One of my favourite museums in the world, and certainly one of the best natural history museums in the UK, is Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, AKA “University Museum of Zoology at Cambridge” (UMZC). It is now nearing a lengthy completion of renovations; the old museum exhibits and collections were excellent but needed some big changes along with the re-fabbed “David Attenborough Building” that houses them. As a longtime fan of the exhibits and user of the collection (and microCT scanner), I hurried to see the new museum once it officially opened.
And that makes a great excuse to present a photo-shoot from my visit. This focuses on the “mammal floor” below the entrance- the upper floor(s?) are still being completed and will have the birds, non-avian tetrapods, fish, etc. But the UMZC is strong in mammals and so it is natural for them to feature them in this chock-full-o-specimens display. Less talk, more images. Here we go!
All images can be clicked to mu-zoom in on them.
Stomach-Churning Rating: 3/10; bones and taxidermy and innocuous jars.
The building. The whale skeleton that hung outside for years is now cleaned up and housed right inside; you walk under it as you enter.
Entrance.
First view past the entryway: lots of cool specimens.
View from the walkway down into the ground/basement level from the entry. As specimens-per-unit-volume goes, the UMZC still scores highly and that is GOOD!
Explanation of frog dissection image below.
Gorgeous old frog dissection illustration; such care taken here.
Leeuwenhoek’s flea woodcut; I think from Arcana Naturae Detecta (1695). There is an impressive display of classic natural history books near the entryway.
Dürer/other rhino art image and info.
Darwin was famed for collecting beetles when he should have been studying theology at Cambridge as a youth, and here is some of his collection. Dang.
Darwin’s finches!
Darwin kicked off some of his meticulous work with volumes on barnacles; specimens included here; which helped fuel insights into evolution (e.g. they are “retrograde” crustaceans, not mollusks).
Darwin’s voyage: fish & other preserved specimens.
I think this is a solitaire weka (flightless island bird; see Comment below). I’ve never seen them displayed w/skeleton + taxidermy; it’s effective here.
Eryops cast. More early tetrapods will surely be featured on the upper floor; this one was on the timeline-of-life-on-Earth display.
I LOVE dioramas and this seabird nesting ground display is very evocative, especially now that I’ve visited quite a few such islands.
Mammal introduction; phylogenetic context.
Monotreme glory.
UMZC is well endowed with thylacines and this one is lovely.
“TAZ FEEL NAKED!”
Narwhal above!
Rhinocerotoidea past, present, and fading glory. 😦
Ceratotherium white rhino. The horn is not real; sadly museums (and even zoos) across the world have to worry about theft of such things, given that some people think these horns are magic.
Ceratotherium staring match. You lose.
Ceratotherium stance.
Foot of a Sumatran rhino juxtaposed with a horse’s for Perissodactyla didaction.
A tapir. As a kid, I used to wander around the house pretending to be a tapir but I did not know what noise they’d make so I’d say “tape tape tape!”.
Big Southern Elephant Seal.
Squat little fur seal.
Hippopotamus for the lot of us. (baby included)
Hippo facedown.
Skull of a dwarf Madagascar hippo.
Cave bear and sabretooth cat make an impressive Ice Age demo.
It’s a wombat.
Ain’t no don like a Diprotodon! (also note its modern miniature cousin the wombat, below)
Diprotodon facial.
Diprotodon shoulder: big clavicles bracing that joint region.
Diprotodon knee: even in big marsupials, the “parafibula”/lateral sesamoid of the knee is still generally present. And why it is there/what it does deserves much more study.
Diprotodon hip. I just find this animal’s anatomy fascinating head-to-tail.
Diprotodon front foot. Absolutely freakish.
Diprotodon hind foot. Even weirder.
Your view after having been trampled in a supine position by a Diprotodon. Not a good way to go.
Diprotodon got back.
Elephant seal’s butt continues my series of photos of big animals’ bottoms.
Asian elephant’s butt view.
African elephant butt.
Sectioned elephant skull to show pneumatic resonating chambers.
Paenungulates: hyraxes, Sirenia, elephants & kin (evolutionary demo).
AND MY HYRAX!
Sorry. Had to.
Megatherium side view.
Megatherium. Yeah!
Megatherium hindlegs fascinate me. Well-heeled.
Tamandua duo.
Silky anteater; wonderful.
Armadillos.
Anteaters round out a fab display on Xenarthra.
The UMZC has everything from aardvarks to zebus. Here, conceptualized with other Afrotheria.
Golden moles: the more I read about them, the more they fascinate me.
We can all use some more solenodons in our lives!
Example of the phylogenetic context used throughout exhibits.
If you’ve got a good Okapi taxidermy, you’d better use it.
It’s a giraffe. Did you guess right?
Gerenuk showing off its bipedal capacity.
Warthogs have an inner beauty.
Pangolin. Glad to see it back on exhibit.
Nice little brown bear.
Double-barrelled shot of hyenas.
Colugo!
Nice to see some Scandentia featured.
My brain says this is a springhare (Pedetes) so I am going with what my brain says and anyway I really like this display.
When I saw this I thought, “That’s a nice… rodent thingy.” And so “rodent thing” it shall be labelled here. Enjoy the rodent thingy. Some serious taxidermy-fu in action.
Moonrats– now there’s something you seldom see a full display of. Well done!
That’s part I of this sneak peek at the evolving exhibits- I will put up a part II once the upper floor exhibits open. I highly encourage a visit!
For Mike: 
What's In John's Freezer? 
[…] Here’s another fine example, from John Hutchinson’s new post A Museum Evolves: […]
Wow, John, what a fantastic post, from such a great museum! Many thanks for putting all these up. I stole the solitaire shot for this brief “necks lie” post, since the photo tells the whole story.
That narwhal has two tusks. I asked myself “How rare is that?”, then found the answer on Wikipedia: “About one in 500 males has two tusks, occurring when the right canine also grows out through the lip.”
That Ceratotherium stance bothers me, because basically nothing stands four-square like that. Even big, heavy mammals like cows stand with their legs much closer to the midline. Do you think this is an oddity of Ceratotherium, or just a museum-mounting convention? I see that the two elephant-butt shots both show the lower legs bending outwards from the inward-directed trajectory of the femora, as though to force the feet to be further apart than the skeleton wants them to be.
That sectioned elephant skull is awesome. Matt’s gonna flip when he sees that pneumaticity.
I don’t get the “And my hyrax” joke.
Finally: I’ve not seen the re-opened museum, but I saw it in its pre-renovation form at an SVPCA a few years ago. How is the new version better? (I only ask because the old version was so superb already.) Have they managed to get more specimens out on display?
Thanks Mike! Hmm yeah the Ceratotherium forelimbs do seem a bit splayed but I’m sure it’s within normal range of motion, if not normal posture. We need to know more about real-life standing poses though; hard to be 100% sure through all that skin.
LOTR Gimli “And my axe!” meme lame joke.
How is it better? More modern signage, phylogenetic context, better usage of skeletons w/taxidermy for same species/genus (I don’t remember there being much of that before), restoration of specimens that needed fixing/cleaning, easier to get up close (and walk around) many specimens, good fit to current faculty research (e.g. Rob Asher on Afrotheria etc.; Jason Head on snakes etc.); those are some thoughts.
Oh and the entry way (top pic) is all new; with gift shop, upper floor cafe, etc. Whale now being indoors instead of exposed to the elements surely makes curators happier.
I guess the problem of habitual quadrupedal stance is like that of habitual neck posture: bones alone can’t tell us what we want to know. In fact, even completely preserved corpses can’t, really — we need to observe actual behaviour.
I can’t believe I missed the LotR reference. Now I need to go find myself a paedomorphic amphibian so I can do “And my axolotl!”.
I know having the whale inside makes more sense from a conversation perspective, but I can’t lamenting the loss of a truly unique feature. Oh well — sounds like the other changes more than make up for it. (Except wasting exhibit space on a git shop.)
Extra image added in your honour at the end of the post.
Haha, nice!
Grar post, John,
certainly going to view it when I’m back in Little England.
I was in Geneva at the Bodmer (book) foundation. To protect the specimens, they only show one page of a rare book, allow however virtual interaction on the screen with the whole. In historic art museums, statues are painted by laser in original colours. In other words, the exhibits are made to come alive by mixing virtual and material reality.
What you posted looks to me as “one damn bone after another” – stamp collecting at an evolutionary scale. Is there a live and interactive section? Like showing how all the muscle layers coalesce in a dyno’s leg or kangaroo, for the matter? You would be the master and commander of such a show, and justifiably so.
Sure, give me a few million pounds and I’ll see what I can do! But no, this is a classic zoological museum. There are things to read but not much dressing up with new-fangled technology, which I’m not so much a fan of myself in natural history museums. Real animals allow a more real, personal connection than virtual ones, in my view, but opinions will vary and humanity is becoming more of a digitally-minded species.
My take on this: digital exhibits are just fine; but I can see those right here on my sofa, thanks to the Internet. When I go to a museum, I want to experience the things I can’t get on my sofa, which means actual physical stuff. Or, if you prefer, “one damn bone after another”. That’s pretty much my definition of an awesome museum.
This looks like an amazing museum. I need to make my way over there at some point.
That bird is probably not a solitaire though. I don’t think taxidermied solitaires exist, for one thing, but if they did, the bird lacks the fleshy cere that is a columbiform trademark. The very robust bill of the solitaire is also quite different. Here are some mounted solitaire skeletons for comparison.
The bird looks more like a rail to me, maybe a weka (which, as it happens, would still make it a flightless island bird).
Ahh thanks, that makes a lot of sense; was unsure about the solitaire ID! (no label yet, that I recall)
While I’m doing my detective work – I think the weka is the western weka (Gallirallus australis australis). The weka are made up of four subspecies, therefore very similar, but the western weka looks most likely and, according to their database, they do have that subspecies in ‘skin’.
Although, the only one it can’t be is the Stewart Island weka (Gallirallus australis scotti), because they don’t have one, unless it was misidentified – it does look to have the correct beak actually.
[…] hour in Cambridge this weekend so I dared the crowds in the revamped UMZC’s upper floor. In my prior visit and post I’d experienced and described the lower floor, which is almost exclusively mammals. This […]
[…] heard that the UMZC has some new exhibits open, so back I went! For the prior posts see here (mammals/basement) and here (everything else). Another photo tour! There’s a special (art) exhibit, too, so […]
[…] new UMZC in Cambridge became a theme on this blog: my first visit to the renovated exhibits and building were followed by a second, and then a third! Click those […]
Great article, Prof.JotF! Is any idiot actually allowed to photograph? I have to get to this museum – it looks amazing! I didn’t know it existed.
…It’s pedetes capensis, the South African springhare (AKA, springhaas).
It looks almost identical to p.surdaster,
but according to their records they only have the springhaas as ‘skin + osteo’.
They have them listed separately as spring hare and springhare in the database (which is probably an error).
I am currently cheating at Jack Ashby’s Twitter close-up specimen quiz, which brought me to your blog.
https://www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk/collection/online
Hi, and thanks! Yes, anyone could come in once they re-open after Lockdown ends(!?), and they allow photos. It is superb!
It does look pristine and beautiful. We’re going to Tring ASAP because it’s 20 minutes away, then I will see if we all get the bug and go to Cambridge.
…I like their online database – that cute springhare was collected at Vredefort Road, 21-06-1901, which was a British concentration camp at that time, during the Boer War!
https://www2.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/bccd/Histories/Vredefort_Road/