The Natural History Museum, London

The Natural History Museum in London, UK, is one of those places that makes me warm and fuzzy inside. It's the most beautiful building - purpose built to hold the British Museum's fossil, animal and plant specimens, and the architecture is themed. Plants adorn the roof of the foyer, and different animals are sculptured on the outside of the building. There are numerous  public galleries and then, tucked behind the scenes, the working scientific collections - rooms upon rooms of insects, mammals, fish, plants... populated with numerous busy scientists tapping away at keyboards or hunched over microscopes.

Mustard accompanied me as I visited the museum and the Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) curator (in a museum, a curator is the scientist who looks after a particular collection) do some work on my PhD at the end of my Famelab trip. 

In the foyer, Mustard came face to face with a much bigger dinosaur...

Mustard meets Charles Darwin!

We found out that the museum cafe does really good cake. Yes, scientists like cake too!

The museum is home to the holotypes of many of the wasps I work on. A holotype is the single specimen designated by a scientist when they describe a new species as the REAL one - it is the specimen that all future specimens will be compared with. The wasps are kept in cabinets in a temperature controlled building to keep them safe. There are rows, and rows, and rows of cabinets. That's a lot of insects!

Inside each cabinet is a series of drawers. Inside each drawer is a series of little boxes... and in the boxes the wasps are pinned with labels that have important information like the date and location the wasp was collected.

I had a lot of fun being a scientist at the Natural History Museum for a few days - it was amazing to work in such a huge collection, and be part of an institution that has so much history!