EuroTrip '08 - London: the Museum

Karen, aka Nunatak from the Beagle Project gave us, the science bloggers (including Professor Steve Steve) a special tour of the Darwin Center, a new wing of the Natural History Museum in London. This is where millions of specimens are deposited, studied, classified, described, etc. There are daily tours for the public (once a day for now), but a person can also contact them and ask to be shown a particular specimen.

Who was there? Mo (with his son), Euan, Ed, Malcolm, Matt, Kara, Alf, Selva, Karen, Professor Steve Steve and me.

Karen and Matt have more details of the tour, and Karen and Mo have posted some pictures on Flickr (I will, too, later, but for now you can find them on my Facebook profile) and here are some pictures for you here as well, under the fold:

Here is the front side of the Museum, where we all met:

This is the Darwin Centre:

And here is another wing, to be opened to public next year:

Karen and Steve Steve, read from the Birds volume of the Darwin's monograph of the Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (page open to cactus finches):

This is Archy, the giant squid:

This is a small sample of specimens collected by Darwin himself:

Here are some other nifty specimens - fish, snakes, a shark, a platypus, a pangolin, an anteater, a Komodo dragon, etc.: