New bat species rises from vaults of London's Natural History Museum

Pickled bat that has lain in the museum for 30 years is a previously unknown species named Francis’ woolly horseshoe bat, experts have confirmed

Press Association

Saturday 31 October 2015 06.01 GMTLast modified on Saturday 31 October 201506.03 GMT

A pickled bat kept in the vaults of London’s Natural History Museum for 30 years is a previously unknown species, experts have confirmed.

The discovery of a new creature of the night at the museum was announced appropriately on Halloween.

It was named Francis’ woolly horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus francisi) after Charles Francis, who collected the specimen in Malaysia in 1983.

A computerised tomography (CT) scanner was used to analyse the animal’s fragile bones without having to touch it.

Museum zoologist, Roberto Portela Miguez, said: “The scan of the bat skull reveals spiky, sharp-edged teeth that would work like scissors to break open the hard outer-body casings of insects.

Readon …

Museum's 'Dippy' dinosaur makes way for blue whale

29 January 2015 Last updated at 00:15

By Jonathan Amos

Science correspondent, BBC News

London's Natural History Museum is re-modelling its entrance, moving out the dinosaur and moving in a blue whale.

The exchange will not happen overnight: the complex logistics involved mean it will be 2017 before the great cetacean is hanging from the ceiling of the iconic Victorian Hintze Hall.

The museum thinks the change will increase the wow factor for visitors.

But it also believes the whale can better convey all the cutting-edge science conducted at the institution.

That is something a plaster-cast model of a Diplodocus skeleton - as familiar and as popular as it has become - can no longer do effectively.

"Everyone loves 'Dippy', but it's just a copy," commented Sir Michael Dixon, the NHM's director, "and what makes this museum special is that we have real objects from the natural world - over 80 million of them - and they enable our scientists and thousands like them from around the world to do real research."

Read on ...

Photos: Incredible Near-Complete Stegosaurus Skeleton

by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | November 19, 2014 07:10am ET

For the first time in nearly 100 years, the near-complete skeleton of a dinosaur will go on display at the Natural History Museum in London. The dinosaur, a stegosaurus, is only missing its left arm and the base of its tail, and will likely spur a handful of studies about the anatomy of theStegosaurus stenops species. [Read full story on the stegosaurus skeleton] 

More ...

Baby mammoth goes on display in UK

20 May 2014 Last updated at 00:45

By Sarah WhiteBBC News, at the Natural History Museum

A perfectly preserved baby mammoth which died 42,000 years ago has been unveiled at the Natural History Museum in London.

Named Lyuba by the Siberian deer herder who discovered her in 2007, the specimen is 130cm tall and weighs 50kg.

Palaeontologist Prof Adrian Lister described seeing her for the first time as an "incredible experience".

Transported in a box that was opened on Monday, the juvenile female mammoth looked almost intact.

Prof Lister pointed out the small milk tusks that are barely visible, the almost flattened shape of the trunk designed to drink water from snow and a small layer of fat on top of the head which would have kept her warm in the permafrost of north-west Siberia.

Lyuba was found to have clay in her trunk, leading scientists to believe she suffocated on it while getting water. She is believed to have been discovered after her snowy grave thawed out during the spring and her remains washed up on a river bank.

Continued

Natural History Museum receives £5m donation

The Natural History Museum's Central Hall is to be renamed following a £5m donation from philanthropists Sir Michael and Lady Hintze.

The gift from the London-based couple is the biggest single donation the museum has received in its 133 years.

To mark it, the museum's cathedral-like hall, which houses a huge replica dinosaur skeleton of a Diplodocus, is to be renamed the Hintze Hall.

The money will be used for scientific research and to maintain collections.

The museum, which attracted 5.3 million visitors last year, said it had received seven-figure gifts and donations from individuals before, but had seen nothing on this scale.

Sir Michael, the founder of asset management firm CQS and a Conservative party donor, said it was a privilege to donate the funds.

read more

Natural History Museum, London, Yields Remarkable New Beetle Specimens from Brazil

Jan. 23, 2014 — A visit to the Natural History Museum, London, yielded an unexpected surprise for Dr. Joseph Parker, a UK biologist based in New York at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History.

Among the 22,000 drawers of specimens that comprise the Coleoptera (beetle) collection housed in the Department of Entomology, was a new rove beetle genus collected during the 1990s in Manaus, a region of the Brazilian Amazon. The new genus is described in the open access journa lZooKeys.

The beetles, which measure only 3 mm in length, have a remarkable sexual dimorphism: the male has large eyes with over one hundred eye facets, whereas the female eyes have a paltry 12 facets. The male also has large flight wings, while the female has no wings at all. It's likely that the male does most of the searching for mates, while the female doesn't develop large eyes or wings and invests instead in egg production.

read further

Attenborough: The forgotten story of Alfred Russel Wallace

On 7 November 2013, the Natural History Museum in London is unveiling a statue of the man who co-discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Alfred Russel Wallace was a pioneering naturalist who discovered thousands of new species, published numerous books and conceived the most important theory in biology independently of Charles Darwin. But whilst Darwin has gone on to become a household name, Alfred Russel Wallace has largely remained in his shadow to this day.

On the 100th anniversary of Wallace's death, Sir David Attenborough tells the story of this extraordinary explorer and explains why Wallace is, in Attenborough's opinion, the "most admirable character in the history of science".

More

The truth is out there: Britain's answer to the X-Files

It is Britain’s own version of the X-files – a unit of experts who specialise in unravelling the origins of mysterious slimes, animals and objects found around the country.

Tucked away in a quiet corner of the Natural History Museum in London are a series of laboratories that would not be out of place in the long running science fiction series.

This is the Identification and Advisory Service, whose job it is to scrutinise the array of strange and baffling objects discovered by members of the public - from apparent dragon skulls to objects that appear to come from outer space.

Their most recent case is a particularly baffling one – a mass of slime that appeared on a nature reserve after reports of a meteor streaking through the skies earlier this year.

Samples of the “intergalactic jelly” were rushed to the museum from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reserve in Somerset. But laboratory tests failed to find any firm clues for what it could be.

Continued

Is this the stomach-turning truth about what the Neanderthals ate?

The idea of these early humans being plant-eating, self-medicating sophisticates has been brought into question by the findings of researchers at London's Natural History Museum

It was the tell-tale tartar on the teeth that told the truth. Or at least, that is what it appeared to do. Researchers – after studying calcified plaque on Neanderthal fossil teeth found in El Sidrón cave in Spain – last year concluded that members of this extinct human species cooked vegetables and consumed bitter-tasting medicinal plants such as chamomile and yarrow.

These were not brainless carnivores, in other words. These were smart and sensitive people capable of providing themselves with balanced diets and of treating themselves with health-restoring herbs, concluded the researchers, led by Karen Hardy at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona. Our vision of these long-extinct people needs adjusting, they argued.

But now this tale of ancient tartar has taken a new twist with two researchers at London's Natural History Museum challenging the Barcelona group's conclusions. Dental research does not prove thatNeanderthals were self-medicating, vegetable-eating sophisticates, one told the Observer. There are other, equally valid but decidedly more grizzly explanations to account for those microscopic fragments of herbs and plants found in Neanderthal teeth.

Continued

Extinction: Beyond dinosaurs and dodos

The extinction of an animal species always brings finality, but in the wake of the demise of species other creatures can prosper. More than 99% of the species which once roamed our planet no longer exist, yet a rich range of plants and animals survived.

In a new exhibition - Extinction: Not the end of the world? - the Natural History Museum in London explores how extinction can have a long-lasting effect on other creatures, and looks at those animals facing an uncertain future in the 21st Century. Take a look with exhibition developer Alex Fairhead.

Extinction: Not the end of the world? can be seen at the Natural History Museum, London, until 8 September 2013.

All images subject to copyright. Most images courtesy Natural History Museum.

Music by KPM Music. Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 7 February 2013.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21351017

New species of wasp discovered

Professor Donald Quicke, the leading wasp expert at the Natural History Museum, has discovered 178 new species of wasp in Thailand, the result of collecting in many different habitats over the past few years.

Prof Quicke told the Today programme that, although they may be a nuisance at a picnic, wasps are "very important from an ecological point of view" because they "kill a large number of pests and insects".

Mr Quicke added that he expects there are more than a million more new wasp species to be discovered around the world.
Listen: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9755000/9755692.stm

Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin

'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal Landmark polar research about the Adelie penguin's sex life by Captain  Scott's expedition, deemed too shocking for the public 100 years ago, is unearthed at the Natural History Museum

• Robin McKie, science editor
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 June 2012 11.31 BST

It was the sight of a young male Adélie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female that particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and freezing cold were one thing. 
Penguin perversion was another.

Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adélies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there. During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.

Levick blamed this "astonishing depravity" on "hooligan males" and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the horrors he had witnessed. Back in Britain he produced a paper (in English), titled Natural History of the Adélie Penguin. However, the section about the animal's sexual proclivities was deemed to be so shocking it was removed to preserve decency. Levick then used this material as the 
basis for a separate short paper, Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin, which was privately circulated among a handful of experts.

In fact, Levick's observations turned out to be well ahead of their time. Scientists had to wait another 50 years before the remarkable sexual antics of the Adélie were revealed. By this time his pamphlet and its detailed records of Adélie shenanigans had been lost to science .

Continued:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity-penguins-scott-antarctic

Beauty in the Beast: Exhibit Shows Off Animal Insides

Naked animals may not cause even a blush, but a look under the covers of our four-legged friends (and finned ones) is a revelation.

Gunther von Hagens, creator of the controversial yet wildly popular "Body Worlds" exhibit of dead humans, has expanded his penetrating vision by presenting "Animals Inside Out." In the exhibition opening Friday (April 6) at the Natural History Museum in London, von Hagens reveals the muscles, blood vessels and weird insides of animal corpses.

As in the human version, the exhibit relies on the plastination process, invented by von Hagens, in which body fluids are replaced by a hard polymer.

From goats to giraffes and sharks to ostriches, some of the animal kingdom's most spectacular specimens will be on display without their "natural clothing." Visitors can stand face to face with a muscle-y gorilla or look up at a glowing-red porbeagle shark whose arteries have been injected with a red resin during plastination. 

Read on: http://www.livescience.com/19514-animal-corpses-plastination-von-hagens.html

Piltdown Man: British archaeology's greatest hoax

In a few weeks, a group of British researchers will enter the labyrinthine store of London's Natural History Museum and remove several dark-coloured pieces of primate skull and jawbone from a small metal cabinet. After a brief inspection, the team will wrap the items in protective foam and transport them to a number of laboratories across England. There the bones and teeth, which have rested in the museum for most of the last century, will be put through a sequence of highly sensitive tests using infra-red scanners, lasers and powerful spectroscopes to reveal each relic's precise chemical make-up.

The aim of the study, which will take weeks to complete, is simple. It has been set up to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the identities of the perpetrators of the world's greatest scientific fraud, the Piltdown Hoax. Unearthed in a gravel pit at Piltdown in East Sussex and revealed to the outside world exactly a century ago, those shards of skull were part of a scientific scam that completely fooled leading palaeontologists. For decades they believed they were the remains of a million-year-old apeman, an individual who possessed a large brain but primitive jawbone and teeth.

The news of the Piltdown find, first released in late 1912, caused a sensation. The first Englishman had been uncovered and not only was he brainy, he was sporty. A sculpted elephant bone, found near the skull pieces and interpreted by scientists as being a ceremonial artefact, was jokingly claimed by many commentators to be an early cricket bat. The first Englishman with his own cricket bat – if nothing else it was one in the eye for French and German archaeologists whose discoveries of Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals and other early humans had been making headlines for several decades. Now England had a real fossil rival.

It was too good to be true. As decades passed, scientists in other countries uncovered more and more fossils of early apemen that differed markedly from Piltdown Man. "These had small skulls but relatively humanlike teeth – the opposite of Piltdown," says Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, who is leading the new study. "But many British scientists did not take them seriously because of Piltdown. They dismissed these discoveries which we now know are genuine and important. It really damaged British science."

In the end, the Piltdown Man began to look so out of kilter with other fossil discoveries that a team led by geologist Kenneth Oakley, anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and anthropologist Joseph Weiner took a closer look and in 1953 announced that Piltdown's big braincase belonged to a modern human being while the jawbone came from an orangutan or chimpanzee. Each piece had been stained to look as if they were from the same skull while the teeth had been flattened with a metal file and the "cricket bat" carved with a knife. As Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell puts it: "The earliest Englishman was nothing more than a cheap fraud." It had taken almost 40 years to find that out, however.

Read on:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/05/piltdown-man-archaeologys-greatest-hoax

New dinosaur species found from museum vaults

Researchers have discovered what they say are the remains of a new horned dinosaur species which has been lying in the vaults of a British museum for nearly a century.


The remains of Spinops sternbergorum, which belongs to the same family as the Triceratops, were excavated from a quarry alongside a large group of fossils in a so-called “bone bed” in Alberta, Canada in 1916.

But the bones were described as “rubbish” by the Natural History Museum’s keeper of Geology at that time, and lay unnoticed for almost 100 years before experts realised they belonged to an undescribed species.

They were rediscovered by a current group of researchers who decided to take another look at the fossils and realised that they were unlike any others known to science.

Dr Andrew Farke, who led the research team, said: “I knew right away that these fossils were something unusual, and it was very exciting to learn about their convoluted history.

“Here we have not just one, but multiple individuals of the same species, so we are confident that it’s not just an odd example of a previously known species,” Dr Farke was quoted as saying a newspaper.

The find means that paleontologists will have to redefine how the horned dinosaur group, plant-eating dinosaurs sporting large horns and bony frills on their necks, are classified.

Dr Paul Barrett, the Natural History Museum’s resident researcher, said: “This discovery is of particular importance as it has implications on the way we use the spines that extend from the bony neck frill, which may have been used for identification between individuals, in our classifications of these animals.

“These embellishments are central to determining relationships between the groups of horned dinosaurs and are a sign of evolutionary relatedness.”

http://www.discoveryon.info/2011/12/new-dinosaur-species-found-from-museum-vaults.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Discoveryon+%28Discoveryon%29

A rare he-she butterfly is born in London's NHM

A half-male, half-female butterfly has hatched at London's Natural History Museum.

A line down the insect's middle marks the division between its male side and its more colourful female side.

Failure of the butterfly's sex chromosomes to separate during fertilisation is behind this rare sexual chimera.

Once it has lived out its month-long life, the butterfly will join the museum's collection.

Only 0.01% of hatching butterflies are gynandromorphs; the technical term for these strange asymmetrical creatures.

"So you can understand why I was bouncing off of the walls when I learned that... [it] had emerged in the puparium," said butterfly enthusiast Luke Brown from London's Natural History Museum.

Mr Brown built his first butterfly house when he was seven, and has hatched out over 300 thousand butterflies; this is only his third gynandromorph.

Half and half
It is not only the wings that are affected, he explained. The butterfly's body is split in two, its sexual organs are half and half, and even its antennae are different lengths.

"It is a complete split; part-male, part-female... welded together inside," he told the BBC.

The dual-sex butterfly is an example of a Great Mormon, Papilio memnon - a species that is native to Asia.

With a shortage of butterfly-specific gender neutral pronouns, the butterfly is being referred to as "it", and is already middle-aged at three and a half week's old.

So the public has only a narrow window of opportunity to see it alive.

Though rare, gynandromorphy isn't unique to butterflies; individual crabs, lobsters, spiders and chickens have all been found with a mix of two sexes.

There are likely many more cases in the natural world, but sexual chimeras are more difficult to spot in animals where females and males look alike.



By Jennifer Carpenter

Science reporter, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14108204