Curators Clare Brown and Sarah Burhouse spent several days in the museum’s Life on Earth gallery, working to preserve some of their most historic natural science specimens.<\/p>\n
Burhouse, Leeds Museums and Galleries’ curator of natural sciences, said such exhibits were prone to damage from clothes moth and the buried carpet beetle.<\/p>\n
“People often panic if they collect taxidermy and they see pests such as these and think there’s an infestation.<\/p>\n
“But actually, these are just creatures that live in our environment so it’s nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n
“But we do need to keep on top of these things, particularly because our collection is susceptible to damage from them.”<\/p>\n
The curator said their inspections of specimens had uncovered some damage to the tail of the male Huia which had “been nibbled a bit, probably by clothes moths”,<\/p>\n
She added: “We think this is historical damage though rather than something new.”<\/p>\n
Another taxidermy mount to receive attention was Grandma the panda – part of the first group of live giant pandas to arrive in the UK in 1938,<\/p>\n
Captured near Weizhou village in central China, she reached Britain in 1938 but died two weeks later from double pneumonia.<\/p>\n
After her death, her remains were distributed to museums around the country for research, with Leeds receiving the skin of Grandma – named such because she was the oldest panda in the group. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Curators Clare Brown and Sarah Burhouse spent several days in the museum’s Life on Earth gallery, working to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-649040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}