Jack Ashby - Animal Kingdom

First published 2017

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Jack Ashby, 2017

The right of Jack Ashby to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8613 7

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My home contains many skulls, fossils, rocks, shells, bones, and teeth. Most are reminders of trips Ive taken and things Ive seen natural souvenirs from my life as a zoologist. The same items also exist in museum collections, but those are not souvenirs. When objects are put in museums they become specimens, imbued with some intrinsic and intangible value they did not have before they arrived there. They become exemplars of a group representatives of their species or kind, setting a standard for a particular animal from a particular place at a particular time. By contrast, I think of my objects at home more as knick-knacks, there for my own enjoyment. They can tell stories, but they are just my stories.

Objects in museums tell different stories. And what we can learn about the animal kingdom from museum specimens is also very different from what we can learn watching animals in the wild. In my ecological fieldwork in Australia I am lucky enough to have engaged with thousands of animals at extremely close proximity. These kind of encounters and the scientific research they are part of help us understand how ecosystems work and how animals behave in the wild. The stories we gain from these experiences enable us to see nature in action, as a vibrant, impossibly complex series of living interactions.

Encounters with specimens from dead animals in museums give us a different view. These meetings happen on our own terms, and allow us to ask and answer different questions. I have seen many more living Tasmanian devils than I have dead museum specimens, for instance, but I feel like I have learned more about them, or at least different things about them, by close study of their remains in museums. Natural history objects allow us to investigate the evolutionary history of animals, and seek to find not just what they do, but how they do it.

Research in the wild and in the museum are both critical pillars of natural history; neither tells the whole story on its own. We can only go so far in studying a skeleton or a carcass to imagine how the animal is adapted to moving through its environment, for example. Similarly brief encounters with animals on their own terms do not tell us everything we seek to know about where a species came from and how it came to be.

Museum specimens also allow us to study animals that have been dead for centuries. New technologies are developed to answer questions that werent even imagined when the animals were first collected. Examining fossils allows us to understand species that have been dead for millions of years. We can use them to build a picture of worlds long disappeared, and how the earth came to be the way it is now.

Objects can tell the general stories about their kind, but also the specific stories that they alone were characters in. They are at once specimens and individuals museum objects were collected, traded and used by people: their stories are historical as well as scientific. Investigating museum collections tells us something about the time in which they were collected. They provide windows into the past as well as data for the present. These historic repositories represent centuries of ecosystems and cultures. Even though they are just dead animals, they reflect local, national and global politics, and the societies they are linked with.

The UK alone holds well over 100 million natural history objects in its public museums. The global collection runs into the billions. The scale of these numbers is impossible to conceive of, and this is just one of the reasons why only a minuscule proportion of museum collections are on public display usually less than 1 per cent. The functions of objects on display are very different to the collections held in storerooms, and this is one thing that Ill be exploring in the final section of the book.

Animals are everywhere in the human world: they are used to advertise pretty much everything, from banks to toilet paper, and cars to cereals. They are mascots for sports teams and logos for airlines. The way they are represented usually links to some reflection of their natural history. As a result every single person walks down the street with an extraordinary knowledge of nature, even if they dont think so themselves. This means unlocking some level of understanding of the natural world is easy. Museums can help us access some of this ingrained expertise, by sparking connections between what people already know and the amazing, rare objects in museum collections.

What I have attempted to do with this book is to select 100 museum specimens to tell 100 stories from the animal kingdom: 100 objects, 100 stories. It is not a history in the sense that it doesnt have a beginning, a middle and an end, and on the whole it doesnt run chronologically. The animal kingdom doesnt have one history. From a single beginning, countless millions of histories have and continue to run their course. They intertwine constantly, some of them end abruptly and some fizzle out.

The book is arranged into four sections, each telling a different kind of story. The first explores the diversity of life over the past 600 million years or so, which is mainly the story of the invertebrates (animals without backbones; vertebrates are animals with backbones). Although information about natural history is everywhere in the human world, the coverage is not even. Large and charismatic species get the lions share of the limelight. Even though they outnumber vertebrates by more than twenty to one, invertebrates are given a raw deal in natural history museums, television programmes and books. Ill admit that I am also somewhat guilty of this (as mammals are my passion), but the first section of this book attempts to show most of the ways there are to be an invertebrate as I go through many of the major divisions of the animal kingdom.

The Turning Points section tells the story of evolution from the perspective of us mammals. As I explain, this is only one of the countless routes through the branches of the tree of life. It begins with the sudden appearance of most of the key groups of animals a little over half a billion years ago, and explores the appearance of different kinds of fish. Our evolutionary history involves fishes without jaws and without hard skeletons, a huge diversity of bony fishes, the colonisation of the land, the end to a reliance on reproducing in water and responses to massively changing ecosystems. We can trace our relationships with fishes, amphibians and reptiles, and understand how the worlds mammalian fauna came to be the way it is today.