Well, that was all rather different to how I expected.

I noticed the sign for the Grant Museum of Zoology one day while I was out wandering around Bloomsbury; wondered why I had never really taken it in before.    It looked interesting: a small zoological museum affiliated to University College London.  I made a note of the opening times, and a vow to return at a later date when it was open.

In my imagination, I pictured a rather fusty, old teaching collection of specimens, little visited, the benevolent old curator having to search around for a special, old wooden key just to let me in, and an invitation to sign their visitor’s book, where the previous entry was dated October 1972.

How wrong could I be?

When I arrived, the place was heaving; rammed to the gunwales; on all sides, the excited chatter of young children holding clipboards.  I edged my way in, squeezing between the skull of a giant deer and an old fashioned wooden display cabinet housing the skeleton of a quagga and various assorted dodo bones.

Here, too, excitingly, was the skull of a sabre-toothed cat; a thylacine skeleton; and what looked like the decapitated body of another thylacine in a large, glass vessel, its distinctive stripy pelt still clearly visible.

Architecturally, the museum was a joy.  A proper, old-skool, educational institution; like a smaller-scale version of the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.  Books lined the walls of a higher floor, from which various skeletons peered, slightly critically, over a balcony at the noisy visitors below.  How much quieter it all must have been during the Pleistocene.

Such was the crush of school parties that I decided to make my visit something of a whistle-stop tour but, scarcely stopping to read any signs, exhibits that stuck in the mind were the amazingly intricate millipede of bones, which was the skeleton of an African Rock Python; two more thylacine skulls––the Grant Museum of Zoology must have been practically singlehandedly responsible for their extinction, given the number of exhibits––and a delicate-looking fossil Rhamphorhynchus.

And, of course, I had to see the Jar of Moles.  How that Christina Perri song might have been reworded if she had ever chanced to pay a visit to the Grant Museum of Zoology:

Who do you think you are?
Runnin’ round leaving scars
Collecting your Jar of Moles.

Grant Museum of Zoology
21 University Street
London  WC1E 6DE
Open: Tue-Fri 1-5PM; Sat 11AM-5PM
Entry: FREE

© Bradley Dunbar

Bradley Dunbar hopes to pay another visit to GMZ at a quieter time.