Museum Of London Research Articles

Critical revision of Physarales and Reticulariales (Myxomycetes) at the Natural History Museum London (BM)

Light and scanning electron microscopy were applied to re-assess diagnostic characters of type specimens and critical specimens of Diachea radiata, D. splendens, D. subsessilis, Diderma arboreum, Didymium. laxifilum, D. leoninum var. effusum, D. trachysporum, D. trochus, Physarum bitectum, P. straminipes, Reticularia intermedia, R. jurana, R. liceoides, R. lobata and Wilczekia evelinae in the order Physarales and Reticulariales (Myxomycetes) from the collections at the Natural History Museum London (BM). The results were used to discuss published data and the type status for specimens studied.

Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and the decorative arts

Abstract This article focuses on the abandoned project for a Museo d'Arte Industriale in Milan, conceived by the Associazione degli Industriali. Although the project was never accomplished, it eventually led to the creation of the Museo Artistico Municipale in 1878. At the time, the Associazione degli Industriali of which Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli was a member, was trying to establish a network of international relationships with museums and cultural institutions such as the South Kensington Museum in London, in order to emulate them in creating a modern museum where their private collections would eventually find a home. This paper sets out the cultural and artistic background in which Poldi Pezzoli and other Milanese noblemen and collectors operated, and in which they tried to transform their private and historical collections into new public museums.

A reassessment of the historical fossil findings from Bahia State (Northeast Brazil) reveals a diversified dinosaur fauna in the Lower Cretaceous of South America

ABSTRACT Supposed dinosaur remains were collected between 1859 and 1906 in the Lower Cretaceous Recôncavo Basin (Northeast Brazil). Since these materials remained undescribed, and most were considered lost. Recently, some of these historical specimens were rediscovered in the Natural History Museum of London, providing an opportunity to revisit them after 160 years. The specimens come from five different sites, corresponding to the Massacará (Berriasian-Barremian) and Ilhas (Valanginian-Barremian) groups. Identified bones comprise mainly isolated vertebral centra from ornithopods, sauropods, and theropods. Appendicular remains include a theropod pedal phalanx, humerus, and distal half of a left femur with elasmarian affinities. Despite their fragmentary nature, these specimens represent the earliest dinosaur bones discovered in South America, enhancing our understanding of the Cretaceous dinosaur faunas in Northeast Brazil. The dinosaur assemblage in the Recôncavo Basin resembles coeval units in Northeast Brazil, such as the Rio do Peixe Basin, where ornithopods coexist with sauropods and theropods. This study confirms the presence of ornithischian dinosaurs in Brazil based on osteological evidence, expanding their biogeographic and temporal range before the continental rifting between South America and Africa. Additionally, these findings reinforce the fossiliferous potential of Cretaceous deposits in Bahia State, which have been underexplored since their initial discoveries.

'All this in their ignorance they called civilisation': Analysing the Relationship between Nationalism and the Display of Roman Archaeology in Britain's National Museums

This article evaluates how nationalist narratives affect the display of Roman artefacts in national museums. The unique nature of national museums as 'cultural constitutions' and arbiters of the 'Authorised Heritage Discourse' is discussed. This article builds upon previous work by demonstrating how nationalist influence affects the display of Roman artefacts, specifically through the use of two case studies: the British Museum in London and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Museum displays are assessed for indications of nationalist influence through consideration of the use of space and collection composition as well as textual analysis of gallery signage and artefact descriptions. The two museums' divergent approaches to national narrative are then compared.

The World of Nebra Sky Disc and Stonehenge

Ever since its discovery in 1999, the Nebra Sky Disc has been one of the best-known and most debated European Bronze Age archaeological artefacts. In 2021–2022 it was particularly in the public spotlight due to two jointly organised international exhibitions, one at the State Museum of Prehistory Halle (Saale), Germany and then one at the British Museum in London. In view of the renewed public interest in the disc that these exhibitions have awakened, this article reviews research relating to the artefact and its interpretation, with particular consideration of supposed links with Bronze Age sky lore promoted by the exhibitions and their accompanying literature.

Alexander Fleming: a second look

In 1928, Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) identified penicillin, the world's first antibiotic. It was a chance discovery that could have easily been missed had Fleming not taken a second look at a contaminated Petri dish. The discovery of penicillin marked a profound turning point in history as it was the first time deadly infections such as bacterial pneumonia, sepsis, diphtheria, meningitis, and puerperal fever after childbirth could be cured, and it paved the way for the development of additional antibiotics. The Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, one of several London Museums of Health and Medicine, is a reconstruction of Fleming’s laboratory in its original location at St. Mary’s Hospital. As if stepping back in time, visitors gain a glimpse into the man, his bacteriology work, and the events surrounding this important finding. For those unable to travel to London, this article provides a brief narrative of the fascinating story.

Overview of the Lost Meteorites of Antarctica field campaigns

AbstractThe Lost Meteorites of Antarctica project was the first UK‐led Antarctic meteorite recovery expedition. The project has successfully confirmed two new high‐density meteorite stranding zones in the Hutichison Icefield and Outer Recovery Icefields areas and investigated the geology of three previously unvisited Antarctic nunataks (Turner Nunatak, Pillinger Nunatak, Halliday Nunatak). The project undertook meteorite searching on the ice surface via skidoo reconnaissance and systematic searching and developed a novel pulse induction metal detection system to search for englacial iron‐rich meteorites trapped within the upper one meter of ice. In total, 121 meteorites have been recovered from the ice surface searching activities, which are now curated in the United Kingdom at the Natural History Museum London and are available for scientific analysis.

Early virtual science museums: when the technology is not mature

This paper discusses three case studies of early science museum-related websites in the 1990s and early 2000s, when web technology was still relatively new and evolving. The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC) was a completely virtual museum, originally produced in 1995 as part of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an international online museum directory within the WWW Virtual Library, adopted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The Science Museum in London was one of the first museums in the United Kingdom to have its own web server. The museum hosted an early meeting on web service provision by and for museums, concurrently with an exhibition on the Information Superhighway at the museum in 1995. Exhiblets were launched online in 1998. Ingenious was a multi-site digital collections transformation project, launched as a website in 2003. Virtual Leonardo and Leonardo’s Ideal City were two experiments conducted by the digital team of the Science and Technology Museum of Milan, between 1999 and 2001. The experiment consisted of the creation of a shared online 3D world, namely a reconstruction of the real museum in the first case and a completely imaginary world in the second case. This paper describes the above three case studies from the early World Wide Web and then draws some conclusions, from first-hand experience of developments at the time. We cover both the advantages and the challenges encountered by the various projects and illustrate why they did not necessarily become established, despite promising early results.

New species and records of Macratriinae LeConte, 1862 (Coleoptera: Anthicidae) from the Americas with five new descriptions.

Descriptions of the following five new species of Macratriinae LeConte, 1862 are presented based on the material mainly from the Natural History Museum London: Macratria bugle sp. nov. (Panama), M. conlei sp. nov. (Ecuador), M. florsavichi sp. nov. (Panama), M. guaymi sp. nov. (Panama) and M. tiriyo sp. nov. (Guyana / Suriname). New distribution records for the Central American Macratria obsoleta Champion, 1890 are also provided.

The Museum of London ‘Diversity Matters Programme’ and Redbridge Museum: Creating Equality, Exhibiting Ethnicity from a Local Perspective

The Museum of London ‘Diversity Matters Programme’ was launched in 2018 and closed in 2021. The programme encouraged London’s small non-national museums to embrace the Arts Council England’s directions to stimulate participation across socio-economic barriers such as the Equality Act (2010) and the Equality Duty (2011) recommended. However, the project results indicate a top-down approach to the involvement of minorities that seems to clash with the idea of inclusiveness itself. The local museums aimed to establish a bottom-up local history experience where visitors were content creators. These two opposite perspectives share the same scope but use different methods to achieve inclusion. By discussing survey data, the article investigates the Diversity Matters Programme as realised by Redbridge Museum, London, revealing competing and conflicting power relations that underpin the engineering of diversity and inclusion.

Architecture is Interface: Latent Virtuality from Antiquity to Zoom

AbstractArchitectural educators Joshua Bard and Francesca Torello embrace numerous digital technologies to subvert issues of scale, framing, materiality, inside and outside to provoke viewers into contemplating the current nature of architecture and its discourse. Their inspiration is Sir John Soane's Museum in London, which is a multilayered conversation between objects and their interrelationships with themselves and their settings.

Understanding the users and uses of UK Natural History Collections

UK natural science collections hold over 137 million items, an unrivalled source of data about 4.56 billion years of planetary development and hundreds of years of biological change, including the differences made by humans — but the scientific, commercial, and societal benefits of these collections are constrained by the limits of physical access, and by highly fragmented digitisation efforts with less than 10% digitally available. Following work with Frontier Economics in 2021, which showed potential for £2 billion in benefits to the UK economy from digitising all UK natural science collections, in 2022–23 the Natural History Museum London worked, with analytical support from McKinsey and Company, to understand the impact of what has already been digitised and shared by UK natural science collections — what is the demand for these data, what are they used for, and how does this deliver efficient, effective and impactful research? This study focuses on usage via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the largest source of relevant usage data, examining 7.6 million records from twelve UK institutions. While these UK collections data are just 0.3% of total GBIF occurrences, they are cited in 12% of peer reviewed publications citing GBIF data, showing the disproportionate impact of UK collections data and the historical, geographical, and taxonomic richness that they bring. Researchers have already benefited from more than £18 million of efficiency savings from digital UK specimen data. Data from natural science collections held in the UK are uniquely impactful resources, vital to a future in which people and planet thrive, and a step change in the pace of digitisation is needed to unlock their potential for researchers, policymakers, and society.

Catalogue of the family Psychidae in China (Lepidoptera: Tineoidea)

This catalogue of Psychidae in China is piled based on a literature research in multiple languages and on the study of Psychidae specimens in National Zoological Museum of China and Natural History Museum in London. Prior our research, less than 20 Psychidae species are listed in China, however we expand the list to 59 species, 35 genera and 7 subfamilies, among them, two species are newly recorded in China.

Polish War Refugees Interned in Palestine in the Light of “Mazra’a Chronicle”

In the autumn of 1940, the British Mandate authorities interned approximately twenty Polish war refugees at the Mazra’a camp in Palestine. In the subsequent months, over a dozen more were detained. The majority of the refugees were interned at the behest of Polish military intelligence, which accused them of collaboration with foreign agencies. The events concerning the detention of the Poles are detailed in the “Kronika Mazryjska” (“Mazra’a Chronicle”) by Czesław Horain. This document is part of the collection at the Archives of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London. The narrative was penned by one of the internees and covers topics such as everyday life in the camp and the situations leading to the arrests of the Poles, and the mood among the inmates. As these issues have not been explored in research thus far, publishing the “Mazra’a Chronicle” is both necessary and recommended.

Community Translation and Modern Philosophy

The Rosetta Stele, an inscribed stone slab, was discovered in July 1799 near the town of Rashid, ancient Rosetta, which is situated in the western part of the Nile delta of Egypt, by soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading army. After the French surrender of Egypt in 1801, the stele passed into British hands and is now in the British Museum in London. The commemorative stele contains three versions of the same text (in Egyptian hieroglyphic, Egyptian Demotic and ancient Greek script, representing two varieties of the ancient Egyptian language and the ancient Greek language). It recounts a decree issued on 27 March 196 BCE by Egyptian priests during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of Ptolemy V Epiphanes to commemorate his crowning. It took more than 20 years and various attempts by scholars to decipher the Demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian texts. This was done by utilising the mechanisms of modern philology, which had been established as a field early in the 1800s. Standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, Jean-François Champollion was the first Egyptologist to crack the code of hieroglyphic writing by realising that some of the signs were alphabetic, some syllabic, and some determinative. The discovery and decipherment of the Rosetta Stele put multilingualism and the practice of translation and interpreting during the Ptolemaic reign over Egypt into focus. In this essay we describe the rediscovery, as well as the emergence and growth of new knowledge, that was unlocked by the decipherment of the Rosetta Stele, including its implications for African orthographies.

HUMAN CREATIVITY DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC: THE PROJECT PANDEMIC OBJECTS AS AN EXAMPLE OF SOCIOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON DESIGN

This article proposes to look at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the valuation of the world of material culture, and how the subject itself can become an inspiration to describe this particular time. Naive anthropomorphism, and thus criticism of the view of the superior role of human, although present for many years, has taken on a new meaning at this particular time. As a theoretical framework for presenting the proposed issues, I adopt the reference to the interpretation of the concept of an “object” present in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the role of designers and the explication of design in the literature. The picture will be complemented by a reference to the Pandemic Objects project, implemented in 2020 by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom.

Trematode parasites as indicators of an animal component in the diet of the Water Vole Arvicola amphibius.

The intestinal trematode fauna of the Water Vole Arvicola amphibius, (previously A. terrestris), was investigated to determine whether it might provide evidence of an animal component in the diet of this aquatic herbivorous small mammal. Interrogation of the electronic Host-Parasite Database of the Natural History Museum London revealed the presence of fourteen species of intestinal trematode in water voles, infection with each of which would require the ingestion of tissue from an animal intermediate host. The results obtained using these parasite indicators provide convincing evidence of animal components in the diet of A. amphibius and support anecdotal reports of water voles feeding on animal material in the field.

Assessing the identity of rare historical museum specimens of the extinct blue antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus) using an ancient DNA approach

The blue antelope or bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus) is an extinct species of antelope that lived in South Africa until ca. 1799–1800. Disappearing only 34 years after it was described, it was the first large African mammal species to have become extinct in recent times. Therefore, current scientific knowledge of the blue antelope is limited to museum specimens. However, these are extremely rare and further complicated by uncertainties surrounding their taxonomic status due to morphological similarity with the closely related extant roan antelope (Hippotragus equinus) and sable antelope (Hippotragus niger). A previous study found that only four (out of ten) genetically analysed historical museum specimens could be confirmed as Hippotragus leucophaeus. Here, we analyse a further five potential blue antelope specimens, two of which had been morphologically identified as blue antelope (one from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and one from National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh), plus an additional three specimens identified here as candidate blue antelope specimens (from the NHM). We find that only one of the five specimens can be genetically validated as Hippotragus leucophaeus, whereas the other four specimens were identified as H. equinus. Furthermore, using hybridisation capture, we generated two complete mitochondrial genomes for blue antelope specimens that were formerly known only from partial mitochondrial genomes. The diversity analyses including all newly generated genomes further confirm that the mitochondrial nucleotide diversity across this species was low.

‘Hazy Cosmic Jive’: composing presence and absence in Moonage Daydream (2022)

ABSTRACT As the V&A museum in London announce their acquisition of over 80, 000 pieces from the David Bowie estate to be exhibited in 2025, and in the immediate wake of Celebrity Studies’ special issue on the ‘maintenance and reassessment of posthumous fame’ (Boyce and Dove 2022a, p. 485), this paper will perform a textual autopsy on Moonage Daydream (Morgen, 2022), highlighting how Morgen extends existing parameters of eulogising the famous. Drawing upon scholarly convergences between stardom and death studies that pivot on a paradoxical interplay of presence and absence, this analysis will begin by outlining how remembrance rituals can offer a conceptual vocabulary to dissect recurring tropes in designing the deceased. It will then examine how Moonage Daydream adheres to a traditional posthumous discourse of preserving and fossilising Bowie’s recognisable star features. How the film disrupts a standard regeneration of bodily presence in absence will then be considered, exposing tensions between the material and immaterial, preservation and dissolution, the mortal and immortal. Overall, this study will propose Morgen’s reanimation of Bowie signposts possibilities for further creative resurrections of the famous during their media afterlife, offering an alternative rhetoric in the composition of death in visual culture.

Silent Heritage: Investigating Ruxton's Nigeria Collection at the Horniman Museum and Gardens

Abstract Museums which display all of their colonial collections are rare, and those which offer clear information on collection provenances and colonial histories in displays are rarer still. Absence and silence surrounding the colonial past in Europe's museums places them at odds with international pressure to account for the custodianship of colonial-era collections. This is examined here through investigating the silent heritage of the Ruxton Nigeria Collection, held at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. Ruxton collected as a military official during Britain's conquest of Nigeria. His collection is typical of assemblages throughout European ethnographic museums, dominated by “everyday” material heritage, not the “treasures” of elites which monopolise restitution discourse. How can provenance research be conducted upon quieter collections dating from the colonial era with little accompanying documentation? What are the potential impacts of such research upon restitution debates? From the available evidence around the Ruxton collection, it is clear that silences are more fundamental than just a matter of archival gaps, and if silences remain even after provenance research (which many museums are unable to conduct on all of their collections), then we need to question not only why and how collections are displayed, but how museums justify having them at all.