#nhmlondon — Public Fediverse posts

🆕 10th December 2025: Oxford, trains and back to London {United Kingdom, December 2025} https://jbinnacle.com/2026/05/09/10th-december-2025-oxford-trains-and-back-to-london-united-kingdom-december-2025/ #London #Oxford #JBinnacle #travel #NHMLondon #Fern #FernTheDiplodocus #Wicked #WickedLondona

🆕 10th December 2025: Oxford, trains and back to London {United Kingdom, December 2025} https://jbinnacle.com/2026/05/09/10th-december-2025-oxford-trains-and-back-to-london-united-kingdom-december-2025/ #London #Oxford #JBinnacle #travel #NHMLondon #Fern #FernTheDiplodocus #Wicked #WickedLondona

🆕 10th December 2025: Oxford, trains and back to London {United Kingdom, December 2025} https://jbinnacle.com/2026/05/09/10th-december-2025-oxford-trains-and-back-to-london-united-kingdom-december-2025/ #London #Oxford #JBinnacle #travel #NHMLondon #Fern #FernTheDiplodocus #Wicked #WickedLondona

🆕 10th December 2025: Oxford, trains and back to London {United Kingdom, December 2025} https://jbinnacle.com/2026/05/09/10th-december-2025-oxford-trains-and-back-to-london-united-kingdom-december-2025/ #London #Oxford #JBinnacle #travel #NHMLondon #Fern #FernTheDiplodocus #Wicked #WickedLondona

🆕 10th December 2025: Oxford, trains and back to London {United Kingdom, December 2025} https://jbinnacle.com/2026/05/09/10th-december-2025-oxford-trains-and-back-to-london-united-kingdom-december-2025/ #London #Oxford #JBinnacle #travel #NHMLondon #Fern #FernTheDiplodocus #Wicked #WickedLondona

I had an enlightening time being shown behind the scenes at London's Natural History Museum today. Huge thanks to the brilliant Josh Luke Davis, science writer at NHM, and to Alessandro Giusti, senior curator of Lepidoptera, for showing me the Museum's collection of gynandromorph butterflies. Wow! 🦋💜🦋

I made sure to say hi to Chas . . .

#NHMLondon #museum #science #biology #zoology #naturalhistory #animals #butterflies #Darwin #gynandromorph #queer #lgbtq #QueerInSTEM

If you've ever wondered just how big a Megalodon shark tooth is, here's your answer.

For comparison, a great white shark tooth would be around the size of the person's thumb.

The Latin binomial for the species, Otodus megalodon, literally means "big tooth" you will not be surprised to read.

Just how big these sharks grew is a matter for debate but 'huge' is one way of looking at it. Not as ridiculously big as in the terrible Meg films, though.

Taken at #NHMLondon, Jan 2016.

#FossilFriday

I knew I had my own photos... I was privileged enough to take these at a special event many years ago at the #NHMLondon: this is the real deal, the fossilised lower jaw of a Mastodon americanus - not a cast - purchased in 1844 and originally excavated in Missouri, USA. The teeth are what give Mastodon its name - mastos from breast and odous from tooth - and, no, I'm still not seeing the resemblance to breasts. Look closely and the teeth in this fossil are fantastically opalescent. #FossilFriday

This is a reproduction of one of my earliest #FossilFriday posts on this platform (foolishly, I let them all auto-delete). It's the Missouri Leviathan. Aka the American Mastodon.

Now housed in the central hall of #NHMLondon, this fossil was unearthed as part of a 'graveyard' of #Mastodon fossils by Albert Koch in 1840.

It's fair to say that Koch, being a showman interested in making money, took some liberties with his reconstruction of the fossilised animals he had found...

(1/5)

United Kingdom returns as GBIF Voting Participant 🎉 🥳 🇬🇧

With its renewed commitment, the UK rejoins 42 other countries that fund GBIF’s core global budget and signals support of national stakeholder community led by #NBNAtlas #NHMLondon #Kew #JNCC #Defra
https://www.gbif.org/news/11u1bN9BR32mDEhPLAgAYi/

One wouldn't mount #herbarium specimens like this anymore, but this one from #NHMLondon does have an artistic appeal.
#MastoArt #ModernArt #HerbariumLife #CuratorLife @museum

#Museum30 Day 30 - ‘Why Museum 30?'
Why posting 30 things about #museums? Because museums are more than the #exhibitions people visit. Museums have many objects visitors usually don't get to see (for various reasons not because we wouldn't want to), aspects people usually wouldn't think and people wouldn't know about. The #herbarium in the #NHMLondon is one of the lesser known parts. I hope got to know 'us' a bit better. :)
Stay curious!

#museodon

#Museum30 Day 28 - ‘Walls'
Quite in contrast to the amazing terracotta walls of the Waterhouse Building (the old part of the #NHMLondon), the walls in the General #Herbarium are more practical: white painted concrete. Except for a few posters to guide the users through our geographical systematic arrangement of the collections, we don't have much decoration.
A bit more colour offer the walls in the open plan office. A soothing pale violet.

#Museum30 Day 27 - ‘Plan'
The #NHMLondon is not just only big, it is actually like a maze. I'm regularly amazed to be shown new weird stairways around. Did you know, we have half storeys? I'm sure there is a plan, but an M.C. #Escher painting will make more sense, I guess.

#Museum30 Day 24 - ‘On screen'
I haven't been on screen as like TV so far, but I did a small video for the #NHMLondon on #peanuts. It was supposed to be a short video, so we had to focus on one specific aspect. I would have loved to tell more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLu1oW6rRrM

#Museum30 Day 23 - ‘Collage'
#Herbarium specimens are made for #science or #teaching nowadays. However, having plant collections was something like a nice #hobby to show around in the past, maybe similar to collecting stamps, baseball cards or car models.
The #NHMLondon also has some of those collections, which have much more of an ornamental focus. Quite often, other material was added to make it look prettier, which then is like a #collage of beautiful #plants
#mastoart

Museum30 Day 22 - ‘Orange'
Quite often, colours of #flowers fade when they dry. #Herbarium specimens therefore often look a bit disappointing. Some flowers, however, like this #Leonotis leonurus (wild #dagga) from #SouthAfrica keep their #colour well. The #orange is still amazingly bright in these two collections from the #NHMLondon are up to 250 years old. 😍😍😍

#Museum30 Day 21 - ‘View'
One exhibition at the #NHMLondon is the Coccoon where visitors can learn how #research is done. And they can even observe #researchers. #Herbarium guests (and staff) on the 5th floor are also part of the exhibition and sometimes can see kids waving their hands 👋. If you visited the Coccoon, have you ever wondered the view from the inside?
Here it is:

#Museum30 Day 20 - ‘Bookshelves'
While #herbaria are usually single sheets with pressed #plants nowadays, originally they were #books with pressed #flowers. The #NHMLondon has more than 1300 volumes of such books and collection sets. You can browse the complete dataset here: https://doi.org/10.5519/swp7oysf

We featured some amazing examples from this dataset in the latest NHM blog (published today!): https://naturalhistorymuseum.blog/2022/11/20/when-is-a-book-not-a-book-the-bound-volumes-and-exsiccatae-in-the-herbarium-at-the-natural-history-museum-curator-of-botany/
#histodon #museodon #HistoryOfScience #herbarium #library #tourism #WomenInSTEM

#Museum30 Day 19 - ‘Location'
The #herbarium at the #NHMLondon has #plant collections from all over the world. However, the specimens are not equally distributed because not all areas are equally surveyed and we do have some foci. The #map is biased towards species with a #research focus (e.g. #Himalaya, Central America) and type specimens, and although only 5% of the specimens are georeferenced, there is already a trend:

#Museum30 Day 17 - ‘Origin'
The #herbarium in the #NHMLondon has actually two origins: The "original origin" are the collections of Sir Hans #Sloane: apothecary, physician, promoter of #smallpox #vaccination, #quinine use against malaria, and inventor of milk #chocolate.

Decades later, the collections of British botanical imperial mastermind and world circumnavigator Sir Joseph #Banks were added, which laid the foundation of the main collection nowadays.
Read more here: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043

#Museum30 Day 17 - ‘Origin'
The #herbarium in the #NHMLondon has actually two origins: The "original origin" are the collections of Sir Hans #Sloane: apothecary, physician, promoter of #smallpox #vaccination, #quinine use against malaria, and inventor of milk #chocolate.

Decades later, the collections of British botanical imperial mastermind and world circumnavigator Sir Joseph #Banks were added, which laid the foundation of the main collection nowadays.
Read more here: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043

#Museum30 Day 17 - ‘Origin'
The #herbarium in the #NHMLondon has actually two origins: The "original origin" are the collections of Sir Hans #Sloane: apothecary, physician, promoter of #smallpox #vaccination, #quinine use against malaria, and inventor of milk #chocolate.

Decades later, the collections of British botanical imperial mastermind and world circumnavigator Sir Joseph #Banks were added, which laid the foundation of the main collection nowadays.
Read more here: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043

#Museum30 Day 17 - ‘Origin'
The #herbarium in the #NHMLondon has actually two origins: The "original origin" are the collections of Sir Hans #Sloane: apothecary, physician, promoter of #smallpox #vaccination, #quinine use against malaria, and inventor of milk #chocolate.

Decades later, the collections of British botanical imperial mastermind and world circumnavigator Sir Joseph #Banks were added, which laid the foundation of the main collection nowadays.
Read more here: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043

#Museum30 Day 15 - ‘Page'
Title pages of #books are often ornamental. #Herbaria bound in a book sometimes go further like this example from the #NHMLondon. Some #herbarium creators made amazing title pages and real #art.
#MastoArt

Mid-November and there are still colour polymorphic Cepaea nemoralis (grove snail) out and active in the UK; worldwide #iNaturalist records by month on right.

#UoN #BBSRC PhD student Margarethe Johansen will present an update (based on whole genome linkage map) in our quest to identify the colour and banding loci, this Thursday at #MolluscanForum #NHMLondon. Free registration, hybrid event [email protected] #Cepaea #grovesnail #Evolution #Polymorphism

#VinceSmith from #NHMLondon speaks about the values of UK specimen collections as environmental data stores through digitisation #DiSSCo #NBNconf22

[open position] at #NHMLondon
Vacancy for Senior Curator: Sternorrhyncha, Lice & Thrips

You like and/or do #research on #aphids, #thrips, #lice, #whiteflies etc.? Join us as curator!
https://careers.nhm.ac.uk/templates/CIPHR/jobdetail_internal_2656.aspx

#Entomology #bugs #zoology #taxonomy

It's November, which is the month of #Museum30.
Day 1 - #Museum.
I'm working in the #herbarium at the #NaturalHistoryMuseum in #London. The #NHMLondon was split off the #BritishMuseum in 1881, which itself was born out of Hans #Sloane's (1660-1753) collections of plants, animals, coins, manuscripts, books, antiquities etc.
The natural history collections have a long and complex history. Almost 2 years ago, I wrote a short piece on the history of the NHM #herbaria: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043