A photo blog post for ya here! I went to Dublin on a ~28 hour tour, for a PhD viva (now-Dr Xia Wang; bird feather/flight evolution thesis) earlier this month. And I made a beeline for the local natural history museum (National Museum of Ireland, Natural History building) when I had free time. So here are the results!
Stomach-Churning Rating: Tame; about a 1/10 for most, but I am going to break my rule about showing human bodies near the end. Just a warning. The bog bodies were too awesome not to share. So that might be 4/10-8/10 depending on your proclivities. They are dry and not juicy or bloody, and don’t look as human as you’d expect.
Simple Natural History museum entrance area.
Adorable frolicking topiaries outside the NHM.
Inside, it was a classical Victorian-style, dark wood-panelled museum stuffed with stuffed specimens. It could use major refurbishment, but I do love old-fashioned exhibits. Get on with it and show us the animals; minimize interpretive signage and NO FUCKING INTERACTIVE COMPUTER PANELS! So by those criteria, I liked it. Some shots of the halls: 
And on to the specimens!
Giant European deer (“Irish elk”). I looked at these and thought, “why don’t we see female deer without antlers ever? then noticed one standing next to these (you can barely see it in back); too bad my photo is crappy.
Superb mounted skeleton of giraffe (stuffed skin was standing near it).
A sheep-y or a goat-y beastie; I dunno but it shows off a nice example of the nuchal ligament (supports the head/neck).
Yarr, narwhals be internet gold!
Giant blown glass models of lice!
Who doesn’t like a good giant foramanifera image/model?
“That’s one bigass skate,” I murmured to myself.
“That’s one bigass halibut,” I quipped.
Tatty basking shark in entry hall.
Irish wolfhound, with a glass sculpture of its spine hanging near it, for some reason.
Stand back everyone! That beaver has a club!
Skull of a pilot whale/dolphin.
Nice anteater skeleton and skin.
Nice wombat skeleton and skin.
Sad display of a stuffed rhino with the horn removed, and signage explaining the problem of thefts of those horns from museum specimens of rhinos worldwide.
But then the stuffed animals started to get to me. Or maybe it was the hangover. Anyway, I saw this…
A proboscis monkey mother who seemed to be saying “Hey kid, you want this yummy fruit? Tough shit. I’m going to hold it over here, out of reach.” with a disturbing grimace. That got me thinking about facial expressions in stuffed museum specimens of mammals more, and I couldn’t help but anthropomorphize as I toured the rest of the collection, journeying deeper into surreality as I progressed. What follows could thus be employed as a study of the Tim-Burton-eseque grimaces of stuffed sloths. Click to emslothen.
Tree anteater has a go at the awkward expression game.
This completed my tour of the museum; there were 2 more floors of specimens but they were closed for, sigh, say it with me… health and safety reasons. Balconies from which toddlers or pensioners or drunken undergrads could accidentally catapult themselves to their messy demise upon the throngs of zoological specimens below. But the National Museum’s Archaeology collection was just around the block, so off I went, following whispered tales of bog bodies. There will be a nice, calm, pretty photo, then the bodies, so if peaty ~300 BCE cadavers are not your cup of boggy tea, you can depart this tour now and lose no respect.
Impressive entrance to the National Museum’s Archaeology building.
The bog bodies exhibit is called “Kingship and Sacrifice“. It is packed with cylindrical chambers that conceal, and present in a tomb-like enclosed setting, the partial bodies of people that were killed and then tossed in peat bogs as honoraria for the ascension of a new king. The peaty chemistry has preserved them for ~2300 years, but in a dessicated, contorted state. The preservation has imparted a mottled colouration and wrinkled texture not far off from a Twix chocolate bar’s. Researchers have studied the bejesus out of these bodies (including 3D medical imaging techniques) and found remarkable details including not just wounds and likely causes of death (axes, strangling, slit throats etc) but also clothing, diet, health and more.
Here they are; click to (wait for it)… emboggen:
Finally (actually this happened first; my post is going back in time), I visited UCD’s zoology building for the PhD viva and saw a few cool specimens there, as follows:
Giant deer in UCD zoology building foyer, with a lovely Pleistocene landscape painted on the wall behind it.
Sika deer in an awkward posture (what is it supposed to be doing?) in Univ Coll Dublin zoology building’s foyer.
The pose of this ?baboon?mandrill struck me as very peculiar and menacing- reminiscent of a vampire bat’s pose.
A whole lotta chicken skeletons in a UCD teaching lab.
After the viva we went out for some nice Chinese food and passed some Dublin landmarks like this:
Trinity College entrance, I think.Former Irish Parliament; now the Bank of Ireland.
And we wandered into a very posh Irish pub called the Bank (on College Green), which displayed this interesting specimen, as well as some other features shown below:
Replica of illuminated 9th Century gospel manuscript “The Book of Kells”, with gorgeous Celtic art.
Vaults near toilets in the Bank pub. Almost as cool as having giant freezers down there.
Nice glass ceiling of the Bank pub.
And Irish pub means one big, delicious thing to me, which I will finish with here– much as I finished that night off:
Ahhh… ice cold.
What's In John's Freezer? 
Glad you made it to Dublin and had a chance to visit the museum. It was actually renovated just a few years ago, but they (to my mind) rightly kept most of the original features of the museum intact. The renovation was mostly concerned with making sure the building didn’t fall down…
By the way, the photo of the nice building near the Bank pub (which incidentally used to be my local – lovely inside, good food, mediocre Guiness…) is the Irish Parliament / Bank of Ireland. Trinity is on the other side of the road.
Thanks for sharing your visit!
This is freaking fantastic.
Dublin’s on my list of natural history museums I’d like to see in my lifetime, and thanks to you, I know exactly what I want to see most when I’m there.
I love the “random ungulates” hanging everywhere in the hall, and the derp!sloths were fantastic. I got a picture once of an awkward expression on a tiger in the Chicago Field Museum that rivals those, even. If you’ve been, I’m sure you know the one I’m talking about.
Irish Elk have always been one of my favorite paleo-creatures, so seeing them “in their native habitat” so to speak (on Irish soil) is also awesome, and that mural behind one of them was cool. I’m glad I’m not the only one wondering why female deer specimens are never shown with any regularity. It was nice to see that they included one.
Love your blog so much, for so many reasons. I’m an Anthropology major with an eye toward Paleontology and a focus on the Pleistocene, so it’s always fascinating to see everything you post. I get excited when I see a new post from you in my RSS feeds. 🙂
Thanks Joshua, that’s wonderful to hear!
Thanks for another interesting read, John. That baboon is fairly robust, could it possibly be a mandrill?
And I was surprised that you managed to find an Irish pub in Ireland as I had assumed that they must all be here in Australia.
Good point; could be a mandrill. The big skull did have me scratching my own head. I wondered if it was a mismatch of specimens. There was no label.
Nice! (there are a few Tet Zoo ver 2 posts on the Dublin collections: so, you didn’t get to see the birds on the upper level?). That ‘baboon’ skeleton: gnarly, inflated maxillae and very long humeri indicate that it is indeed a (male) mandrill (I think). Note the similar weird posture of the ?gibbon in the background.
Ahh yes, I see the Tet Zoo posts now, beginning here for the benefit of all:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/04/06/stuffed-megamammal-week-day-1/
and here
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/09/10/56th-svpca-hello-dublin/
Thanks Darren!
I probably could have bugged the curator to get to see the upper floors, but I didn’t have much time there and will be back in March for a seminar anyway.
Should I feel bad that all I could think of when looking at the bog body torso was the pokemon, Geodude? Oh man.
Loved the photos, my partner’s brother lives in Ireland so we’ll have to try and visit him and the museum sometime soon. I’m also another person who loves the Irish elks(they were always one of my childhood favourites at the London Natural History) 😀
Glad to hear it, thanks!
I feel obligated to point out that in the ‘giant glass models of lice’ picture, the two most prominent individuals are in fact scabies mites. The one on far left past the flea is still a louse. Lovely models, nevertheless.