Recent Acquisitions at the Natural History Museum

Abstract

THE Museum has received as a permanent loan from His Majesty the King a fine series of elephant tusks. The series comprises the record pair of Indian tusks, three pairs and a single large tusk of the African species, and an ornamented tusk of the Malayan elephant. The Indian tusks, which are figured in Rowland Ward's “Records of Big Game”, are of exceptional size for Indian ivory, measuring 8 ft. 9 in. and 8 ft. 6J in. in length and weighing 161 Ib. and 160 Ib. respectively. Good Indian tusks rarely exceed 6-7 ft. in length or weigh more than 80-100 Ib. The Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, have handed over to the National collection the type specimens of fifteen races of British and Irish birds, described by the late Dr. E. Hartert and Mr. H. F. Witherby. These types formed part of the famous Rothschild collection which was purchased by the American Museum in 1932. Through the generosity of Mr. E. C. Stuart Baker, the Museum has received the largest collection of birds' eggs ever presented to the British Museum. This great collection consists of approximately 60,000 eggs belonging to some 1,960 different species of birds found in the Indian Empire; Very many of these eggs were not previously represented iii the national collection and in a considerable number of cases Baker's specimens are the only ones known. A collection of more than 6,000 invertebrates, chiefly Brachiopoda and Trilobita, including 40 new species, as well as type and figured specimens, collected by Mr. B. B. Bancroft with great exactness as to horizon and locality, from the Ordovician of the Welsh Borderland and the Lake District, has been purchased for the Department of Geology. The Mineral Department has received from the Director of the Geological Survey of Nigeria as a donation a piece, besides several fragments, of the meteoric stone which fell near Udei station, Benue river, Nigeria, in 1927. The meteorite is of unusual interest because it belongs to the rare pallasite group of stony-irons containing olivine.