Animalia

Went to the newly reopened Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh today. It was heaving - and rightly so, for there was so much to see and do. I loved the beautiful old helmet made of kingfisher feathers, and a large lump of cross bed sandstone, which I took a photo of and sent to my friends on the Black Isle, as they have a smaller, but it has to be said, far superior, example sitting on a windowsill at their house. There was lots of great interactive stuff too - I particularly liked a sort of "Guess Who?" game but with animals instead of funny faces. If I were still a Science teacher I would have nicked that idea and made a similar resource to use with my classes. In addition to the hand-on activities though, there remained the stuff of my childhood museum memories - animals preserved in jars or taxidermied. It was this sort of thing, seen on a small scale in local museums and on a larger scale at the Natural History Museum in London, that partly incited and influenced me to study Biology at school and then Zoology later at University.

I know it's been said in recent times that stuffed beasts and creatures in cases are not what museum visitors of today, especially younger ones, want to see, but the animal halls here were packed full of people all around each section. It was a pain in the neck from the point of view that you had to negotiate your way through them, or wait your turn to have a look at that display, but it was also heartening to see that the popularity of this sort of exhibit definitely does not appear to have waned over the years.

I've chosen this image to upload for today because there are little things I like in it - the way the giant squid has just slivered it's pink way into the top left hand corner of the shot, and the elephant in between the jawbones of a whale - showing that our largest land mammal can stand easily inside the jaws of our largest mammal.