A lot of deep-sea anglerfish prey is bioluminescent, so the anglerfish have black-lined stomachs to stop their insides from glowing after lunch and distracting their next victim. Often the stomach is elasticated, so they can ingest animals bigger than themselves.
This particular anglerfish pair is one of 22 million specimens looked after by the Natural History Museum. What about the two other pairs of anglerfish in amongst all those? One couple are a species called Ceratias holboelli; they sound horrible, and they look it. They live in the tank room beside another, smaller female specimen which was found inside the stomach of a sperm whale. The second couple are of a species called Malanocetus johnsonii, otherwise known as the black sea devil. The female is a little monster, the size of a baked potato, with super-sharp teeth; her male is clamped on to her underside.
As well as the anglerfish James and Ollie care for are around 800,000 other fish. The collection is used like a reference library, so scientists can keep tabs on what we already know, and use that as a basis for new discoveries. Some fish are being wiped out before they’ve been scientifically described. Most of the specimens are in Victorian glass jars filled with alcohol for preservation (the spirit collection), stuffed, or skeletons (the dry collection). They’re kept on miles of shelves heaving with specimens, from microbes to the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). The largest ones are in tanks in the tank room, in the basement. James and Ollie took me down there in the lift and pushed open the heavy grey doors that seal the room off from the rest of the museum.
Archie, the giant squid (short for the scientific name Architeuthis dux), caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands, dominates the tank room. She arrived at the museum as a folded, frozen, pink blob, and was kept in a freezer while Jon Ablett and his co-mollusc curators decided how to proceed. Since this species is so rare in museum collections, it was decided to keep her complete and undissected, preserved in formal saline. She was defrosted – carefully, so that the mantle, head and tentacles defrosted at the same time – her tentacles were unravelled, and she was injected with 15 litres of preservative before finally being placed in her home. Her tank is on a stand, so I could look at the squid at any angle.
She is 8.62 metres long and her enormous tentacles spread the length of her 9.45 metre long acrylic tank (built in California by Casco Ltd, the same team that made Damien Hirst’s shark tank). There is another set of tentacles beside her. These belong to the colossal squid, which shares her tank. It’s an incomplete specimen of a species which, when fully grown, may be even bigger than a giant squid. (The museum does not have a complete specimen yet.)
Archie and the tentacles of the colossal squid are stored in the basement because it is the only floor in the archive that can support the enormous specimen (plus one). Another reason for keeping her here is the formal saline (a mixture of formalin and salt water) in which she is preserved, is more toxic than alcohol; the air around her needs to be monitored and vented in case of a leak. She’s not a fish, of course – she’s a mollusc – but this is the room of the museum that is best suited to be her home. You can visit her on a Spirit Collection tour.
Archie may hog the limelight, but there are countless treasures in the fish collection. I peered in at a small catfish called a candiru; in the Amazon, a naked man might be shocked to feel it swimming up his penis. I saw fish collected by Darwin on the Beagle, most of which were new to science when he collected them and are still being used for research today.
Charmingly, I was shown an old UK record grayling specimen donated by a fisherman proud of his catch. His grandchildren have been to visit it. Less charming were several specimens of nature gone wrong, including a kitten with no face and a chicken with two heads; these were on display when the museum first opened and are now only used when children come in on school trips.
Next, we ventured towards the sharks, lifting the lid of a metal tank to reveal several rare species. These sharks helped Olympic swimmers to win gold medals. Fiona Fairhurst, a biomimetician – someone who incorporates good designs from nature into technology – was working on swimsuit ideas for Speedo. She set up shop among the tanks to study the sharks and their skin.
I stroked the skin of one of the dead sharks she worked with, and it was really rough, like sandpaper. That’s because it is covered in razor sharp scales called ‘denticles’, like little teeth. They help the sharks swim effortlessly by controlling the turbulence of the water next to the skin of the swimming shark. Speedo incorporated the denticle design to make Fastskin®, their fastest swimwear ever. It was thought the streamlined, sharky swimsuit reduced friction on a swimmer’s skin, and contributed to the winning of 47 medals in the 2004 Athens Olympics, including the six gold medal haul won by Michael Phelps. In 2008, 105 world records were broken, 79 of them by swimmers wearing the suit. Before the suits were banned by FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation, the body responsible for administering competition in aquatic sports) in 2010 (they were not to be seen at the London Olympics), only two of the existing world records pre-dated their invention.
However, an ichthyologist – a fish expert – at Harvard said that, while the swimsuits may help a swimmer to go faster, this is because the suit changes the human body’s posture, making it more hydrodynamic, rather than because the fabric itself decreases the drag. He says the denticle design works for sharks but doesn’t have the same benefits for humans as our bodies are less flexible. There is more to be learnt if we want to catch up with nature.
James and Ollie add fish to the collection all the time. The public donate some, and the curators acquire others – they’d just returned from fishing in Burma when I met them. Ollie has tasted a lot of bizarre fish but his favourite is fresh mackerel, straight out of the sea: ‘Whip it into a pan, flash fry and there you go.’ Some fish come into the museum via unusual routes. When Archie came into the collection, she had fish trapped inside her mantle from when she was caught in the fishing net, and those fish were added to the collection, too.
Each time a new fish arrives, the curators take a small amount of tissue for a DNA sample. Ollie explained: ‘We’d never have dreamt 20 years ago we would be looking through museum collections for DNA, but it’s important now, and in the future we don’t know what will be useful.’ The fish is injected with a preservative called formalin (formaldehyde solution), which after a few days is replaced by a solution of 70 per cent alcohol, then the specimen is bottled, databased, labelled and added to the collection. This has been going on since the museum began, the first ‘database’ consisting of handwritten ledgers.
Every natural history museum in the world has a scientific collection, and only a tiny fraction of their collections is ever on display. The natural history museums in London, Paris and Washington have the largest collections overall. If a researcher needs to study a species over several centuries, or across a wide geographic area, they can come here, to the library of species at the museum. It’s a lot cheaper than flying to every area of the world in which a species lives, and a lot safer than heading off to research a fish that lives in a war zone.
[The happy couple]
How many fish can you see in this photo? The female is the big one, and her boyfriend, the worst boyfriend in nature, is hanging onto her bottom. You can see him if you trace a line from her jaw, downwards, to her backside.
[The tank room]
There are countless treasures in the fish collection. Ollie and James add fish to the collection all the time.
[Archie the giant squid]
Archie, shortly after she arrived at the Natural History Museum. Now she is in a specially made tank that was built by the same people who made the tanks for artist Damien Hirst’s shark.
[Denticles]
Shark skin is composed of placoid scales (also called dermal denticles), tiny tooth-like structures which give it a rough, sandpaper-like texture.
IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE Natural History Museum in France are 70 million objects of high scientific
or heritage value belonging to the French nation. Mustachioed Monsieur Michel Guiraud has been curator of natural history at the museum for 20 years. He and Madame Michelle Lenoir, a lovely lady who is in charge of the collection of books, showed me around.
We began in the library. Michelle flipped the window blinds shut to protect her precious books, then began to pull out curious volumes. The books she is most proud of are those in the ‘Vellum Collection’, which is made up of 7,000 drawings on vellum, bound up into one hundred red leatherbound volumes which now live in the cool, dark library and are rarely visited.
The red volumes contain three centuries’ worth of drawings of plants, animals and birds by the best artists in France. A few pages are missing, taken in the nineteenth century by naughty curators, perhaps to hang at home. We looked through them, marvelling at the detailed drawings of plants and animals collected over the decades since the museum began. The vellums were used as study material before photography took over as the best medium in which to collect images of natural life.
Many of the animals in the drawings once lived in the museum’s Jardin des Plantes, France’s most important botanical garden, which also has a zoo. I liked a sweet picture of a camel born in the Jardin des Plantes, drawn when she was only 28 hours old. I also love a beautiful drawing of a long, fluttering-eyelashed giraffe. Michelle explained to me that this baby giraffe was the first to come from Africa to France, and ‘everyone went crazy for her.’
She arrived in 1827, as a gift from the King of Egypt. Born in the Sudan, the gangly giraffe was packed onto a boat and sent across the water from Africa to Europe; the boat had a hole cut on deck for her head and long neck to peer out of. Three cows were taken on the trip so she would have milk to drink. She was held in quarantine on the island of If, the former residence of the Count of Monte Cristo. Then, when she arrived in France, she walked for 41 days, from Marseille to Paris, to meet the King of France, Charles X. The procession across France was led by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a top scientist and one of the founders of the Natural History Museum in Paris.
All the way along her route, the people of France poured out of their homes to watch her walk past: never had they seen such a mysterious creature. Such a long neck! Such bizarre markings! A blue tongue! The French were obsessed with her, and women began wearing their hair ‘a la giraffe’ (a bit like Marge Simpson’s) and potters painted ceramics galore with the image of the pretty lady giraffe. In Lyon, 30,000 people turned out to see her cross the city.
When she arrived in Paris, she was installed in her own enclosure in the Jardin des Plantes. She lived there for 20 years, with a man from Sudan named Atir, who had travelled with her from Africa. Each night, he climbed a ladder to the mezzanine to sleep. From there, he could reach out to scratch the pretty giraffe’s head.
The zoo in the Jardin des Plantes was founded in the 1790s by Saint-Hilaire. He started it with animals saved from the mobs of the French Revolution who attacked the royal menagerie in Versailles. The Jardin des Plantes was once royal property – le Jardin du Roi – a royal garden filled with medicinal plants, and the museum buildings once housed the royal natural history collection. The Revolution changed all that and the whole thing was opened to the public. The best natural history professors in France were hired to research and expand the collections, now brought together under the renamed Natural History Museum.
The giraffe – like the other animals and plants in the Jardin des Plantes – was drawn by the best artists of the day. The beautiful drawing at the end of the chapter of the giraffe’s head and neck was created in the year the giraffe arrived in Paris. It was drawn by Nicholas Huet, something of a celebrity in the world of nineteenth-century natural history painting. The drawing has never been on show. It is too fragile. It was created for scientists, and for posterity. There are no copies and it is so old and precious it’s best for it to remain within its leatherbound volume in the library, away from the light. We put the book back in its place and opened the blinds. The body of the giraffe is now in a museum in La Rochelle. We looked at a little model of her that sits on the window ledge of the library. Then we headed underground.
Beneath the museum are three floors of stuffed creatures and animals stored in jars. Few people know that this archive is here and the museum never does tours. It’s very odd, once you know it’s there, to walk across the courtyard and through the museum building and imagine the long corridors and dungeon-like rooms filled with thousands of dead animals, from tiny mice to huge lions, just beneath your feet. I imagined what would happen if they all came back to life.
The specimens are kept at a steady temperature of 15.5°C (59.9°F) so that the alcohol in the spirit collection doesn’t vaporize and explode. (That would be a really bizarre explosion – bits of long-gone creatures from around the world flying everywhere.) It’s one of the best natural history collections in the world. Michel believes seventy per cent of the world’s ‘type’ specimens are here. It’s a living collection and the museum keeps it all, because you never know what will be needed for research in the future.
A lot of the taxonomic specimens kept here are skins, taken from the skeletons displayed above ground in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy. Artists love to visit the museum to draw and learn about the inner workings of all sorts of bodies. I don’t suppose too many of them have ever wondered what happened to the outer layer of the animals they are drawing. They might be surprised to know that they are standing on top of them. The skins have been stuffed, so there is a whole row of ten fierce lions, whose skeletons are upstairs in the museum, beside a row of shrews, teeth comically bared.
Michel said they have enough stories down in the dark archive to fill two or three books. He showed me a selection of the most iconic specimens. First, we met a black emu from an island just south of Australia that once belonged to Joséphine de Beauharnais, wife of Napoleon. She commissioned the French explorer Baudin to bring her animals to put in her menagerie. Baudin obliged with this small black emu which, when it died, came into the museum collection. It is the only specimen of this species known in the world and so is the ‘type’ for the species. Curators have gone back to the island where it was collected to look for more black emu, but haven’t managed to find any. Scientists who have studied the creature in the archives don’t know whether it is an elusive species of its own, or a form of the mainland species that evolved on the island to be very small.
Next, I saw an albino quail. It was shot by King Louis XV, and kept because it was an albino. It is one of the oldest specimens in the collection. Taxidermy was an embryonic art at the time, so arsenic soap was used to protect its skin from bugs. Michel told me, ‘It also killed the taxidermists, but there were plenty of them at the time. We also have a white thrush shot by King Louis XVI. Maybe shooting albino birds was a French king’s privilege …’
Finally, I saw a chimp that belonged to the Comte de Buffon (1707–66), who was the director of the Jardin du Roi which became the Jardin des Plantes. Luckily, Buffon himself isn’t down in the archive … Or is he? I wouldn’t be surprised if he were. Descartes’ skull is there, but not his body. That, according to Michel, is in Sweden.
I went for a walk around the Jardin des Plantes, with a friend who was writing a poem about an orangutan and wanted to see the one that lives there. She’d seen a photograph – a friend texted it to her from the zoo – but she’d not seen him in the flesh. When we spotted him he was sitting up on a ledge, with a handkerchief over his head to keep the sun off. When he saw people watching him he swung about a bit, waving his handkerchief.
Afterwards, we walked out on to rue Geoffroy St-Hilaire, named after the man who led the gentle giraffe across France to Paris, and to the museum gardens. On this road there is an ornate mosque (and a tasty Moroccan restaurant with birds flying around inside it, and a hammam). It’s a shame it was built a century after the giraffe lived in Paris because the sound of a call to prayer from the mosque might have made the giraffe from Sudan,
via Egypt, feel more at home.
[The first giraffe in France]
She arrived in 1827, as a gift from the King of Egypt. A man from Sudan, where she was born, came with her. His name was Atir.
[Head of a Giraffe, by Nicholas Huet, 1827]
I love this drawing of the giraffe’s head, painted when it first arrived in Paris. The drawing lives inside a red book in the library of the Natural History Museum in Paris.
[Orangutan]
I went for a walk in the Jardin des Plantes with a friend who was writing a poem about an orangutan. We saw the one that lives in the zoo, sitting on a ledge, with a handkerchief over his head.
THIS GREAT AUK EGG IS one of the oldest and most valuable eggs in the Natural History Museum, which holds the largest egg collection in the world. No egg like it will ever be laid again because, around 1844, the last great auk (Pinguinus impennis) in the world was killed. There are five other great auk eggs in the collection, and all six eggs are kept in the back rooms of the Natural History Museum at Tring, where the museum stores its eggs, birds and nests. I know where they are kept, but I’m not allowed to tell you.
Very few people at the museum have ever seen them, let alone members of the public. They are very fragile, and the colour on the eggs can fade in daylight, so it’s best not to display them. ‘Sometimes people come to do research on them and I have to stand over them with a stick,’ the curator of eggs joked. His predecessor at the museum was too nervous to touch them but, recently, they have been re-boxed and re-examined.
The Secret Museum Page 11