THIS weekend (October 3 and 4) marks the last opportunity to visit the Life Gallery at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow until next year as the popular space undergoes a major revamp. For the full story, see The Herald Magazine.
Here’s our favourite kooky facts about the Glasgow Museums natural history collection:
1. Sir Roger the elephant has been on display at Kelvingrove since 1902. After retiring from Bostock and Wombwell’s Menagerie – a travelling show – in 1897, he went to live at the Scottish Zoo in Glasgow. He was known to enjoy walks in the countryside with his keeper.
Unfortunately in 1900, Sir Roger developed “musth” – this is when male elephants are in heat and can make them very dangerous. It was decided he must be euthanised. Some soldiers and a man with an elephant gun arrived and shot Sir Roger one morning as he ate his breakfast.
2. The juvenile male Asian elephant that shares a display case with Sir Roger came from the Scottish Zoo in Glasgow in 1899. He was named Kelvin following a competition in the Evening Times.
3. The tens of thousands of items not currently on display are housed in large storage pods at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre at Nitshill, while those still awaiting taxidermy or skin and skeletal preparation are kept in vast freezers.
4. The collection contains many unique, rare and unusual items including a Lancet Fish caught off St Kilda in 1911 – the first record of the species in British waters – and the very large head pike head found near Loch Lomond, known as the “Endrick Pike”.
5. Quirkier items include a hare drinking a cup of tea and wearing a straw hat. It was used in a temporary “mad-hatters tea party” exhibition at Kelvingrove during the 1980s.
6. There are also objects confiscated by HM Customs and Excise such as snake and crocodile skin belts and handbags.
7. Historically important mammal specimens include several pieces relating to African explorer and missionary David Livingstone such as hippo teeth and elephant tusks.
8. The bird collection features examples of extinct species including a Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon, Huia and Moa. Nearly all resident British birds are represented and there is a particularly good collection of Scottish species with only a few gaps.
9. An old favourite set to make a comeback next year is Sam the tiger from the former Calderpark Zoo in Glasgow who will return to the Life Gallery for the first time since the early 1980s.
10. Other newer acquisitions include a wandering albatross, set to go on display in 2016, which came from the British Antarctic Survey. There will also be a pallas’s cat, Arctic terns and a leopard.
11. Another recent addition is a house martin found by Richard Sutcliffe, research manager for natural sciences at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, in the back garden of his in-laws house in Comrie, Perthshire, during 2012.
12. Members of the public have contributed thousands of creatures to the collection over the years from wood mice to birds. Among the most unusual was a colourful sounding red-spotted bluethroat back in 1982. A school girl, who by coincidence was due to visit Kelvingrove later that day, found it dead in her garden and had the presence of mind to pick it up and take it with her.
The Glasgow Museums natural history collection by numbers
9,000 bird specimens. There is also 2,500 fish, 100 amphibians and 1,600 reptiles.
1,800 mammal specimens. This includes about 560 mounted specimens, 700 osteological specimens such as skeletons and skulls, 330 cabinet skins and 48 specimens preserved in fluid.
200,000 insects in the Entomology collection over half (54 per cent) of which are Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). The remainder comprises 27 per cent Coleoptera (beetles), nine per cent Diptera (flies), four per cent Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants) and six per cent other groups.
51,000 non-insect Arthropods. More than 80 per cent of described living animal species are arthropods. The collection includes Chelicerates (spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites), Crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimps, barnacles, woodlice) and Myriapods (centipedes and millipedes).
100,000 molluscs including dry shells, specimens in spirit and other miscellaneous objects.
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