Adventures in International Education

Schools in the United Kingdom began the summer break only a few weeks ago, and many of those students filled the Natural History Museum on Sunday. Groups from China, families, and this solitary visitor from them U.S. crowded the museums exhibit areas, all stopping to take selfies and (hopefully) gain something from the miles of displays and science-related history.

The museum reflects the ideas of Charles Darwin, Carl Linnaeus (the creator of the binomial naming system that defines organisms) as well as the museum’s founder, Richard Owen, and architect Alfred Waterhouse. With meteorites representing the 4.5 billion year history of the earth, type samples from hundreds of years of specimen collection, fossils that helped define the stratigraphy of the earth, and contemporary exhibitions of the moon and volcanic systems of the earth, the Natural History Museum is a home for one-stop shopping into the science of the world. 

At other points in my life, I studied geology and the history of the world and this museum has it all: Specimens from botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology, and zoology. Mounted specimens with the tag stating genus and species reminded me of a zoology class I took in graduate school and the specimens I had prepared. The stunning gem collection and the huge room devoted to rocks (igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary) brought stones into a new perspective. Exhibits about the human body and mammals successfully explained life on earth in real terms. Whales, elephants, dolphins—about every possible form of animal life as we know it and displays about dinosaurs and early forms of life to the cell level—rounded out the displays. The museum contains 80 million specimens and the new wing, the Darwin Center, shows samples preserved in formalin or mounted, with the aisles of the working laboratory stretching behind the display cases and upward eight stories. This working museum mixes display with the work done behind the scenes to categorize and document life types. 

The work of of the museum goes back to Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species. The museum houses many of his samples from the journey of the Beagle as well as samples collected from Antarctic expeditions, and more.