Australian Animals at The Hunterian

Dr Peter Koene

Encouraging the public into the main Museum, after viewing ‘The Kangaroo and the Moose’ in the Art Gallery, has been an important aim of the project from the beginning. So, to complement the Stubbs, I designed a 45-minute public tour of the Hunterian Zoology Museum’s Australian animal collections.

Many of the specimens included in the tour have only an indirect connection with the Gallery exhibition (I did try to cover as wide an arc through the Australian animal kingdom as possible, covering koalas, echidnas, crocodiles, lungfish, giant earthworms, emus, kookaburras and lorikeets), but for this blog, I thought a few others, which link more directly, might be interesting to discuss.

Making the most obvious connection between my tour and the Stubbs painting, we began with marsupials – the pouch-carrying mammal group of which kangaroos and wallabies are possibly the most celebrated members. Whilst we looked at a skeletal specimen, we discussed diet (grass and other vegetation – shown clearly by the animal’s ‘clipping’ front teeth and ‘grinding’ molars), and that most characteristic ‘hop’ which results from the combination of powerful hind-leg muscles and tendons from tail to hips, which stretch and recoil, storing and releasing energy to make for a very efficient means of getting around. Our stuffed Black-gloved Wallaby specimen (whose ‘cuteness’ was a big hit with all) helped to illustrate the continued British influence on Australian wildlife that began with Cook’s first voyage: this little fellow came under great threat through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to predation by European red foxes, which had been introduced by British settlers to be the object of recreational hunting.

Amongst the monotremes (another mammal group, found only in Australasia) is another iconic Ozzy: the platypus, one of the strangest of all creatures. This shy animal, found in the freshwater streams and pools of eastern Australia, has a duck-like bill that is actually made of bone and skin, and hunts invertebrates using electroreception (i.e. it can detect the tiny electrical signals given off by the muscle movements of other creatures). The males of the species have ankle spurs above their webbed, paddle-like feet, which inject venom, possibly for defence, or to subdue females during mating. (The platypus is the world’s only venomous mammal!) The females lay soft-shelled eggs, like reptiles; but, like all true mammals, they produce milk for their developing offspring. However, they have no nipples: milk is expressed through the skin to be licked off by their young. It should be no wonder, then, that the first platypus skins sent back to London (in 1798) were thought to be a possible hoax. Sir Joseph Banks himself, by then president of the Royal Society, even weighed in, sending his own specimen to Germany for corroboration by the famous naturalist Johann Blumenbach, who also confirmed the scientific name, Ornithorhynchus anitinus (‘bird-nosed duck-thing’).

One of the Zoology Museum’s living specimens is White’s Tree Frog, which, unfortunately, does not always make an appearance on the public tours, highlighting one of the hazards of trying to show a nocturnal animal during normal opening hours. But those lucky enough to see the frog in its tank encountered a representative of the very first Australian frog to be scientifically described and named. Its common name is after John White, ship’s surgeon of the First Fleet of convicts and attendants, which set up the penal colony at Sydney Cove in 1787 in the wake of the Cook explorations. The scientific name, Litarea caelrulea, translates to ‘blue tree frog’ – an odd name for an obviously green amphibian: the first specimen sent back to Britain (to Sir Joseph Banks in 1790) had been stained blue by its preservative. The animal is still of interest to scientists, as it secretes a waxy substance to cover its skin. The remarkable sunscreen contains antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal properties, and is currently an object of investigation amongst bio-medical researchers. (As a point of interest, Banks’s blue frog, which became the type, or standard reference specimen, ended up in the ‘other’ Hunterian – that is the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London based on the collections of our William Hunter’s brother John – after Banks’s death, where it remained – still blue – until it was destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War.)

Finally, one of the oldest and most intriguing objects in the Zoology Museum is the Giant Clam. Our specimen is from Dr Hunter’s own collection, and had been housed at Hunter’s original museum (and anatomy school) in Great Windmill Street in Soho (from 1768), where both Stubbs and Banks are likely to have encountered it. Although Hunter’s giant clam actually comes from the Indian Ocean, I have included it in the Australian animals tour because the Great Barrier Reef – cue stories of Cook’s first expedition – is soon likely to be the only place left to find the species, as it becomes extinct elsewhere. As its name suggests, this clam is indeed a giant – in fact, it is the largest bivalve species in the world. The two halves of our ‘specimen’ weigh about 129lbs and 95lbs respectively, and actually come from two different individuals. (I do not know whether Hunter himself realised this – although, given his genius, I should think he must have! – in any case, we display the shells together, as Hunter did.) In Hunter’s own time, the giant clam was still relatively new to science: indeed, it was in the very first group of animals described and named using the Latin binomial system still in use today, by the great Carl Linnaeus himself (the founder of the system, and father of modern taxonomy) in 1758.

Despite the initial slow uptake, the tours did seem to be quite successful. I think there was a little something to suit everyone’s interests. Certainly, from my own perspective, both leading the tours and carrying out the research beforehand were immensely pleasurable (which is, after all, why I do this sort of thing!). Visitors for the most part had either come from the Gallery exhibition, ‘The Kangaroo and the Moose’, or were going to see it afterwards; so, I am particularly pleased that my tours were able to supplement the exhibition. Now that Stubbs’s Konguoro has (sadly for us here) moved on from the Hunterian to the Horniman, I do hope at least that we can continue the Australian animals tours, which I think can still work well, even if their inspiration has left us to inspire others. So, next time you are in Glasgow, I beg you to drop by; I would relish another opportunity to show off part of our wonderful zoology collection.