Volunteering Week Ten; The Final Week

What happened in week 10? It was our last week, so we were happy and sad and up for a laugh and wanting to get it done and intending to get loads done and to conclude at a satisfactory point. And then we found a walrus skull.

We also found a dugong skull - WEIRD. 

We also explored another green box, just to finish up the section, and we found more skulls, mostly of terriers. We found a seal skull, I think it was a cape sea lion, big sharp pointy teeth! The box also contained the ear bones from several whales; two of which were marked as humpback whales! 

Tucked away in a corner of a box was the skull of a fox terrier, with its teeth attached to a piece of card. A little bit weird.

As it was our last week, Lynsey came up to see us, and we were presented with certificates for the work that we have done! So we hosted a prompt and cheesy award ceremony photoshoot ;-)

It was a really, really good ten weeks and I honestly learnt something new every time I was there! It was also great to get some experience in this sector, as museum work is one career path I am interested in taking when I graduate. I'm also a bit morbid and am fascinated by bones, especially skulls, so it was good to indulge that side of me too! A big thankyou to Lynsey at Thinktank, and all the MCC staff for helping us get the work done, despite technology issues! Hopefully I will be back next year to finish up the Natural Science section.

Volunteering Week 9! Bones!

In week nine, we continued to work on the large items on the shelves. There were lots of bones that needed identifying as much as they could be, and then adding to the MINISIS software.

We had half a skeleton of a large cat; a whole taxidermy peacock and a monkey of some sort complete with gunk on the joints!

Handling taxidermy peacocks is a lot harder than you may think!

Volunteering Week Eight! A belated post

I’m not very good at blogging a series of posts on the same subject. I’ve been meaning to catch up with these posts for a while, but have just never had the desire to do it. No more! I *will* get the remaining posts written, and then you’ll all hopefully be sick of pictures of skulls!

So, in week 8, from what I can remember, we carried on working through the box of monkeys, which actually contained six primates and a koala.

We also carried on with some of the large taxidermy animals, which included a hyena, a deer, a fox and a cat! The hyena was quite big – I didn’t think they were that big – but the face looked it was smiling at us. Very unnerving.

I also had a mooch around the far side of the warehouse, and found some more weird and wonderful taxidermy. A pet dog? A sloth on a branch? A seal? Welcome to museum storage!

There were also some objects that were not part of the natural science collection, so I took photos of these as well.

Volunteering Week Seven

This week we continued working through the boxes. We found lots of skulls (mainly rodents); hippo teeth; cat claws and small boxes with miscellaneous small bones.

Cat claw?

We then decided to open the box labelled 'Monkeys x7', and Lynsey filmed it as part of our Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Twitter takeover day on the Thursday. The box did indeed contain seven primates, including a Marmoset and a Lemur! The following pics contain rather gross images of dead primates.. you have been warned!

We catalogued one of them and then had to pack away - we will continue with the box in Week 8!

Volunteering; The Sixth Week

I have gotten all confused and befuddled. I thought this week was week 6. Turns out my head is a week late. Gah! Anywhooooo. Week six, what happened?

Oh yes! On the Sunday, the MCC had an open day! Myself, Lukas and Lynsey were around to show people around the Natural Science floor, and to speak to visitors about the work we are doing on the collection here. It was a very long day (I had been at work in the morning!) but very enjoyable. I got the chance to walk around the main store on my lunch break, and I managed to see quite a few items that I remember from the old museum. I also held a corn snake! Awesome.

Back in the MCC, Sarah and I continued to work our way through the boxes of 'stuff'. These contain all sorts of wonders, mainly miscellaneous bones! In one box, we found a massive slice of bone, which turned out to be a section though an Elephants skull. Impressive.

We also uncovered a box with Ox bones in.. They looked as though they had once been on a display board, and were in varying stages of being sawn, processed, turned and carved! We found several spoons, some teething rings and a blank for a paper knife. It was really peculiar, and felt a bit weird looking at it all.. Who would want an Ox bone teething ring?!

On the Thursday I was by myself, so I cracked on with the boxes. I managed to finish one box, which meant that we had finished one side of the shelf!! (But then we discovered someone else had dumped more boxes there, booo). During the course of the day, one box contained this:

A fish skull! Not sure what type of fish, I thought maybe a cod? That's my hand on the left for some sort of scale. It was really fragile.. All the bones were wired together, but there were so many! Loads of tiny bones in the middle, and bits inbetween other bits, extra plates tucked in places. Really amazing to look at and hold! It was really delicate - each bone was almost transparent, almost like thick paper. Amazing.

Volunteering Week 5!

The halfway point! It both seems like we've spent longer on this project and haven't been working on it that long. It's quite a strange feeling!


This week, we all took part in a Meet The Volunteer day at Thinktank Science Museum, which was really successful - there were far more people there than I ever expected, and it wasn't just children & parents. Some of the staff came to have a look, the children had their siblings, friends, parents, family, friends with them. One man appeared to be with his carer, and some people even came back for another quick look.

We had three stalls set up - one had a few taxidermy specimens and photos that Lukas had taken at the MCC. Another had a simplified 'tree of life' and some specimens - some fossils, some beetles in plastic cases, a frog in resin, some skulls and an alligators head. The third table was the colouring-in table, which was quite a hit! I had such a great day, talking to people about our work, what we are doing and why. The children who came were all excited at being able to touch the animals and the bones. Not many people realised or believed us when they were told that they were all real, and once were very much alive! Even the Goliath Bird Eating Spider got a lot of love. We had a lot of positive feedback during the day, and I'm glad that I was part of it.

From the Thinktank facebook page

On Thursday, Lukas and I continued with working through the boxes of bones. As we had started working on the Muntjac deer, we decided to finish it. It turned out we had 11 small boxes of bones - we actually ended up with 35 new items! It took us all morning to finish cataloguing it all.

Muntjac deer femurs. ~6 inches long!

Muntjac deer tarsals and carpals (feet and hand bones!) - there were 63, very small, bones all in one box. We gave the box one number because it would take too long/be a bit pointless giving each individual bone a number!

The computer software, MINISIS, showing how many items we had done after just 4 boxes.

This week was also our last week of working with Katie! She is on to pastures new, up in York. It has been brilliant to work with her - despite her knowledge base being social history, she has been pretty good at the natural sciences stuff!

This Sunday August 19th, the Museums Collection Centre (MCC) will be having an Open Day! If you are around, come down! You can walk around the storage facilities and see the object we have in the collections, as well as some of the items that were on display in the old museum but are now in storage. For the first time, the warehouse will be open, so you can walk around the part where I have been/am working! The walkway will take you around most of the warehouse, so you can see the birds, some of the taxidermy animals and some other objects we have up there. Come along! Entry is free, and there will be a falconry display too!

Volunteering Week Four

More of the same - we carried on looking through boxes to see what had numbers and what needed numbers. Quite a few specimens had numbers that weren't meant to exist (they didn't correspond to anything) so we had to re-number quite a lot of stuff. The MINISIS software worked brilliantly both days, and I think we've ironed out any teething issues - we all know how and what to enter and where to enter it, and I think the records we've been making are pretty full!

We found this skull in the bottom of one of the boxes. We have no idea what it is?! It looks almost like it wants to be a Triceratops, with the ridge at the top. It obviously had large horns. That's my hand for some sort of scale - anybody have any ideas?

Wartime posters in one of the downstairs rooms.

A brilliant entry in the accessions book!

The warehouse stores all sorts of objects, not just Natural Science. This shelf is behind the computer.

Muntjac-In-A-Box! (Eleven boxes containing Muntjac deer bones. Lukas and I wanted to assemble them with blu-tac. This idea didn't go down well).

All in all, I'm loving being a NatSciVol! The work is varied, interesting, weird, funny, tedious, amazing and rewarding all at the same time. We have tracked down things that were missing; we've added a decent amount of specimens to the catalogue; we've photographed a lot of the birds (mostly in glass cases); and we think we've found the source of the Llama head which is sitting on a shelf. I could quite easily do this more often, two days a week just isn't enough! We're nearly halfway through the project - next week (Wednesday), we will be at Thinktank Museum to do a Meet The Volunteer day. On August 19th the Museums Collection Centre will be open to the public so you can come down and see some of the objects we have been working with! 

Volunteering; The Third Week

Week Three! We *finally* managed to get the database software (MINISIS) working for half of the day, so we could begin to transfer items from the spreadsheet to the database. We also carried on with checking specimens from the shelves.

 Quite a small Giant Anteater - only 110cm long (can grow to over 200cm long!)

 

 Me, with a strange, unlabelled piece of human bone we found in a box.

We found a second piece of bone, identical to the first. Using a model skelly that is lying on a shelf, we determined that we had found two pieces of a pelvis! We were then able to create a new record on the database for these.

Volunteering Week Two

In the second week of volunteering, we only did one day. We continued to look at the taxidermy specimens on the shelves and tried to trace them in the written accession books. Not all were present, and so we carried on producing basic computer records on Excel, with up to date details such as measurements and a full condition report.

 I like the accession books, they're very interesting to read, but can sometimes be quite difficult to understand!

 Specimen of the week - mongoose avec snake! There are two of these, fairly identical. Gross.

 Sarah King, a post-doc from my uni department is also on the placement this summer. We take it in turns to handle the specimens and wear the body suits.

A constant hazard - hence the body suits!