guy comes in from on a boat from England, no offense,
Speaker 1: and goes to some island, sees like all of the
Speaker 1: behaviors that animals do at any point, comes back tells
Speaker 1: the stories like we've now discovered everything about these animals
Speaker 1: because I went on a boat to this place for
Speaker 1: a few years. Like, it's such an unrealistic version of
Speaker 1: how animal observations and this is just talking about observations
Speaker 1: in the wild, right, like are actually made and how
Speaker 1: the like how there are so many animals for which
Speaker 1: it is very difficult to observe them that you have
Speaker 1: to rely on people who live there to god your
Speaker 1: research into these animals. So like, you know, things that
Speaker 1: could be dismissed as local folklore or non scientific, right
Speaker 1: because these are observations made by fishermen. Maybe you have
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who live near where nar waals are, right,
Speaker 1: and they make these observations. It's like, well, these aren't
Speaker 1: really scientific, but we don't have anything else, right, Like
Speaker 1: we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier about
Speaker 1: how hard it is to study some of the largest
Speaker 1: animals in the world, whales, because we don't live there.
Speaker 1: There's nobody that lives in the middle of the ocean
Speaker 1: where we can make observations and see their sort of
Speaker 1: quotitian lives. Similarly, the best records of animal observations for
Speaker 1: remote areas where well relatively remote, right remote to us.
Speaker 1: When we don't live in those areas are going to
Speaker 1: be made by people who live there. And so if
Speaker 1: we dismiss those kinds of observations or even cultural stories
Speaker 1: right that get passed down from generations, we're also dismissing
Speaker 1: a huge wealth of knowledge. Right, So, like there are
Speaker 1: a lot of animal observations that we're now of starting
Speaker 1: to realize that oh, like this story of say like
Speaker 1: hawks in sort of the outback like spreading fire that
Speaker 1: wasn't maybe just metaphorical, They might literally do that. We
Speaker 1: need to observe them more to know like if they're
Speaker 1: doing this behavior. But these kinds of cultural stories or
Speaker 1: observations made by local people are really important data points
Speaker 1: that should be respected in that way. And I think
Speaker 1: having the like not having this like idea that like, well,
Speaker 1: science comes from you know, a white guy who came
Speaker 1: in on a boat and suddenly like gave the gift
Speaker 1: of science to people who were living in this area.
Speaker 1: It's like no, Like, observations made over generations is a
Speaker 1: type of data collect and it's something that is really
Speaker 1: important should we want to actually engage in research in
Speaker 1: a way that is, you know, taking into account a
Speaker 1: type a type of research and a type of data
Speaker 1: collection that takes years in generations.
Speaker 2: To do exactly that. And I mean, even if we
Speaker 2: did just want to focus on Western science and scientific
Speaker 2: understanding as the world, which as you say, is pretty
Speaker 2: narrow a way of looking at things, even making those
Speaker 2: discoveries required an understanding of how to catch the animals
Speaker 2: in the first place, which requires know where they're going
Speaker 2: to be at a certain time of year, a certain
Speaker 2: kind of day, how they're going to react if you
Speaker 2: chase them, how where they're going to borrow, you know,
Speaker 2: and all of that. I've been studying this collection of
Speaker 2: Central Australian mammals, which is from the first scientific expedition
Speaker 2: in Central Australia, and it was it resulted in the
Speaker 2: collection of a bunch of new mammal species that hadn't
Speaker 2: been encountered by Europeans before, and all of the labels
Speaker 2: on these specimens spread across museums across the world to
Speaker 2: say they were collected by one of two white men
Speaker 2: on this expedition or associated with this expedition, And having
Speaker 2: read their letters, it's clear that they didn't have want
Speaker 2: of them to collected a single specimen. It was all
Speaker 2: it was all sudden arevent to the first nations Australian
Speaker 2: women who were collecting these specimens, and then they were
Speaker 2: being shipped back to the city, and they were even
Speaker 2: telling them what was collectible, so that the event of
Speaker 2: women was that, you know, were directing the collecting efforts
Speaker 2: and describing the natural history and providing the specimens. So
Speaker 2: it's yeah, it's huge roles that have transformed Western scientific
Speaker 2: understanding of in that case, central Australian mammals.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's just it's the
Speaker 1: respecting the amount of information that you can get from
Speaker 1: having the humility to understand that. Like, look, I may
Speaker 1: have like a lot of knowledge about biology, but if
Speaker 1: you go to a lot area, like people who have
Speaker 1: say lived near the Amazon based basin for many generations,
Speaker 1: they will just intrinsically have sort of a perspective and
Speaker 1: life experience that can help you. Right, Like it's it's
Speaker 1: not it doesn't have to be a competition about like oh,
Speaker 1: who's more knowledgeable or which method is better. It's like
Speaker 1: all of these types of methods can work together, right,
Speaker 1: Like the sort of you know, the scientific method that
Speaker 1: you are trying to do by collecting specimens and then
Speaker 1: whatever research you're doing works can work in tandem with
Speaker 1: the knowledge and data collection of people who live there.
Speaker 1: It's it's absolutely sort of a symbiotic relationship, not something
Speaker 1: that is like has to be one or the other
Speaker 1: or replaced by one thing. You know, it's a it's
Speaker 1: sort of a it's just it's all an opportunity to
Speaker 1: be able to share data together, which I think is
Speaker 1: something that to me that like, that's one of the
Speaker 1: most inspiring things about natural history museums is the idea
Speaker 1: of like humanity collectively sharing uh, just this immense amount
Speaker 1: of data, uh information and stories about our world, and
Speaker 1: so understanding that this takes many shapes and forms. That
Speaker 1: is not just purely like you know, Charles Darwin getting
Speaker 1: on a boat and going to an island. No, no
Speaker 1: offense to Charles Darwin. He was great. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's that is not the only type of uh
Speaker 1: kind of natural history that exists. Yeah, before we go,
Speaker 1: I do want to ask just do you have any
Speaker 1: like really weird or funny uh stories about something that
Speaker 1: happens behind the scenes at the Museum of Zoology at
Speaker 1: Cambridge that you think would like surprise people like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be super important to science, just something like,
Speaker 1: you know, because like one thing that UH is like
Speaker 1: there's this in UH at the Harvard Museum of Natural History,
Speaker 1: there's just this like decaying elephant head that's just it's
Speaker 1: not on display for visitors because it's too kind of
Speaker 1: creepy looking. But they just sort of shoved it there
Speaker 1: in one of the one of the research buildings, and
Speaker 1: this elephant head that's like falling apart. It looks very haunted.
Speaker 1: Like I I think that if there's like an elephant
Speaker 1: haunting that happens, it's going to be because of that.
Speaker 1: But is there any any kind of like weird or
Speaker 1: funny stories that you can share.
Speaker 2: I think this isn't just for Cambridge, but it's definitely
Speaker 2: true here. I think it's really surprising that the length
Speaker 2: that museums can go to to change a specimen and so,
Speaker 2: like it often surprises people to learn that most mammals
Speaker 2: have in their penis because museums. It's surprising because you
Speaker 2: will almost never see a mammal skeleton with its penis
Speaker 2: bone attacked. So there is one specimen on display here
Speaker 2: in Cambridge out of how I don't know how many
Speaker 2: hundreds of skeletons that has a penis bone attached, and
Speaker 2: it's an elephant seal. But if you go to any
Speaker 2: European museum, including the UK, you are very unlikely to
Speaker 2: see a penis bone. Interestingly, Americans are less prudish, but
Speaker 2: the reason being is that you Victorian curatives have decided
Speaker 2: to try to spare their visitors blushes or perhaps the
Speaker 2: giggles or twelve year old boys by taking the penis
Speaker 2: spats away. But what that means is that museums have
Speaker 2: been deliberately misshaping their specimens, so deliberately telling people the
Speaker 2: wrong thing right about animal anatomy, that there is a
Speaker 2: bone in most mammals penis And I think that's astonishing
Speaker 2: that they would do that. And so you go to
Speaker 2: it thing, right, Yeah, you go to a museum store
Speaker 2: and they're literally drawers of penis bones.
Speaker 1: To me, that's more perverse, right, like it it's way
Speaker 1: more perverse to like rip the penis pone off the
Speaker 1: skeleton and put it in a drawer somewhere.
Speaker 2: So it's like I was. I was in the California
Speaker 2: California Academy of Science in San Francisco, and I was
Speaker 2: walking around kind of impressed how many penis bones place.
Speaker 3: And then I was in their store room and I
Speaker 3: noticed that in the stores like where you've got a
Speaker 3: kind of a skeleton of say a seal, which obviously
Speaker 3: in storings are not mounted into into a skeleton Shapey're
Speaker 3: not articulated.
Speaker 2: They are kind of left in boxes because that is
Speaker 2: much easier to store but also to study. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: they don't have any human biases attached to them. Is
Speaker 2: that they had also like so they displayed that they
Speaker 2: had on the shelves. They had a box with the
Speaker 2: bones in it of the skeleton, and then the skull
Speaker 2: separate on the shelf, but then also separate on the
Speaker 2: shelf next to it was the penis pone. So they
Speaker 2: also removed the penis bone from the boxes, were kind
Speaker 2: of like elevating its importance. But I just don't understand
Speaker 2: what's going on there, and I asked the curator and
Speaker 2: I don't know, that's just what.
Speaker 4: We do.
Speaker 2: Un built tropes.
Speaker 4: But you go to go and.
Speaker 2: Look around the naturalistic collector a skeleton collection of mammals,
Speaker 2: and it should be the primates, the rodents. What we
Speaker 2: used to call the insectivors, which are the moles, shrews
Speaker 2: and hedgehogs, the anevns, the bats, and the rabbits, and
Speaker 2: they should have penis pants on most of their species
Speaker 2: obviously just on the mail, but you will. It's a
Speaker 2: hearty hard fish to find them.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of It makes me think of like
Speaker 1: sort of artist depictions of male and female skeletons where
Speaker 1: it's like the female skeleton has like an hourglass shape
Speaker 1: and it's like, no, no, that's not how. That's not how
Speaker 1: that works, or like a or like a smaller hip
Speaker 1: bone than the male. It's like that's not that's not
Speaker 1: that's not how. That's not how it works. But yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that that is amazing because it's just like it is.
Speaker 1: It's like how our prudishness then leaves people to not
Speaker 1: understand that actually like, uh, we're kind of the exceptions,
Speaker 1: Like there are there are other animals that do not
Speaker 1: have penis bones along with humans and another close human relatives,
Speaker 1: but like like we are kind of the exception, like
Speaker 1: most mammals do have penis bones.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yeah, this is just like beha and bred y.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, just just not like it's like, yeah, either
Speaker 1: the bonobos don't I think, right, or am I wrong
Speaker 1: about that?
Speaker 2: I can't remember. I want to say, yeah, I can't remember. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think chimps.
Speaker 1: Have Oh no, they do.
Speaker 2: They do.
Speaker 1: Both chimpanzees and bonobo's have the penis phone. I'm wondering
Speaker 1: now if it is just humans that don't have it
Speaker 1: among primates, or if there are.
Speaker 2: Any primary there are there are. I think there are
Speaker 2: a couple, but they're unusual. You know, there are definitely usual.
Speaker 1: We're weird, but because we're the ones making the museums,
Speaker 1: we're like, no, all your other all your other mammals
Speaker 1: are weird freaks like not us. Well, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming on today. This has been really really interesting.
Speaker 1: And where can people get your book? Tell people what
Speaker 1: it's called and why they should read it. I want
Speaker 1: to read it now, to be honest.
Speaker 2: It's called Native's Memory, Behind the Scenes of the World's
Speaker 2: Not Christ Museums, and it comes out in twenty fous
Speaker 2: and a contentiary five and.
Speaker 4: So saying so you know all good bookshops, and it's
Speaker 4: it's it's about how nature is presented to the world
Speaker 4: in museums and the windows that we provide a naturalist
Speaker 4: museums that kind of.
Speaker 2: Provides a universe and tour of all the world Tristan's games.
Speaker 2: That's one story. The other stories how we go about
Speaker 2: telling the human stories and our collections and of the
Speaker 2: things I mentioned there, so how well at people representation
Speaker 2: museums and then finally talked about how natrists museums can
Speaker 2: save the world. That first set stories we're talking about
Speaker 2: about the research happening air questions much.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think if you are concerned about the way
Speaker 1: that science is being treated right now in the US,
Speaker 1: reading this would be really interesting because it is like,
Speaker 1: this is all about how our perspectives can be shaped
Speaker 1: by sort leads the you know, the decisions of what
Speaker 1: we elevate in science and then how you know, potentially
Speaker 1: like going forward and what we can do. So yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on, and thank you
Speaker 1: guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show
Speaker 1: and you leave a rating or review, that really helps me.
Speaker 1: And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song.
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