I just got back from Scotland where I had two science adventures. One was visiting the Surgeons' Hall Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. This included an exhibit on the history of surgery and a fantastic pathology exhibit with a display of disquieting abnormal tissue specimens. I will review this for the Web site in the near future.
The other was at the University of Glasgow, one of the most beautiful campuses I've seen (with a stunning chapel). I visited a small natural history museum called the Hunterian Museum, the oldest public museum in Scotland. Much of it was closed for renovations, but I did get to see some impressive fossils, including an ichthyosaur lush with spindly bones (left).
A few buildings away tucked in the department of zoology is the humble Zoology Museum, a large room and hallway filled with taxidermy animal specimens, each with a decades-old, hand-typed explanatory card. I saw my first pangolin (top), some monstrously large pickled worms (right), a leopard cat, and the skull of a blue antelope. The bluebuck, as the antelope is casually known, went extinct around the year 1800, and its remains are incredibly rare. They also have an impressive insect collection, including a Goliathus goliathus (right) found in 1770 floating down the river Gabon in West Africa. For 100 years it was revered by entomologists as the only known specimen of its kind, its species considered at the time to be the largest living insect and quite rare. Now these guys come a dime a dozen and it is barely noticed in this little museum-cum-study-hall for the lucky students of Glasgow.
NOTE: The Hunterian will be closed October 7 through March 7 for renovations.
