I went to the Natural History Museum here in London and did a Behind the Scenes tour of what they call the Spirit Collection in the Darwin Centre, which is a place with active science labs in which they study, analyze, preserve, and store animal specimens within the museum. I found the name Spirit Collection delightful for a couple reasons: first, because it is the collection of preserved specimens in the museum, so ‘spirit’ could have a ghostly kind of meaning (which I find fun and ironic), and second, because I came to learn that they store these specimens in a solution of alcohols (~95% ethanol and ~5% methanol), so spirits.
That addition of methanol makes the ethanol classified as not drinkable, or denatured. Denatured alcohol was what folks were drinking back during Prohibition times in the United States when there was not legal, commercial alcohol available. It is terrible for human consumption because methanol is horribly poisonous, acting on our optic nerves and causing blindness, and then a slow death. Our guide warned us against drinking from the specimen jars for that reason (for THAT reason…as if the nature of what they are ALREADY isn’t a deterrent!). This alcohol solution helps to preserve the tissue without denaturing the genetic material (so that it can be collected and analyzed, if needed, at a later date). When you walk down into the storage area, you can smell the alcohol in the air (sort of an angel’s cut type thing, if you are familiar with whiskey making, but grosser).
Ethanol is the primary component in beer, wine, and spirits and whose volume is commercially measured by ‘proof’. I think proof is a fun unit because early ways to show the alcohol content of something were to burn it, which proved that it contained alcohol. Proof is 2 times the alcohol percentage by volume, so if you have a whiskey that is 80 proof, it is 40% ethanol and the rest is water. I am not sure that we could talk about the proof of the spirit solutions at the Natural History Museum since they are not aqueous solutions (mixed with water), but if we could, they would be outrageous. The ‘proof’ would easily be ascertained in the presence of a heat source and, for that reason, our guide said that the specimens have to be stored at 13-16oC, which is below the flash point of ethanol.
The specimens themselves are stored in long banks of lockers, for the smaller specimens anyway, and there is a whole room (the ‘tank room’) for the larger specimens…including an 8.6 meter long giant squid they affectionately call Archie because the genus name for giant squid is Architeuthis. I thought that was cute – the name, not the squid (see below) – though I was mysteriously craving calamari for the rest of the day.
The Darwin Centre is obviously named after Charles Darwin (1809-1882), famed naturalist and proposer of the theory of evolution through natural selection, though Darwin never actually stepped foot in the Natural History Museum because of some beef with its first curator, Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892). I will save that story for another post, but the short, short version is that Owen was pretty famously kind of awful, in spite of his brilliance as a naturalist himself and being integral in getting the Natural History Museum built in the form it is today (definitely more on this in a future post – just talked myself into it). The reason I decided to do the tour is that many of Darwin’s original specimens from his voyage on the HMS Beagle are housed in the Spirit Collection. It was very cool to see specimen jars with Darwin’s handwriting on them. I really geek out about such things – I like seeing historical signatures and documents – it is so amazing to me to think that Charles Darwin was writing on that piece of paper almost 200 years ago.
The white labels are newer, which you can tell by eye, but the original labels with Darwin’s original script are at the top of the specimen jars there and you can see recognizable names, places, species, etc. The other thing to note is the yellow tops to some of the jars – these indicate ‘type samples’.
A type sample, which was a new term to me, is essentially a reference sample. It is the first known sample of a particular organism that all future samples are compared against to see if they are of the same species or not. You can see just from these few photos that many of Darwin’s samples are type samples.
Fun story (while I’m bouncing all over the place): that turtle in the above photo was not thought to be labelled and was originally used on some early curator’s desk as a paperweight. They found the label under the carapace at some point and added it to the collection of Darwin’s specimens, where it belonged!
Ok – but, I promised a story about an octopus in the title. This was one I had not heard before. Apparently on his voyage on the HMS Beagle in 1832, Darwin collected an octopus of the coast of what they called at the time St. Jago (Santiago, which is the largest of the the Cape Verde Islands – off the west coast of Africa). This is allegedly one of the first species he collected on his trip, which began in 1831 (Cape Verde was the first stop). He was mesmerized by its ability to maneuver in tight spaces, spew ink, and to change colors and decided to essentially keep it as a pet for as long as he was able to keep it alive on board the ship. He thought, at the time, he had discovered a new species, so it was originally labeled something else, but it turned out to just be a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris). If you want a little more detail, there is a great account on the Natural History Museum’s website. I find Darwin’s excitement and delight at this creature very endearing and relatable. I love the child-like enthusiasm and joy in learning about the world around us – be it mundane and common, magical and ethereal, or somewhere in between.
