Written by Julie Griffith, Property Experience Curator, Calke Abbey - National Trust & Sarah Burhouse, Taxidermist, Birdhouse Taxidermy. How to challenge negative pre-conceptions of taxidermy and facilitate deeper, positive engagement with the objects – this was the challenge faced at Calke Abbey, a National Trust property in Derbyshire. Julie – Calke Abbey Integral to Calke Abbey’s identity, the natural history collection demonstrates the interests and collecting of several generations of the Harpur Crewe family.

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Welcome to the April edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Hideko Yamamoto (former Volunteer, Natural History Museum, London) with input from Jovita C. Yesilyurt (Senior Curator, General Herbarium, Natural History Museum, London). For centuries, a quiet corner of the Natural History Museum has concealed a secret: a previously undocumented historical seed collection. Hidden in locked cabinets, hundreds of small paper packets hold botanical specimens—and unanswered questions. This article offers a glimpse into this overlooked collection, the detective work behind its investigation, and the exciting possibilities that still lie ahead.

Bill Pettit Memorial Award - £3000 Deadline for 2026 applications: 13th April 2026 NatSCA is pleased to invite applications to this year’s Bill Pettit Memorial Award. Up to £3,000 of grant money, is a...

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. Welcome to the March edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Madalyne Epperson, Assistant Conservator, Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM). The Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), located in downtown Milwaukee, is Wisconsin’s natural history museum. It opened to the public in 1884 and houses more than four million objects. The Museum is currently undertaking a multi-year effort to pack its extensive collections and relocate to a newly constructed building, due to open in 2027.

Written by Joe Rigby, Senior Lecturer, University of Chester: Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. 'Storehouses for dinosaur bones, mineral samples, and fading dioramas portraying early humans. Do such places have something to tell us about capitalism and the climate crisis?' (Wainwright 2025, p. 8) As readers of the Natsca blog will appreciate, the discipline of ‘natural history’ encompasses a wide range of what today have become institutionalised as more or less separate fields of knowledge, including geology, biology, geography, anthropology, and history.

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Curator of Fossil Cnidaria at the Natural History Museum. Welcome to the February edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. Digital Digest is a monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by John-James Wilson (Lead Curator of Zoology, World Museum), Jude Piesse (Senior Lecturer in English Literature, LJMU) & Alyssa Grossman (Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Liverpool). The interdisciplinary public engagement project ‘ENLivEN: Empire, Nature and Liverpool: Investigating and Engaging with Natural History’, is a collaboration between University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) and 14 city-wide partners.

Written by Anna Robson, Associate Collections Curator – Biology, York Museums Trust A new foyer case exhibition titled ‘The Life and Work of Botanist Catherine ‘Kit’ Rob: An insider’s look at the Yorkshire Museum’s Herbarium’ is now on display at the Yorkshire Museum. This exhibition displays the herbarium in a new light, being one of the only times the museum has exhibited the dried plant specimens to the public.

Written by Lauren Field, Curator of Natural History, Bolton Museum.  In 1895 The Borough of Bolton Botanical Society was formed. This group concerned itself, as the name implies, with botany alone but eventually a feeling emerged among naturalists in Bolton that other aspects of natural history should be covered. On February 7th 1907 a group of keen local naturalists met at the Chadwick Museum (Bolton Museum’s first building).

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Welcome to the January edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Collaborating and Connecting with Natural History The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA) will be held on Thursday 14th and Friday 15th May 2026 at The Uls...

Compiled by Jennifer Gallichan, NatSCA Blog Editor. It has come to the end of another year and we have had some fantastic contributions to the blog. I would like to take this opportunity in the last blog of 2025, to celebrate the ten most read articles of those published this year. As a whole, they represent the huge amount of work that is going on across the sector, from collection decants, to specimen conservation, getting the collections out there, and researching the incredible histories they contain.

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. Welcome to the December edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Leonie Sedman, Curator of Heritage & Collections Care, University of Liverpool. Along with many other NatSCA members, I care for a mixed collection, meaning that one inevitably becomes something of a 'Jack of all trades’ missing out on the academic satisfaction created by specialisation. As a curator who finds collections research to be the most satisfying part of my job, it can be frustrating when that research is often only possible on a ‘need-to-know’ basis - usually when a new display or exhibition is being planned, or when the specimens are to be used in teaching.

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Curator of Fossil Cnidaria at the Natural History Museum. Welcome to the November edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. Digital Digest is a monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Claire Kelly, Conservator at Natural History Museum, London. Boa Constrictor in Fishes, Amphibians and Reptiles Gallery at NHM ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum A Boa Constrictor on display in the Fishes, Amphibians and Reptiles Gallery at the Natural History Museum in London, UK was removed to undergo a considerable amount of remedial conservation treatment.

Written by Adriana Ballinger, Yale University Charles P. Howland Postgraduate Research Fellow at the National Museum of Ireland, Natural History. Natural history specimens are often inaccessible to the communities from which they were collected. As a result, source communities lack opportunities to connect with elements of their local heritage, and museums and their publics overlook the place-based expertise that many of these communities hold about the specimens we research and see on display.

Written by Sarah Burhouse, Caitlin Jamison, Bethany Palumbo & Vicky Ward. Compiled by Jennifer Gallichan, Vertebrate Curator, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. Those of us that that are lucky enough to work with natural science collections will be familiar with the question ‘How do you get a job in a museum’? At a time when cuts to the sector mean that museum jobs seem even fewer and farther between, I felt it was important that we share some of our combined experiences to hopefully give some tips (and hope) for emerging museum professionals.

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Welcome to the October edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Dr Jamie Maxwell, Collections Assistant, National Museum of Ireland, Natural History. Not every job takes you to a windswept beach on Ireland’s west coast to recover the head of a stranded True’s beaked whale calf. But then again, my past year as a Collections Assistant at the Natural History Museum in Dublin has been anything but ordinary. As we collected the head of the slightly decomposed whale calf, I was reminded of my previous fieldwork experiences, mainly on research cruises during my academic career.

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. Welcome to the September edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Pauline Rutter – Independent Archival Artist, Community and Organisation Poet. These words look out from the page with eyes I have borrowed. Eyes not shaped for vision through the specific disciplinary scientific lens. Eyes that strain to see beyond past centuries of debate on what, of all origins, is knowable and what is not. With these original eyes, would ways of seeing allow the light to travel outwards resisting funnelled perspectives and interpretations descended from imperialistic systems of Enlightenment science, colonial ideologies and narratives?

Written by Clare Brown, Leeds Museums and Galleries. Taking a walk through a forest, running through fields of wheat or even just gazing at trees, all a far-cry from dealing with the sheets of pressed, long-dead dried plants you come across in museum collections. Good taxidermy at least looks like the original animal. Other problems with plant specimens include their need for low light, extremely careful handling and, occasionally, mercuric chloride.

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Collections Moves Team Leader at the Natural History Museum. Welcome to the August edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. Digital Digest is a monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Hannah Clarke – Assistant Curator (Collections Access), University of Aberdeen. In May this year, I was given the slightly terrifying task of overseeing the removal and transportation of Aberdeen University’s much-loved Japanese Spider Crab (Macrocheira kaempferi) specimen. The crab, who is usually proudly displayed in the foyer of the University’s Zoology Building, had been requested for loan by Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums, for their exciting new exhibition ‘Monsters of the Deep.’

Written by Dr Christina Thatcher, Lecturer in Creative Writing & Dr Lisa El Refaie, Reader in Language and Communication, Cardiff University. With biodiversity declining at an alarming rate, we need to find ways of encouraging people to care about all endangered animal species, not just the ones with the most obvious appeal, such as pandas and polar bears, for example.

Written by Anastasia van Gaver (Conservator) & Bethany Palumbo (Head of Conservation) Natural History Museum Denmark). As conservators, it’s essential we keep up to date with developments in the techniques used in specimen treatments. With hundreds of fluid-preserved specimens to make and conserve for the new exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, we sought the best in the field to give us a refresher course.

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Welcome to the July edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to…

Written by Jazmine Miles Long, Taxidermist. When a taxidermy mount is made, the skin of the mammal (and in some cases reptiles and birds) is usually tanned. Tanning is the process of turning a raw skin into leather using chemistry. By turning the skin into leather, we are changing a fragile perusable material into something durable that can be sculpted into taxidermy and be more resistant to insect attack.

Written by Sarah Marden, Curator of Natural History at The Box, Plymouth. From March 2024 to April 2025, a new exhibition at The Box called Planet Ocean explored Plymouth’s marine heritage and contemporary identity as “Britain’s Ocean City”. Specimens from our natural history collections, including spirit-preserved marine invertebrates, molluscs, corals, mounted sea birds and seaweed folios were displayed alongside art, world cultures collections, image and film and loan material from local partners.

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool. Welcome to the June edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to 

Written by Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology, The Great North Museum: Hancock. So, how did I get started in museums? Like perhaps many people, it began with a stroke of luck. I’d decided to study Biology at university—I suppose I’d vaguely pictured myself at some point in the future, white-coated in the lab, pouring over spectrophotometer readings or agar plates.

By Eimear Ashe, Collections Moves Project Manager, National Museum of Ireland Having recently completed a major decant of Natural History collections in the National Museum of Ireland, I thought it a perfect opportunity to share my learnings with fellow NatSCA colleagues. National Museum of Ireland – Natural History Tip 1. Start with the staff! What skills do you need to recruit in or increase capacity in?

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Collections Moves Team Leader at the Natural History Museum, London. Welcome to the May edition of NatSCA Digital Digest Digital Digest is a monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to…

Written by Jazmine Miles Long - Taxidermist & Bethany Palumbo - Head of Conservation, Natural History Museum Denmark. Taxidermy collections are crucial for our understanding of biodiversity, evolution, population genetics and climate change. They form a large part of natural science collections and their long-term preservation is essential. Historically, taxidermy was created using natural, durable materials such as wood, plant fibres, wax, clay and glass with examples dating back to the 16th century.

Written by Caitlin Jamison, Museum Collection Technician, Montrose Museum: ANGUSalive. Montrose Museum in Angus, northeast Scotland, houses an impressive natural history collection. Everything from taxidermy to fossils to rare minerals are housed in a modest, Greek-revival style museum off the high street. Built in 1842, it is one of the first purpose-built museums in Scotland. Sadly, due to changing public interest (and the challenging funding situation facing many local authority museums) the collection has been somewhat forgotten since it was catalogued onto neat pink index cards in the late 1970s.

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Welcome to the April edition of NatSCA Digital Digest. A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to…

Written by Julian Carter, Principal Conservator Natural Sciences, Amgueddfa Cymru - Museum Wales, Cardiff During the late 19th century, Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf (1857-1929) produced thousands of beautifully detailed glass models of a wide range of sea creatures, and other animals, for natural history museums and aquaria all over the world. The work has since been hailed as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art”.

NatSCA would like to offer a number of bursaries for members towards the cost of the AGM and conference.

NatSCA Conference & AGM 2025 The Annual Conference & AGM of the Natural Sciences Collections Association will be held on Thursday 8th and Friday 9th May 2025 at The University of Manchester, Mancheste...

Written by Lauren Field, Curator of Natural History, Bolton Museum. In June 2024 Bolton Museum launched a summer exhibition titled Birds of Bolton. This exhibition celebrated the incredible variety of bird life in Bolton and beyond and was inspired by the recent donation of a large collection of sketchbooks by Bolton-born artist and naturalist Eric Gorton (1929-2001).

Compiled by Jen Gallichan, NatSCA Blog Editor. 2024 was a great year for the NatSCA blog and we have seen increases in both the number of readers and number of articles submitted. We are now reaching well over 2000 views per month. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed an article. The NatSCA blog is driven solely by your contributions, and it is stands as a testament to all the hard work you are doing.