Gizmodo: Feast Your Eyes on a Selection of the Year’s Most Breathtaking Wildlife Photos https://gizmodo.com/feast-your-eyes-on-a-selection-of-the-year-s-most-breat-1850788734?utm_source=regular #wildlifephotographeroftheyear #naturalhistorymuseumlondon #wildlifeoftheunitedkingdom #naturephotography #shashwatharish #snowleopard #douggurr #hunting #bison #deer

Surreal! The red folders are #type specimens at #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon. [Type specimens are the very definition of a species and therefore really important]. The red shelf contains the NHM's collections of #Stelis #orchids from the region 23 (Tropical South America).
#HerbariumLife #CuratorLife

At the #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon, we are not only imaging our collections, we also do #georeferencing. Amazingly, the more we digitise, the more data we get, and we can even reconstruct travel routes.
E.g.; Oleg #Polunin (https://bionomia.net/Q266663) collected in the "Kolahoi valley", #Kashmir, in 8/1956.
He started his travel from Pahalgam in the south, via Liddarwat (now a camping ground) towards a "pass" on 14422 ft. altitude where Polunin collected several plants.

@FediFollows Currently, the #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon has a project to digitise all specimens of #wheat and it's relatives. E.g., we have collections from 1864 from a place called "Phèner Baghtché". This looks odd but if you consider that the collector might be French, then this sounds simply like "#Fenerbahçe". Yes, the it's the same place where the famous #football club has it's name from, a suburb of #Istanbul, #Türkiye.

Thanks to @FediFollows I gained quite a number of new followers. Welcome!
Maybe this is a good opportunity to show what I am doing as a #herbarium #curator.
Curators are basically librarians for collectibles other than books. In my case, I take care of the plant collections of the #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon.
Taking care means a lot of things. I digitise (database and image), repair, clean and update herbarium specimens.

For #FlyFriday here is a lovely specimen.

Identifying material collected during an #OperationWallacea field expedition to #KneppEstate from summer last year & found this male Stomorhina lunata - the locust fly. The first one added to the British collection at the #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon since 1947!

Highly mobile & migratory species whose larvae abroad eat locust eggs but we are not sure what’s happening in the UK. The Adults just like the pretty flowers though 🤓 @NHM_London #collections

So bats are cute yeah?

I give you Hypsignathus monstrosus

I love the collection at the #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon #mammals #bats #Chiroptera

#coleoptera #naturalhistorymuseumlondon
#biodiversity
A quick look in the beetle collection at the Natural History Museum London hosted by its curator Max Barclay
https://youtu.be/U14dOr_m-m0

In the library at the #naturalhistorymuseumlondon there is a pigSkin bound copy of The Natural History (Latin: Naturalis Historia) by #plinytheelder- This volume is from the second edition, printed in 1472 (approx 1,400 years after it was compiled).

Advice includes -‘At any other time, also, if a woman strips herself naked while she is menstruating, and walks round a field of wheat, the caterpillars, worms, beetles, and other vermin, will fall from off the ears of corn.'

Hi folks
I’m a senior Curator of Flies and Fleas at the #naturalhistorymuseumlondon
I’ve been working & playing there for about 15 years and am slightly obsessed by flies…
If you want to know more about #flies, the #collection, #curation, #research or #fieldwork ask away….

Day 11 of #Museum30: Remember

Minerals can preserve the memories of long dead organisms by replacing original tissue or by forming casts and moulds. Here the internal chambers of an ammonite have been replaced by calcite

#minerals #museum #museums #Museum302022 #NaturalHistoryMuseum #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon #MineralGallery #ammonite #calcite #FossilFriday

Day 10 of #Museum30: Growth

The fractal growth of manganese dendrites in felsite. These patterns were often mistaken for fossils

Specimen on display in the Natural History Museum, London

#minerals #museum #museums #Museum302022 #NaturalHistoryMuseum #NaturalHistoryMuseumLondon #MineralGallery #ManganeseDendrites #felsite