More Highlights from ‘The Rarest of the Rare.Stories behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.’

The museum was transformed from an academic backwater to a world class player by the appointment of Louis Agassiz, the famous and inspirational Swiss expert on fossil fish in 1848. He established the Museum of Comparative Zoology with a hard won grant of $100,000 from the Massachusetts Government on the understanding that the museum would be open to the public.


Ironically, one of his purposes was to discredit Darwin’s recent theories of evolution.
His son, Alexander, became the museums’s director after his father’s death in 1873 and stayed in the post for 40 years. He had previously made a fortune from copper mining in Michigan and donated over 1 million dollars to the museum during his life … that’s the sort of Director a museum needs.


Alexander did accept Darwin’s evolutionary theories but disagreed with his views on atoll formation. Darwin believed they were the result of sinking volcanoes. Agassiz disagreed and visited most of the coral reef regions of the world at great expense. He was wrong. Darwin ‘s theories are now accepted as correct.


Alfred Wallace, the English naturalist, who came up with a theory of natural selection independently at the same time as Darwin, visited the museum in 1886 and found it, ‘far in advance’, of the British Museum which he said displayed, ‘countless masses of unorganised specimens in gloomy halls’.


Harvard purchased a major meteorite collection in 1883. Current thinking at the time was that meteorites came from volcanic eruptions on the moon.


In 1927, Thomas Barbor took over as Director, an ambition he had nurtured from the age of 13. He installed electricity, revamped the exhibits and placed specimens he considered worthless on the museum lawn for anyone to take away. He was a big fellow and his autobiography, ‘Naturalist at Large’, was a pun on his size.


He is most famous for the ‘frog toss’. He argued with a fellow naturalist about the origin of life in the West Indies, insisting that the islands were once connected. His colleague insisted that animals spread from one island to the next by sea (on rafts) or by air (carried by hurricanes). To prove the point, his colleague climbed the 5 storeys of the museum with several live frogs which he tossed out of a window, one by one. Barbor and an assembled audience watched the carnage from ground level and noted that each frog was killed by the impact. A few minutes later the stunned frogs recovered and hopped away. In fact, both scientists were correct.


Zoologist Harold J Coolidge collected specimens for the museum by shooting them – including whole families of gibbons and a giant gorilla that is still on display. He saw the error of his ways in later life and was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.


James Watson ,who discovered the structure of DNA with Francis Crick ,was an Assistant Professor at Harvard in 1916. A traditional biologist, later to become a good friend, described him at the time as, ‘the most unpleasant person I have ever met. He had a conviction that biology must be transformed into a science directed at molecules and cells and rewritten in the language of physics and chemistry. What had gone before, ‘traditional’ biology ,my biology ,was infested with stamp collectors who lacked the art to transform their subject into a modern science. He treated the other 24 members of the Department of Biology with a revolutionary’s fervent disrespect.’


Charles Doolittle Walcott made his name by discovering and working on the Burgess Shale in Canada while at the Smithsonian Institute. He became a world-class palaeontologist and Secretary of the Smithsonian despite never finishing school. Aged 20, he gave up his job in a hardware store and moved to Trenton Falls, New York State, where he built up an impressive collection of fossils, including 325 complete trilobites, 190 crinoids and 6 starfish. Louis Agassiz bought the collection for the museum for the princely sum (in those days) of $3,500.


‘Darwin’s Sand Dollar’, is a prize historical fossil, which Charles Darwin collected in Patagonia while on the Beagle, and sent to Louis Agassiz for identification.


Twelve fossil butterfly species have been identified from 35 million year old rocks from Florissant, Colorado. Examples of eight of these are in the museum collection and were first described by the museum.


Harvard sent an expedition to Australia in the 1930s to collect extant marsupials. They also returned with 6 ton blocks of stone that had been dynamited from the ground in North Queensland ,containing a massive Pliosaur specimen. The 9 foot long skull, with teeth as big as bananas, took several years to prepare and the blocks containing the rest of the animal were untouched for more than a decade. The skeleton was about 60% complete and reconstructed under the guidance of the famous Harvard Palaeontologist Alfred Romer. It was set in plaster and is still on display. However current research suggests Romer added 8 too many plaster vertebrae to compete the skeleton and it should be 30 feet long, not the present 42 feet.


Alfred Romer was the author of Vertebrate Palaeontology’, the standard textbook on the subject for over 50 years. He was also an active field collector, especially in the Permian Red Beds of Central Texas. The museum owns the type specimen of Dimetrodon, an almost complete skeleton that Romer found. The purpose of Dimetrodon’s sail-like membrane that runs along its body, is still under debate. Main theories are that it had a function to heat and cool the body or that it had a sexual display function.
When Romer was in Argentina, police illegally seized all the fossils he collected. They were later returned. International fossil politics are not a new phenomenon!


More highlights to come!!

Highlights from ‘The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures of The Harvard Museum of Natural History’

(Harvard Museum of Natural History: ‘HMNH’ (not to be confused with ‘NMNH’, London’s Museum of Natural History)

…21 million specimens …the Egg Room contains 30,000 glass topped boxes of bird’s eggs and nests… no one has ever counted the mollusc collection… the world’s largest ant collection…

The man who collected a rare butterfly in Papua New Guinea, was later eaten by cannibals.

The oldest correspondence dated 1777, is from a Boston dentist requesting two sea horse teeth (walrus ivory), to make dentures, though it was later stated that such dentures caused bad breath and made food taste disagreeable.

There are two stuffed pheasants in the collection, said to have been given to George Washington by Louis XVl.

The Mineral Collection was started by a Quaker doctor named Lottson, famous for bleeding his patients – and for the following rhyme:

‘When any sick to me apply I physics, bleeds and sweats em If, after that they choose to die Why, verily I Lettson.’

In 1846 John White Webster presided over the museum’s collections. He lived beyond his means and entertained lavishly. He was forced to borrow $2000 from a group of benefactors, including a wealthy physician named George Parkman, to purchase a complete mastodon skeleton.
He was already in debt to Mr Pakham so he put up his personal possessions, including his own mineral collection, as collateral. Webster then tried to sell the mineral collection to Parkman’s own brother-in-law. An outraged George Parkman visited John Webster to remonstrate and promptly disappeared. A week later, his false teeth and some skull and arm bones were found in Webster’s furnace, pelvis and leg bones in the cellar below the laboratory and more bones in Webster’s tea chest. The only positive identification that sent Webster to the gallows was from the dentures. The mastodon is still on display.

The moral of this tale is:
1.Mastodons are to kill for
2.Never lend a curator money.
3.Never,never ask for it back.

To be continued.....

London Fossil Dealer to go to Bangkok for Mammoth Erection.

Dale Rogers from upmarket Ammonite Gallery of Pimlico, London is planning
a trip to Bangkok to perform a Mammoth Erection.

He confided to me that he intends to seek local help but expects to “do
the business in private”.

Once the erection is successful, the results will be open to public scrutiny.

”I have only done this once before, as a sort of practice run, but its all
just basic anatomy, just on a bigger scale” he quipped.

The replica Siberian Mammoth is to go on display in an elephant museum in the
outskirts of Thailand’s capital.

Dale, who is 50 years old, is from Essex.

Where can I find an exciting read?

Nobody had heard of Chelyabinsk, a provincial Russian town in the Urals until a meteorite fell there last winter...... Unless your holiday reading happens to be ‘The Diamond Chariot’ by bestselling Russian author Boris Akunin, in which his hero Erast Fandorin foils fiendish Japanese ninja infiltrators attempting to disrupt Russian communications and thwart their military efforts in the Siberian Pacific. Among their dastardly machinations was a plan to blow up the Alexander Bridge in Syzra, the largest bridge in Europe at the time’ by planting a bomb on a goods train to Chelyabinsk!!

And did you know that in ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ‘, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s  harrowing account of life in a 1950s labour camp the term ‘Ichthyosaur’ is used as friendly banter to denote stupid old fool. Thereby showing what an educated lot the political prisoners in the Gulag were.

Aepyornis, the ‘Giant Elephant Bird’ has been extinct for at least 300 years. It was 3 metres tall, weighed up to 400Kgs and laid one of the largest eggs known in the natural world.  Recently the eggs have caused much excitement and frenzy at auction.  H.G. Wells’ collection of short stories ‘Tales of Wonder’ contains a ripping yarn entitled Aepyornis Island in which a castaway hatches an Aepyornis egg and cohabits a desert island with the bird as it grows to massive adulthood, shades of recent film The Life of Pi. Of course the story ends badly!

What is kept in Museum Cellars?

• A dog-sized dinosaur with a 5 foot tail from the Middle Triassic Period, in other words, one of the world’s earliest dinosaurs has just been described.  The specimen was found in Tanzania 80 years ago and has been in the Natural History Museum, London,  ever since.

• A fossil turtle that has been lost for 150 years has been found in the National Museum of Wales, where it has been in secret residence since 1933.  It was found in the Purbeck area of Dorset and described by Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum, in 1841.  It was donated to Bristolmuseum in 1915 from a private collection, but lent to the Cardiff museum in 1933 and forgotten.  Much of Bristol’s fossil collection was destroyed during a German bombing raid in 1940 and nobody remembered that the turtle had not been in Bristol during the fatal raid.

• A partial skeleton found in the Oxford Clay in Peterborough in the early 1900s has finally been named and described at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.  Tyrannoneustes Lythrodectikos means blood-biting tyrant swimmer.  It is a new genus, part crocodile, part shark, part dolphin – and all charm!  Up to 9 meters long with four paddles for speed and big jaws with serrated teeth, suggesting it could take on and devour animals as big as itself!

Goodbye Jungleyes.

We are sad to say goodbye to one of our longest customers, Jungleyes, formerly of Kew and the Isle of Wight. A great character, he has been ill for a long time, sadly. He will be sorely missed. Below is his obituary from the Daily Telegraph, 11th February 2013.

Rock On Jungleyes - Respect.



11 Feb 2013 – Daily Telegraph Obituary:

Jungleyes Love, who has died aged 56, was an Old Harrovian hippie who traded in runic jewellery, dinosaur eggs and fossilised animal excrement, which he sold from his shop on the tourist trail to Kew Gardens in south-west London.

He learned the tradition of rune-lore in the 1980s. Since the Dark Ages this had been passed down orally by successive female practitioners, a rune being a Norse hieroglyph which, when scribed (or struck) on to an object or metal and its name chanted phonetically, reputedly invests the wearer with power.

His runic jewellery was much sought after by customers at his tiny shop, called World Tree Mend Us, at which he also sold rocks, gemstones and coprolites (fossilised excrement).

Descended from privateers, Charles Gibaut Bissell-Thomas was born in Jersey on March 13 1956. He shed his given name while a teenager, changing it several times, first to Charlight Utang, then Soma Love, then (by deed poll) to Jungleyes Cism Love. More recently he called himself Jarl Love.

During assembly at primary school, he questioned his orthodox Christian headmistress about why the school was not also worshipping the Devil. Later, at Harrow, he contacted the Chinese Embassy and persuaded staff there to send 725 complimentary copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which were promptly returned by the school authorities.

Several terms later his mother received a call from his housemaster stating that he was being sent home in the middle of term, not because he had been expelled but because he contacted the headmaster of Latymer School, Hammersmith, and had secured himself a place.

After entering Latymer he would never cut his hair again, and from his mid-20s no longer brushed or combed it. While perhaps hoping to achieve a neat Rasta-dread style, he ended up with a matted construction which was later long enough to use as a cushion while waiting at bus stops.

After graduating in Neurobiology at the University of Sussex he travelled extensively in Asia, spending several years with a witch doctor (or dukun) in Indonesia called Waktu Lemak (Fat Time).



Jungle — as everyone called him — embraced the psychedelic movement and while many progressed no further than marijuana or LSD, he regularly took the hallucinogenic amanita muscaria (or fly agaric) as used in the Siberian shamanic tradition. For the last 30 years of his life he was a fruitarian . He also refused to be photographed, claiming that the camera would steal his soul.

As well as his shop at Kew, Jungleyes Love also had a second retail outlet in the Victorian Appley Tower, at Ryde on the Isle of Wight – a space that he restored himself.

A notable commission in the early 1990s was from a customer who wanted him to design a pendulum that would enable the buyer to win on the horses (in order to buy a flat with the proceeds). When first employed, the pendulum won the owner £800 but on its second attempt it failed to swing with pertinence and was returned with instructions to replace silver with gold. This Love did, also adding part of a prehistoric pony’s kneecap.

The pendulum was ready for the following year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup, when the owner formed two circles of runners’ names from the racecard. The first circle produced no movement in the pendulum, but when the second did — and the owner placed his initial £800 winnings on the horse indicated — he won £33,000.

Despite spending prolifically on exotic fruits, Jungleyes Love became one of the few European sufferers from beriberi, his fruitarian diet being deficient in vitamin B. In 2007 an abscess infected with TB (probably lying dormant since his Asian travels) was removed from his brain. The operation led to complications, which left him needing care during his last years .

Jungleyes Love, who was unmarried, is survived by his mother, brother and two sisters.

Jungleyes Love, born March 13 1956, died February 2 2013

Charles Darwin, Victorian Polymath and Fossil Fancier!

Highlights from Fossils, Finches and Fuegians, an account of Charles Darwin’s travels on The Beagle by his great grandson, Richard Keynes.




Charlie as a student:

“No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their characters…I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw 2 rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one I held in the right hand into my mouth. Alas,it ejected some intensely acrid fluid so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.

I was very successful in collecting and invented 2 new methods: I employed a labourer to scrape moss off old trees and place it in a large bag and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of barges in which reeds are bought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species.

No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen’s ‘Illustrations of British Insects’, the magic words: ’captured by Charles Darwin, Esq’”



Resolutions at the start of the voyage:

“I am afraid I shall be quite overwhelmed with the number of subjects which I ought to take into hand. The principal objects are first collecting, observing and reading in all branches of Natural History that I can possibly manage. Observations in Meteorology, French and Spanish, Mathematics and a little Classics, perhaps not more than Greek testament on Sundays…how great and uncommon an opportunity of improving myself”



Curation:

The untidy piles of fossils dumped by Charles on the spotless decks of the Beagle were wholly contrary to naval tradition: ”Wickham, the First Lieutenant -a very tidy man who liked to keep the decks so that you could eat your dinner off them - used to say, ’If I had my way, all your damn mess would be chucked overboard, and you after it, old flycatcher.’



While in the Falklands:

“I am quite charmed with Geology but, like the wise animal between two bundles of hay, I do not know which to like best, the old crystalline groups of rocks or the softer and fossiliferous beds. When puzzling about stratification etc... I feel inclined to cry a fig for your big oysters and your bigger Megatheriums. But, when digging out some fine bones I wonder how any man can tire his arms with hammering granite……

There is nothing like geology; the pleasure of the first day’s partridge shooting or first day’s hunting cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue.”



Leaving Tahiti:

“In nothing have I been so much pleased as with the inhabitants - there is a mildness in the expression of their faces which at once banishes the idea of a savage -and an intelligence which shows they are advancing in civilization…in my opinion they are the finest men I have ever beheld.”



Leaving New Zealand:

“I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand; it is not a pleasant place; amongst the natives there is absent the charming simplicity which is found at Tahiti, and of the English the greater part are the very refuse of society. Neither is the country itself attractive.”



Leaving Australia:

“Farewell Australia, you are a rising infant and will doubtless some day reign a great princess in the south; but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect; I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.”



About coming home:

“I am in high spirits about my geology and even aspire to the hope that my observations will be considered of some utility by real geologists. I see very clearly it will be necessary to live in London for a year, by which time, with hard work, the greater part of my materials will be exhausted. Will you tell Erasmus to put my name down to the Wyndham or any other club…or to turn in his mind for some lodgings with big rooms in some vulgar part of London.”



Shortly after coming home and years before working on, ‘The Origin of Species’, he read a paper to the Geological Society about the elevation of the coastline of Chile, followed by a paper entitled: ’On the connexion of certain volcanic phenomena in South America and the formation of mountain chains and volcanoes as an effect of the same power by which continents are elevated’.

This was received with polite respect and forgotten shortly afterwards. It was not until the 1960s, when the theory of plate tectonics caused a revolution in geological thought, that it could be appreciated how accurate Darwin’s theories had been.

May you live and prosper beyond the 22nd December and enjoy a good 2013. Simon Cohen.