Fleas, swifts and plankton
1:51pm Wednesday 6th August 2008
T he most stimulating and engaging teaching, and the best learning, occur when science is brought to life. So said Ofsted inspector Christine Gilbert in a recent report on the state of this discipline in our schools, adding that students need to be encouraged to think for themselves and make their own discoveries.
In the University Museum of Natural History (pictured above), Oxfordshire schools are fortunate to have a local resource that suggests limitless jumping-off points (National Curriculum allowing) for serious enquiry.
The not-so-serious approach is catered for as well. What child could resist the display of dodo parts, the live tarantula in the Upper Gallery, or the Victorian flea dressed in tiny clothes and carrying a tiny rucksack?
Education lay at the root of the museum's genesis and subsequent development.
"Our founder, Henry Acland, a Reader in Anatomy, was a great friend of John Ruskin, who was himself a very enthusiastic mineralogist," said Monica Price, the museum's acting director.
"The two had a huge interest in getting science on a more academic footing - it was almost a hobby until then.
"A new science degree had been established, but science at that time was dispersed around the university in odd corners of colleges. It needed a place where it could be brought together and made respectable. Every single feature of the design was supposed to teach natural history."
Particularly interesting from this point of view are the columns around the court, each made from a different decorative stone, selected in the field by the first curator and inscribed with its origin and type.
Surmounting these are botanical carvings, intended for the same instructional purpose but lacking a label.
"The O'Shea brothers were the main stone carvers," said Monica. "They used to go down to the Botanic Gardens, pick the plants, and bring them back so they could work from the actual material. Unfortunately the money ran out before they finished."
The craftsmen were so infuriated by this mismanagement - having counted, presumably, on several years' further income - that they took a satirical revenge in the form of owl and parrot carvings representing the great and good of the university, which led to an even prompter departure than they had been expecting.
An alternative version of their dismissal was related by Ruskin, who wrote that it was a consequence of the unnecessary introduction of cats' round a window on the first floor.
The museum opened in 1860, and from the start was used to further scientific knowledge as well as to conserve and display the artefacts on which it was based, hosting in June of that year the famous Origin of Species debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley.
Darwin's collection of crustacea is in the possession of the zoology department, which takes care of more than 250,000 specimens in total, many of which are extinct or endangered.
"Collectors brought some pretty strange things back including a whole giraffe," said Monica, "It was being boiled down in the stables at Christ Church, to get the bones out, when a little dog ran off with the tip of the tail, which had to be replaced with lead."
Like those of other departments, zoology staff run an active research and acquisition programme, though nowadays this involves observation and photography rather than shipping large carcasses from the other side of the world.
One long term study is taking place right on the museum's doorstep - actually, about 100 feet above it - where swifts have for many generations made their nests in the tower. Taking advantage of this great opportunity for ringing and detailed record-keeping, ornithologists have made some important discoveries about the almost entirely airborne lives of swifts - which only land to breed.
Modern nest-boxes, equipped with cameras, enable Museum visitors to see the young of the 60-odd pairs hatching, being fed, and preparing themselves for their first flight.
"They only get one chance" said Monica. "So you see them doing press-ups in the nest to strengthen their wings!"
You can also see live bees occupying a glass-sided section of a hive, connected to the outside world via a tunnel, courtesy of the entomology department.
A diagram shows the nearest sources of nectar and explains the meaning of their dances.
"Next to them is a whole wall with an amazing array of different insects, from the most beautiful butterflies, with wings that shine like gemstones when they catch the light, to tiny creepy-crawlies. We all depend on insects to support the food chain - if we lost them, the entire eco-system would fall apart," Monica said.
The same can be said of plankton, portraits' of which are the subject of a current exhibition at the museum, Just Drifting Around, by biologist and artist John Angus.
Fished out of the sea at various points around Morecambe, using a home-made conical plankton net, these transparent micro-organisms have been photographed and presented as brightly coloured digital images which emphasise their bizarre and appealing shapes and the odd category they occupy in modern scientific classification, comprising not only examples of animals (dependent on external sources of food) and plants (able to synthesise their own), but also surprising individuals able to switch between the two according to conditions.
The museum's other departments, mineralogy and geology, are closely linked in terms of interests, and include in their exhibits fossil bones from the Oxfordshire dinosaurs.
"These were the first ones ever to be described" said Monica. "They include William Buckland's Megalosaurus, or what he called the Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield', discovered in 1824. Buckland was a huge populariser of science, and took people on social jaunts to Headington, and other places, to look for fossils. We have the archive of William Smith here too - he used fossils as a guide to make the first geological maps of England and Wales.
"It was an exciting age to be alive because people were beginning to appreciate that evolution demanded a longer time-frame than the biblical stories of the Creation and Noah's Ark implied."
The museum receives more than 350,000 visitors a year. It would be fitting if some of today's Creationists were amongst them - the abundance of physical evidence that led to such significant intellectual progress 150 years ago would surely give them pause for thought.
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PW. Admission free. Open 10am-5pm, seven-days-a-week. (Opening hours will be unaffected by the temporary closure of the neighbouring Pitt Rivers Museum).Call 01865 272950 Just Drifting Around exhibition, August 1- 30th September 30, in the upper gallery