What’s missing? The reflection of the American Museum of Natural History shows in New York City
Jeffrey Greenberg / universal group images through Getty images
Memory of nature
Jack Ashby (Allen Lane)
Museums are odd things, Jack Ashby, Assistant Director of the Zoology University of Cambridge, UK, focuses on his new book, Nature Memory: Behind the scenes of natural world history museums. They are signs of our society and natural records of our ecosystems and homes, yes. But they are also worse and significantly skewed.
Museums, especially natural history that Ashby focuses on his bookIt was previously seen as a giant taxonomy of all living – and continued to live – on our planet. From Flora to Fauna, insect mammals, the purpose of the first catalogs are documenting and presenting all our world to help us better understand it.
That was then, and it is now. The bites of fact, as defly shown in this book involvement, which attracts a critical eye of the imperfections of the museums and how it is not what they are not thinking about. For something, many volumes in our natural history are not actually shown in these institutions, but delivered to dark light warehouses.
We quickly know how important areas behind velvet ropes and polished glass are: about 70,000 other species of Plants blooming It is believed to exist in the world than scientists described, as Ashby, with half of them sitting before the museum catalogs waiting to analyze.
His views on how things moving behind the scenes are some of the most ruining book points, as he describes how skeletons are kept in and then preserves the boards. How to present taxidermy models and why shown frogs are rare (they ran out of bad sentences to make the most realistic hobbies of flowers.
But there are bigger play issues than 70,000 missing plants: the exhibits we filed on school trips as we explained about our planet and its populations.
Ashby points in a 2008 study case found only 29 percent of the mammals and 34 percent of the birds of the average natural museum are female in habitats. In part, that’s because the man of species is always more decorative and lent himself better to show. However, it is because people collect and show items that are always men – and white, people west of that, as Asty.
He is strongest in his rallying shouts to change the problem of misrepresentation within the museums. Ashby made an arous case that we all have well educated in our world and nature because of losing and lacking in previous generations. Most mammal mammal skills are different from people in an important way: the presence of a baculum, or penis bone – thanks for the shows of the whole museum from the pelvis.
This book was written before the intentional destruction of US science institutions, but at the funeral of a general expert malaise – and it appeared. Therefore it is necessary to read it. We need to think about the consequences of what the museum is left as we do with what is kept.
As Ashby placed it:
Chris Stokel Walker is a Newcastle-based science writer, UK
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