October 19, 2011 - Zoology Museum

Important Discovery of the Day: My "radiators", as they are called here, do in fact work, but they only operate at certain hours which I have yet to figure out since the radiator does not seem to actually be on during the hours that I am in my room, unfortunately. I guess I'll have to continue working at my laptop with gloves on, as ridiculous as that might look :P I have also finally invested in the St. John's signature woolen scarf, which is extremely warm although somewhat uncomfortable.

Aside from my usual classes, I took a visit to the Museum of Zoology, which is located right in front of the Department of Zoology, where one of my classes are located. It has been calling my name for a few days. There are quite a few other departments that have museums for the public located right next to their main buildings. I guess this comes with being a popular tourist destination as well as a great university that tries to educate its public. Its also a great stop for cold travelers with its free entry :)

It was pretty empty today which was nice and gave me to time to peacefully go through all the exhibits. I didn't take a picture of the entire museum, but their exhibits wonderfully trace the evolution of animal life. Its on the showier side for the younger museum visitors, with some fake plastic structures strewn about, but there's still quite a bit to learn here with the plethora of information accompanied by each exhibit. The displayed specimen are also used by the University for research and undergraduate teaching.

This is a killer whale! For some reason, I would have imagined the skeleton to be a lot bulkier since it takes so many lives on a regular basis, but I guess they still have to be able to move fast in order to kill their prey.

As expected, the skeleton of the hippopotamus is very hefty...

They even store the zoological collections of Charles Darwin!! On December 27th 1831, at the age of 22, Charles Darwin set sail aboard HMS Beagle bound for South America. During the five year surveying voyage, Darwin collected many specimens of animals, plants, rocks and fossils. Since Darwin was associated with the University of Cambridge, some of the material collected on the Beagle voyage is now housed here.

And this is for Anika, who probably isn't even reading my blog... Remember this little guy from Tangled? He resembles Pascal quite a bit :) I love that movie so much!

As much as I hate snakes, this skeleton was simply too amazing to not document. Its a python, for those of you who are wondering... I'll spare you the skeleton of centipedes; those are almost as bad as centipedes themselves.

 Anddd here's the last picture from the museum, a male Finback Whale! The whale was washed ashore in 1865 at Pevensey in Sussex. During the next few days, about 40,000 people made the trip to view it on the beach. Special trains were laid on for the sudden influx of people and a new station was built. The huge carcass was first sold at an auction to a group of wealthy merchants from Hastings and Eastbourne, who formed the Greenland Whale Company, and gave tours of the whale. The prepared skeleton was then purchased by the museum in 1866. The museum building was actually designed initially to display this skeleton  and has grown since then.

After my visit to the museum and my last class, I stopped at Benet's for some delicious hot chocolate. This still has to be my favorite cafe, even though its located in the most touristy location of them all, the King's Parade. It is nice when tourists aren't around though, and you have a wonderful view of Queen's College.

Along with the winter cold, decorations have also sprung up all over town, bringing in the Christmas spirit :) It definitely made me smile at 8 am on my way to class :)

The next few days are about to get very busy with lots of events planned and hopefully a weekend visit to London. Somehow my schedule can never stay generally balanced, and instead there are bursts of lots of activity and other times of absolutely nothing. You'll be happy to know that I finally got two of my eight supervisions planned for the first week of November, so I actually have some work to do now and am somewhat on track to actually passing these classes :) I'm definitely going to end up having a crazy amount of work in the last week or so which is kind of annoying, so I better make the most of the time I have left right now!