A CUCKOO known for its “pungent odour” and reluctance to fly and an Azara’s “false fox” are among the Charles Darwin specimens conserved by NUI Galway and recorded in a new catalogue.
The catalogue, compiled by a team working with the university’s “dead zoo”, has been published a century after the original listing of more than 500 native and exotic species.
Only two tattered copies survive of that first listing, written by the late Prof RJ Anderson at a time when the university’s zoology and marine biology museum was one of the finest on any campus in Ireland and Britain.
Not only did the museum own four Darwin specimens, collected by the naturalist during his five-year voyage on HMS Beagle during the 1830s, but it also featured, and still does, a plethora of native and exotic animals, from three-toed and two-toed sloths to an American alligator.
Many of the specimens were used for teaching purposes. Students, for example, were expected to be able to name every bone in the American alligator’s body.
The “time capsule” that is Galway’s “dead zoo” was visited by wildlife broadcaster Éamon de Buitléar this week when he marked the publication of the new catalogue with Prof Wallace Arthur of NUI Galway’s zoology department. The collection’s variety reflects the adventures of upper class members of the Zoological Society of London during the growth of the British empire. Around 1854, the society opted to sell off a number of specimens to London’s then developing natural history museum and to the universities in Cork and Galway.
The NUI Galway collection survived the upheavals caused by two world wars, the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War, and a fire on campus in the late 1960s.
The collection includes more than 100 glass representations of marine mammals, known as Blaschka models, made by German father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in Dresden. They are now considered to be works of art, as well as models, with an “irreplaceable” value.
The NUIG zoology and marine biology museum is open daily and is free to the public. It will be one of a number of college museums and centres open during the fortnight-long Galway Science and Technology Festival, which runs from next Monday to November 27th.
For more details, see galwayscience.ie
