ArtScience Museum's new Treasures Of The Natural World features around 200 artefacts from the esteemed Natural History Museum in London. But if you expect to see only old rocks and bones on display, think again. Here are 6 things we learned from the show.

SINGAPORE: This weekend, the ArtScience Museum (ASM) goes old school.

After its previous futuristic shows that tackled aliens, outer space and robots, the museum is going back in time with Treasures Of The Natural World, the highly anticipated show done in collaboration with the esteemed Natural History Museum in London.



Around 200 artefacts, from skeletons of extinct animals to mysterious rare objects, are on display until April 2018. And it will be the first time that the 190-year-old institution has allowed pieces from its humongous collection of around 80 million to travel to Southeast Asia.

A model of the extinct Dodo (right) with actual bone pieces that have been found. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

A big deal? You bet. ASM executive director Honor Harger says many of the objects here have “completely revolutionised our understanding of science and the natural world.”

So what should visitors expect? Here are some interesting back stories that should whet your appetite.



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1. 19TH CENTURY FOLK LOVED THEIR DINOSAURS AND OTHER DEAD ANIMALS

Fun fact: The person credited with pushing for the building of the museum back in 1881 – a certain Sir Richard Owen – also coined the word “dinosaur”.

And while there aren’t any T-rexes to be found here, the range of creatures being namechecked and displayed gives visitors a glimpse of just how rich the animal kingdom is (or was).

A skeleton of a sabre-toothed cat from 12,000 years ago. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

There are fossilised giant trilobites piled atop each other (supposedly dying during a “mass mating event”); teeth from the megalodon, the ultimate monster shark; and an ichthyosaur fossil discovered by Mary Anning, one of the rare women collecting such items at that time. And don’t forget, the much-talked about skeletons of a giant sloth and a sabre-toothed cat.

Others have a more sobering past: There are species here went extinct thanks to humans: The hapless dodo was hunted as souvenirs by explorers and sailors to Mauritius; the moa was killed off by the Maori in New Zealand well before the Europeans arrived; and the Tasmanian tiger is said to have been officially died out only during the last century.

A skeleton of the extinct Moa as well as a selection of Moa feathers. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

2. EXOTIC ANIMALS WERE KEPT AS PETS

Charles Darwin wasn’t just busy working in the Galapagos. He was also taking care of an unusual pet – a juvenile giant tortoise he had found walking around in his cabin one day. It had the nickname James after the island where it was found.

It’s on display in a section that features other Darwin-related artefacts such as an adult tortoise and lots of barnacles.

But the exhibition also hints at a darker side to this fascination with exotic animals. Elsewhere, there’s a stuffed cassowary that was bred by a certain Walter Rothschild in the UK itself. The famous collector was notorious for amassing unusual animals (both living and mounted) and zoological artefacts. In fact, there have been photos of him riding carriages pulled by trained zebras.

A selection from artefacts from Charles Darwin including two tortoises. The smaller one to the left was his pet juvenile tortoise James. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

Another unfortunate specimen is the skull of a lion from around 600 years ago. It was discovered in the Tower of London, which was home to a menagerie of animals ranging from polar bears to elephants. The royalty of that time would either show off to guests or use for animal fights. DNA analysis has revealed that the lion – and by extension every other animal there – was poorly treated to they point that they may have been paralysed and blind.

But not everyone back in the day were horrible to animals though. Try and look for the mummified cat, who were certified VIPs under the cat-worshipping Egyptians during ancient times.

An ancient Egyptian mummified cat from the Natural History Museum in London. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

3. PEOPLE WORE FOSSILS AS FASHION ACCESSORIES

Discovering and collecting fossils were common during the 19th century, but some people took it even further by turning these into fashion accessories.

One example in the show is the Dudley locust brooch. It’s actually a 430 million-year-old trilobite – the ancestor of the horseshoe crab – that were apparently fashionable to wear during that time.

A "cursed" amethyst (left) and a Dudley locust brooch, which includes a trilobite fossil. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

Not all jewellery were popular though. Also on display is a “cursed amethyst” that its terrified owner had tried to throw away because it brought him extremely bad luck. He later donated it to the museum along with a letter warning people that it was “trebly accursed”.

4. ARTISTS WERE ALSO CONTRIBUTING TO SCIENCE

Scientists, explorers and naturalists may be the ones feted for many discoveries in the natural history world, but let’s not forget the artists.

Often, they would make the voyage alongside these men of science to make drawings, illustrations or even sculptures that people could then refer to.

A page from The Birds Of America by John James Audobon, who was also a painter. (Photo: Mayo Martin)

The American naturalist John James Audubon was also a painter who is known for his Birds Of America book, which featured 25 new species in the 1800s. During Captain Cook’s voyage to Australia and New Zealand, the explorer brought along a botanical artist named Joseph Banks, who drew some the plant specimens he encountered in the region.

5. DARWIN WAS THE STAR, WALLACE WAS THE UNDERDOG

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were separately working towards the theory of evolution by natural selection. Unfortunately, the latter got the short end of the stick as Darwin took all the glory while Wallace was mainly known for his book on the Malay Archipelago.

“Wallace is often considered a kind of unsung hero, who was working on the same ideas as Darwin but had a lot less means and was exploring a different part of the world. He was a kind of outsider and underdog, while Darwin had a lot of backers who would send him on voyages,” said Harger.

An original page from Darwin’s On The Origin of Species manuscript, along with a finch, mockingbird and pigeon skeleton that he studied when formulating his theory. (Photo: Natural History Museum in London)

But while there are some interesting Darwin-related objects in the show (including his aforementioned pet tortoise James and a handwritten page from his groundbreaking Origin Of Species), the show is quite the homecoming for Wallace.

On display for the first time in Singapore are beetle specimens he had gathered during his time exploring the Malay Archipelago, aka what’s now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

An interactive map for children featuring Alfred Wallace's famous Wallace Line. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

And he might not be as famous as Darwin, but Wallace did come to be known for something very important: The so-called Wallace Line, a boundary that cuts through Indonesia that proved that species on the east of it were totally different from those on the west.

6. 21ST CENTURY EXPLORATION IS A BIT DIFFERENT

You might think of an esteemed institution like the Natural History Museum London as simply a place where old objects are kept and exhibited – but you’d be wrong.

According to Jim Broughton, the museum’s head of international engagement, the part that’s open to the public comprises only 20 per cent of the floor area. The rest is where the real action takes place.

One of the laboratories at London's Natural History Museum can be seen in the background at this section of ArtScience Museum's show Treasures Of The Natural World. (Photo: Marina Bay Sands)

“In some ways, it’s easier to think of the museum as a campus,” he said. The museum has 350 scientific staff in its payroll and welcomes 10,000 visiting researchers every year, all of whom take advantage of the fact that 85 per cent of the museum’s entire collection is stored onsite as well.

And while the Darwins and Cooks of the past were busy discovering worlds the old-fashioned way, a lot of the exploration today employs more high-tech means like cryogenics and DNA.



One of the museum’s current projects is trying to look at the “bacterial life of cities”, where instead of plunging into dense rainforests, they’ve enlisted students from 500 schools in the UK who have swabbed the walls of their buildings to gather bacteria to look at the “microfauna of cities”.

One of the lion statues at the Natural History Museum in London has found its way in Singapore. (Photo: Mayo Martin)

As boring as it may sound to people weaned on David Attenborough’s exciting documentaries, there’s a point to this, said Broughton.

“It’s about trying to understand that discovery lies all around us. We’re showing that biodiversity really is everywhere – and not just in tropical forests or coral reefs,” he said.



