The Anatomical Venuses and Slashed Beauties created in the late eighteenth century by the studio at ‘La Specola’ Natural History Museum in Florence, Italy, under the leadership of Clemente Susini are the perfect specimens, though to refer to them as specimens or, indeed, even as ‘objects’ seems wrong-headed, besides the point, an insult to their utterly persuasive [...]
In January 1913 Gaston Durville started to experiment with a dismembered hand, a body part given to him by a certain Dr. Soquet . For almost more than three months this hand was treated with the electric flow of magnetic fields. Additionally, three so-called magnetiseurs carefully performed a ritual where each day, for three quarters [...]
Regardless of how diminished and frail our picture of nature has become, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and climatic changes continually remind us of the power and complexity of the environment and our inability to control or predict it.
For years I was searching for dead birds. Not just any dead birds; finding dead birds, in and of itself, is dead easy. Dead birds have a habit of just showing up: found shriveled on the street after flying into the windows of skyscrapers; inhabiting the avian galleries and overfilling the ornithological specimen drawers of [...]
Compound Ascidian (Sea Squirt), D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, University of Dundee
Submitted by: Matthew Jarron
In the late nineteenth century Dundee was the European capital of the whaling industry, a fleet of up to sixteen ships sailing for the Arctic every year. Professor D’Arcy Thompson, recognising the potential for his Zoology Museum, made friends with the whalers and encouraged them to bring back specimens for him. In time he built [...]