The Perfect Specimen

@perfect-specimen.bsky.social

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A lighthearted look at natural history via objects in the NHM London collections, hung loosely on a different adjective every episode. Podcast available on Spotify, Apple and YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6w4ihPqk5_LOTuw-VhlaqEn1CctPqWGB

Donut plot showing the split of 113 specimens across the podcasts. Animal (90 specimens), plant (15), other (8).
Head of a badly stuffed rat
Stuffed cuckoo with a stick up its butt
Stuffed Galapagos tortoise with a label round its neck
Jar with a bat in it. The bat has its mouth wide open
Illustration from a 17th century book of The Boas. A scaled snake like creature with no limbs but a fat body, long tail in a knot, eating a person.
Black beetle in a white box. This one can be run over by a car and survive!
Mammal skull held by person. Skull is about hand sized. This is a quokka
A large jar with fluid inside and a big brown blob which is a sponge.
Henbane. A dried plant specimen with pale whitish flowers and green spiky leaves, flattened and stuck to card
Christmas Island shrew. Small stuffed brown shrew with a label attached to it. Next to it a test tube containing a tiny skull from the shrew.
Messor structor ants pinned in a box
Cute lil pufferfish in a jar
A red fox with one back paw stuck in a letterbox half way up a large back door to someone’s house. How it got like this no one knows…
Eggs in a basket. There are 4 rows each of 4 eggs. Top row is turquoise, second is grey, third is spring green, fourth is chocolate brown. All are shiny like porcelain.
Close up of the face of a Halloween crab. The claws and lower half of the face are white, the top of the carapace is a lovely dark red. The crab is preserved in a jar of alcohol
Line drawing from a paper that shows bellbird mating dsiplays. Panel A shows a male bellbird calling at the end of a branch and a female looking on from closer to the trunk of the tree. Panel B shows the male shaking his wattles and indicates he has now moved inside the female so she is now closer to the end of the tree branch and he is closer to the trunk. Panel C shows the female right at the end of the branch and the male crowding her and shouting into her ear.
Barchart showing distribution of specimens across animal phyla. Chordata = 15, Arthropoda = 8, Mollusca = 3, Annelida, Cnidaria, Echinodermata, Nemertea and Onychophora = 1. Chordata is coloured to show that we have most mammals (7) then fishes/reptiles (3), then birds/tunicates (1).
Crisp list set menus. Surf and Turf: scampi fries, bacon fries, skips. Ploughman’s: pickled onion monster munch, cheese quavers, ready salted hoops. Kids menu: Pom bears, skips, scampi fries
Taxidermy wildcat posed lying down and baring its teeth as if meowing angrily, in front is a dead looking red squirrel
Patches with images of space monkey Gordo and another of Able and Miss Baker.
Round brown ball pinned to a white background. On the top are loose bits of material. Looks like a tiny Alien egg…
A reconstruction of Anomalocaris, colour reddish. It's a segemented animal, a bit like an armoured squid. It has swimming flaps running along its body, large compound eyes, and a single pair of segmented, frontal appendages that look like long weird shrimp
Two images of the same fossil, the top panel shows the fossil itself. It's the torso of an ichthyosaur with a very small baby ichythosaur clearly peeking out of the centre. The bottom panel is the same image with the baby ichythosaur coloured in yellow, the paddle of the ichthyosaur in blue and the ribs in green.
A white woman with long red hair raising a crown in both hands above her head. She is wearing a floor length beautiful gown, all green, with long trailing sleeves. Some parts are green and shine like gems. These are the beetles.
Elton John Carpool meme (Elton John dressed in a massive prink feather boa, with pink glasses and feather headdress, sat next to his manager dressed in black.
A huge pyrosome under water with a diver riding it for scale.
Rectangular jar in portrait orientation. Inside is clear fluid and what looks like a white furry sock
Skull of a dugong. It is a very weird shaped skull with the snout and mouth pointing down at a 90 degree angle allowing the animal to graze on the bottom while still looking forwards. Skull is in a collections area so in the background there are some obvious striped legs of a zebra.
Black object on a white background. The black object is made of compressed thick hairs which are separate at the edges but still stuck together in the centre.