If you spent just a minute examining each specimen on display at the Natural History Museum, you’d need 223 days nonstop to get around the place. Which would take dedication. But if you spent a minute on every specimen in the entire collection, you’d need another 152 years. Which would take a lot more dedication. You’d really have to love your fossils (they have 7m of them). And your lichens and algae (6m). And your parasitic wasps (they have 48 different species).
Of the 80m items at the museum, less than half a per cent is on show. The public displays are the tiniest tip of an iceberg. Beyond and beneath the grand halls of South Kensington, there are vast stores where the remaining 99.6%, 400 years of accumulated stuff, is kept. Thanks to the pesky British Museum Act 1963, it’s difficult to throw anything away. Even the 48th parasitic wasp. Even the "sacks and sacks" of stones, ingested and excreted by elephants and collected, enthusiastically I presume, by the nation’s favourite explorer, Dr Livingstone. Deaccessioning, as they call it, is strictly controlled.
Some critics have called it a scandal that such a vast collection is boxed up. Others have demanded a thorough spring clean followed by an auctioning off to fill dwindling coffers. Lot 483: six sacks of excreted stones.
Certainly, you could make a case for opening regional branches of the museum. There is an outpost in Tring, Hertfordshire, but what about Manchester or Liverpool? In the current climate of decentralisation, couldn’t Newcastle show off a few dinosaurs? Couldn’t the Northern Powerhouse plan include a good wedge of natural history?
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