CUMS has organized a social outing at the University Zoological Museum (the New Museums Site, much to my surprise, actually has them). The museum is housed in the ground floor and basement of one of the Site’s numerous concrete cubes; a skeleton whale (theatrically floodlit by the beginning of our evening visit) hangs suspended over the entrance. Inside are even more skeletons: pangolins and giraffes, primates of all shapes, impossibly delicate hummingbids. More exciting, perhaps, are the boards of skewered insects and spirit jars filled with flaccid fish and cephalopods, many prepared by Darwin (a fanatical beetle-collector in his undergraduate days).
After pacing the galleries, flourescent, empty and echoing after hours, we are conducted into the storage rooms where the museum keeps items too precious, delicate or mundane to display. One of the numerous refrigerators, we are told, contains a recently-deceased rhinocerus cut into thin sections. The rooms reek of naphthalene. They are packed with beautiful wooden drawers full of “skins”, ex-animals preserved but unmounted, that department zoologists use in their studies; our guide says these resemble socks with faces. On a desk someone has left a whale aorta as large as a dinner plate in cross-section; a neatly-lettered label on a nearby box describes its contents as “dried stomachs, intestines, &c.” Eventually we’re taken to the real treasures: a complete (though composite) dodo skeleton, acquired by way of a familial relation between the museum director and the governor of Mauritius, and a cabinet housing a great auk, a passenger pigeon and various other specimens whose species have recently suffered the same fate.