In that article, it was the case of Tasmanian tiger and marsupial rat. For more information, visit the museum’s website.A while ago, I wrote an article about the possibility of bringing back extinct animals to life. ![]() It’s open from 10:00 to 5:00 Monday through Saturday, and 2:00 to 5:00 on Sunday. If you’re in London sometime in the near future, I highly recommend taking a day trip to Tring to visit this gem of a museum. Gould was somewhat vague about where the birds were collected, saying only that they were obtained from “that little explored district of California which borders the territory of Mexico.” Apparently, the skins were actually collected by an Italian mining engineer named Damiano Floresi, who collected a number of birds early in the 19th century in the Sierra Madre near Bolaños, Jalisco-a long way from California. He brought several specimens of this bird, “remarkable for its extraordinary size,” to a meeting of the Zoological Society of London, where they must have created quite a sensation. Photo: Tim Gallagher/Courtesy of The Natural History Museum at Tring.īut the specimens that impressed me most were four Imperial Woodpeckers once owned by famed ornithologist and bird artist John Gould, who scientifically described and named the species in 1832. And I was delighted to see the finches and other specimens collected by young Charles Darwin during the voyage of the HMS Beagle. Menzies was the surgeon during Captain George Vancouver’s epic voyage of discovery from 1791 to 1795. ![]() I was thrilled to see the first specimen of a California Condor, collected more than two centuries ago by Archibald Menzies as it dined on a beached whale on the Monterey Peninsula. What is most remarkable about the bird collection is that it contains so many type specimens, or syntypes-an individual or set of specimens upon which the scientific description and name of a new species is based. ![]() (Fortunately, there are plenty of mounted birds to see in the public display.) Robert Prys-Jones, curator of birds at the museum, was kind enough to give me a behind-the-scenes look at the collection and let me photograph the specimens that most interested me. The bird research collection and the ornithological library were moved to the museum at Tring in the early 1970s, but they are not open to the public. Photo: Tim Gallagher/Courtesy of The Natural History Museum at Tring. The museum does, however, have a complete Dodo skeleton.Ĭurator of birds Robert Prys-Jones with an Imperial Woodpecker specimen. I did a double take when I saw two mounted Dodos in a glass case, but they were only models. The first gallery was the most interesting to me, because-in addition to the large carnivores and primates-it has an extensive display of mounted birds, including a Great Auk, a bird that’s been extinct since the mid-19th century. The museum is made up of six galleries, each housing a different set of animals. (I’m guessing that the interior hasn’t changed much since then it is a classic Victorian zoological collection.) The museum, with specimens and other contents, was given to the British nation by the Rothschild family in 1937, and became part of the Natural History Museum. And indeed, the place was built more than a century ago, in 1889, to house the private collection of Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, and was first opened to the public in 1892. ![]() Photo: Tim Gallagher/Courtesy of The Natural History Museum at Tring.Įntering the museum is like stepping back in time to the Victorian Era as you walk past massive glass cases, framed in dark wood, containing taxidermied zoological mounts ranging from polar bears and African lions to huge raptors and spectacular birds-of-paradise.
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