More International Visitors at the Booth Museum

The Booth Museum has had two international visitors this month on very different missions. Both were from North America, and both are studying for their Ph.D.s.

Caitlin Silberman

First we welcomed Caitlin Silberman from California, but studying for her doctorate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is in the early stages of writing a dissertation on birds and bird/human hybridity in Victorian British art, visual culture, and material culture. One of her chapters deals with bird taxidermy, and the Booth Museum is of course a prime source for nineteenth-century taxidermy. Caitlin looked at all our archives about Mr. Booth, his diaries, catalogues and paintings, as well of course as his splendid 4-volume publication ‘Rough notes on the birds observed during twenty-five years’ shooting and Collecting in the British Islands, 1881-1887.

Michelle Campbell

Only a week later, we were happy to be able to help Michelle Campbell in her quest for Chalk fossils of some early representatives of marine reptiles. Michelle is studying for her doctorate at the University of Alberta, though she originally comes from Ottawa. She is interested in how land-based reptiles made the leap into becoming fully marine in their habits. Michelle’s supervisor, Prof. Mike Caldwell first visited the Booth Museum in 1995 and discovered our rich collection of 85 million year old fossils which he studied and published on. Michelle is extending those studies.

We take a great deal of pleasure in the knowledge that we are able to help people as diverse as scientists and art historians advance their studies by using the collections in the Booth Museum.

John Cooper, Keeper of Natural Sciences

The Booth Museum Stars in a New Fossil Project!

The fossil collections at the Booth Museum are currently getting some attention they deserve! Two scientists from the British Geological Survey (BGS) are spending a week with us photographing some of our most important specimens.

Dr Michaela Contessi and Simon Harris

International science codes require that every species or subspecies of organism, whether living or fossil, should have a type or reference specimen to define its characteristic features. These specimens are held in museums and collections around the world and must be available for study. The Booth’s collection of fossil type specimens are available to scientists all over the world through a catalogue.

Many of the UK fossil species were defined over a century ago, and with time, the type specimens may have deteriorated or been lost, causing major problems.

The GB/3D type fossils online project, funded through the BGS by JISC (the Joint Information Science Committee), aims to develop a single database of the type specimens held in British collections, of fossil species and subspecies found in the UK, including links to photographs and a selection of 3D digital models.

The BGS is partnered by:

• National Museum Cardiff
• Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences
• Oxford University Museum of Natural History
• Geological Curators’ Group

Together they will develop a collaborative database of British type specimens.

The results will be made available through a single searchable web database. It will include links to view or download high quality images, stereo pairs (anaglyphs) and digital models.

This week Dr Michaela Contessi and Simon Harris are working on the fossils held at the Booth Museum, and they are writing a blog of their work which can be seen here

John Cooper, Keeper of Natural Sciences

Chilled to the Bone

How many ice ages have there been in Earth’s past? Would you expect Britain to be hot or cold during an ice age? And just how big is a mammoth or a cave bear? With our latest exhibition – Chilled to the Bone – at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery we answer these questions and more.

The exhibition came about through a desire to show more of our archaeological collections as well as presenting some of our natural history collections held at the Booth to a wider audience in the centre of town. A new gallery called the Spotlight Gallery has been built on the upper floor of the Brighton Museum in the area previously occupied by the Body Gallery. This space has been designed to be a flexible space with large scale display cabinets suitable for a wide variety of collections, and used to showcase objects from the Brighton Museum collections.

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An initial plan for a Piltdown Man exhibition to tie in with the 100^th anniversary of the hoax was discounted due to a lack of material and a clash with a similar exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London. The idea was expanded to include an exhibition on ice ages throughout Earth’s history and on the archaeological discoveries resulting from a Victorian desire to learn more about these stages in our planet’s past, and how humans evolved. This Victorian ‘Bone Rush’ would also include the Piltdown fraud as one of the major events of Sussex archaeology. The exhibition also focuses particularly on the environment of Sussex during the most recent ice age, as well as Sussex archaeology and the search for human origins.

The design and construction of the exhibition was carried out by a small team working with a very limited budget. An additional challenge was that for much of the design stage of the exhibition, the cases were yet to be built. So mock ups were laid out in order to get a general idea of the look of each case and how well things fitted into the space.

The layout of the gallery is such that it was required to be as non-linear as possible as visitors can enter from three different directions, negating a start and end point. As such the intro panel is repeated at both ends of the gallery and each cabinet is built around a theme which should not require the visitor to have read text in a different cabinet before hand.

A welcome addition was an interactive program developed as part of a separate digital project. ‘Chilled to the Bone’ worked as a suitable test bed for the quiz program and allowed us to have a large scale projection and digital interactive that was otherwise out of our budget. The AV section sits alongside an activity wall and handling object to provide an uncluttered and entertaining ‘hands on’ area.

Huge thanks to everyone who worked on the design and installation of the gallery.

Lee Ismail, Curator of Natural Sciences