Halloween is breathing down our necks, and with the holiday come frightful creatures. Horror literature is replete with fantastical hybrids and gargantuan beasts, but the real world itself may just trump our collective imagination. We can think of Earth’s own bestiary as shadowy predators, grisly giants, and unnamable pests… or we can take inspiration from zoologists and put aside our fears to study these magnificent creatures.
I had the pleasure of visiting the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London during my recent trip to the United Kingdom. With the help of museum curator (and Canadian expatriate) Tannis Davidson, let me take you through three mini “creature features” from the museum so that we may preempt our nightmares and instead embrace our human curiosity.
The ghost predator
If I speak of a camera-shy, carnivorous creature whose alleged sightings often send the rumour mill rolling, you may picture a tall humanoid living in the Himalayas… but the legendary Tasmanian tiger or thylacine also fits the profile and has the added advantage of having once been real. In fact, the Grant Museum has a complete skeleton, several skulls including the largest known thylacine skull, as well as one of only five preserved thylacines (and the only one on display) in the world.
Thylacine skeleton (credit Jonathan Jarry)
Preserved thylacine specimen (credit: UCL Grant Museum of Zoology)
“The thylacine was a carnivorous marsupial which was hunted to extinction in 1936,” Davidson tells me. “It was believed that thylacines were responsible for killing sheep although it is far more likely that the sheep were taken by feral dogs or thieves. A government bounty was awarded to those who hunted thylacines and this practice was not stopped until it was too late. The last wild thylacine was shot in 1930 and the last captive specimen died in Beaumaris Zoo, Hobart, Tasmania from exposure to the elements (and general neglect) in 1936.”
I asked Davidson if there was any reason to believe the sightings of the creature since the 1930s.
“There have been thousands of unofficial sightings of thylacines since, but none have been confirmed. It is most likely that these are sightings of dogs.”
But could modern technology bring them back… for real?
“There has been recent interest in cloning the thylacine using DNA from museum specimens. The Grant Museum’s preserved specimen was sampled to determine if there was sufficient genetic material to possibly clone it but the DNA was too fragmentary to be of any use.”
The gothic giant
Imagine having bone antlers growing out of your skull. And I’m not talking about a couple of devilish horns; I mean a massive gothic display weighing up to 45 kg (100 pounds). In terms of span, imagine a tall human being on either side of your skull and you get the idea.
Irish elk (credit: UCL Grant Museum of Zoology)
“The giant deer, Megaloceros giganteus, also known as the Irish elk, is an extinct species of deer which lived during the Pleistocene epoch around 2.5 million to 7,000 years ago,” Davidson says. “Most specimens have been recovered from bogs in Ireland, however DNA research has shown that they were more closely related to fallow deer than any living elk species. They were found not only in Ireland, but across Eurasia to Siberia and China.”
Having witnessed the size of these antlers at the museum, I can report that “mighty” and “fearsome” certainly popped into my head. But was this animal the least bit aggressive?
“As a herbivore which lived in grasslands, this species would have eaten grass and leaves in the summer and likely tree twigs and bark in the winter. It’s difficult to say how aggressive giant deer were, but like most deer, there were likely periods when males would become aggressive during the rutting (breeding) season when they are competing for females.”
You may be surprised to learn where the Museum’s skull specimen—once estimated by biologist Stephen Jay Gould to be the largest in Great Britain—was initially found.
“The specimen in the Grant Museum has been in the collection since 1961 when a member of the department saw it in a hotel in County Kildare in Ireland and purchased it. The skull and antlers were discovered during a ‘peat cutting’, which is when a slab of peat is cut out of the ground.”
Museum personnel had to move the massive skull during renovations. How did they do it?
“It takes several people to lift and move it. During the last move, we hoisted it onto a trolley and wheeled it down Gower Street.”
Irish elk being moved (credit The Londonist)
The squirmy invisibilia
When I say the word “animal”, what comes to mind? A dog? A cow? A gorilla? But the vast majority of animals are actually quite small, so tiny in fact that they can easily be mounted on a glass slide.
A nook at the Museum is dedicated to their display. This three-sided, backlit space is like a scientific chapel dedicated to the incredibly small. It’s called the Micrarium.
Micrarium display (credit Jonathan Jarry)
“There were two main drivers behind the idea for the Micrarium: to showcase the smaller members of the animal kingdom which are vastly underrepresented in natural history museum displays (although make up most of the living animals on earth) and also to put on display some of the 20,000 microscope slides which are in the Museum’s collection.”
In the Micrarium, I saw lancelets, looking halfway between fish and worms. I saw specimens of hydrozoans, related to jellyfish and corals, like something out of Swamp Thing. And I witnessed the dreaded bed bug, Cimex lectularius, no longer a threat mounted on a glass slide and bathed in a pale yellow hue.
Micrarium bed bug (credit Jonathan Jarry)
Does Davidson have a favourite slide? “Difficult to say but probably the Fasciola hepatica flatworm slide because the details of the internal structure is so clear and it can be compared to the scaled-up wax model that we also have in the collection. Both the slide and the model are examples of how the collection has been used in teaching since its inception in 1827.”
Fasciola hepatica slide (credit: UCL Grant Museum of Zoology)
Creatures can be frightening but zoologists’ aim is to demystify their workings, to study and compare their anatomies to better understand how they evolved. And the Grant Museum of Zoology’s collection is quite simply awe inspiring.
Bonus: a jar of moles
Oh and the Museum has a jar of moles.
Jar of moles (credit: UCL Grant Museum of Zoology)
“It is our most famous specimen (I think there’s something about imagining a jar of moles in your kitchen that thrills visitors) and one which provokes the most questions and conversations. The moles seem to outshine the other ‘jars of multiples’ in its case – perhaps it’s the little feet which are visible through the glass – but all of these jars have a similar, practical purpose to hold several specimens that were likely to be used in classroom dissections. It’s a cost effective way to store and move multiple specimens.”
Special thanks to Tannis Davidson, curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London, England.
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