“I will take great care of your specimens.” ( According to the History Blog, when the packages were late, Darwin was so concerned that he actually put an ad in the paper offering a reward for their return.) “It is a noble collection, & I feel most grateful to you for having entrusted them to me,” Darwin wrote Steenstrup when he received the box of barnacles in January 1850. In the decade before he published On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin corresponded with Japetus Steenstrup, then head of the Royal Natural History Museum in Denmark (the precursor to the current Natural History Museum’s Zoological Museum), who lent Darwin some fossilized barnacles in November 1849 for his Species research. ![]() Joakim Engel, Statens Natuhistoriske Museum Scientists have named the skeleton-which once belonged to a muscular middle-aged man standing 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches-Noah, because he lived after a great flood that had covered southern Iraq. Monge told Hafford that she had no records of a skeleton like that, but did have a mystery skeleton in a box-and after the box was opened it was clear that the 6500-year-old skeleton was the one unearthed during Woolley’s excavation. Woolley’s field notes contained photos of the archaeologist “removing an Ubaid skeleton intact, covering it in wax, bolstering it on a piece of wood, and lifting it out using a burlap sling,” according to the museum. “Further research into the museum's object record database indicated that one of those skeletons, 31-17-404, deemed ‘pre-flood’ and found in a stretched position, was recorded as ‘not accounted for’ as of 1990.” Among a number of items on the list were “one tray of ‘mud of the flood’ and ‘two skeletons,’” the press release notes. According to a press release, half of the artifacts stayed in the newly formed nation of Iraq, and the other half was split between the two museums that had sponsored the excavation, the British Museum and the Penn Museum. William Hafford, Ur digitization project manager, and his team found records indicating which unearthed objects went to which museums after Woolley's dig. But no one understood its significance until this 2014, when researchers were working to digitize records from Sir Leonard Woolley’s 1929-30 excavation at the site of Ur in southern Iraq. It had been at the museum as long as she had been. Janet Monge, curator-in-charge of the physical anthropology section of the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, had always known about the mystery skeleton, which sat in a wooden box in basement storage. Researchers at the museum can use the historical specimens “to study the effect of changing environments on plants and animals around the world,” Barclay said. The specimens aren’t just a cool find they also have scientific value. Although the specimens were technically the property of the government, they were never published, so selling them quietly would have been relatively easy. The beetles were among a collection of 15,000 insects left to the museum by lawyer and amateur entomologist Edward Young Western when he died in 1924 he may have acquired the specimens from one of the members of the expedition at a natural history auction in the 1860s. I have worked here for more than 10 years and it was a complete surprise and incredibly exciting to find these well-preserved beetles, brought back from Africa 150 years ago almost to the day.” ![]() Barclay, the museum's collections manager of Coleoptera and Hymenoptera, said the beetle hoard “includes almost 10 million specimens, assembled over centuries. David Livingstone, who collected the insects during his Zambezi expedition of 1858–64, the first European venture to reach and explore Lake Malawi in Africa. In October 2014, while he was searching the collections of London's Natural History Museum, Max Barclay found a wooden box with 20 beetles pinned inside and labeled “Zambezi coll. Here are just a few examples of specimens and artifacts that were lost, then found, in museums. Museums often have millions of items in their collections, so it’s not surprising that things occasionally get misidentified or even lost-but it must be a nice surprise to rediscover them.
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