2 July 2008

New Zoology museum open to the public

The new D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee is now open to the public for its first summer season.

The museum, located in the Carnelley Building behind the University Tower, will be open every Friday between 2 and 4.30pm until 12 September.

The museum features birds, mammals, fish and reptiles along with a huge variety of other creatures. Among the highlights are a King Penguin brought from the Antarctic by Ernest Shackleton; a beautiful pair of huia birds, now extinct; a giant spider crab from Japan; and fossils of prehistoric creatures including an ichthyosaur. There are also beautifully crafted teaching models and charts, many well over 100 years old.

The museum is named after Professor D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who founded the first zoology museum at University College Dundee in the 1880s - subsequently demolished in the 1950s to make way for the Tower Building. Many of the specimens on display in the new museum are from D’Arcy’s original collection.

Admission to the museum is free.

NOTES TO EDITORS
More about D’Arcy Thompson and his museum:
When D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson arrived at University College Dundee to take up the Chair of Biology in 1885, he set about creating a museum to help the teaching of zoology students. Specimens soon filled every corner of his small department, but it was not until 1889 that sufficient funds were raised to create a proper museum within the original College buildings on Nethergate. Its collections represented every major group of the animal kingdom. They were drawn partly from D’Arcy’s own expeditions and those of his students, as well as donations from friends and colleagues at home and abroad. A huge variety of models, charts and teaching preparations were also purchased.

After nearly 33 years in Dundee, D’Arcy left to take up the chair of Natural History at St Andrews in 1917. This was the same year that he published his most important work, On Growth and Form. Based on his research into the museum’s collections, it was a ground-breaking investigation into the growth of organisms. The book pioneered the science of mathematical biology and has been described as “the greatest work of prose in 20th-century science.” It has continued to influence both scientists and artists ever since.

D’Arcy’s successors continued to expand and care for the museum, but in 1958 it had to be demolished along with the other Nethergate buildings to make way for the University Tower. The larger specimens were dispersed to the Royal Scottish Museum and the Natural History Museum, and only a smaller teaching collection was kept. This moved in the 1960s to the Biological Sciences Institute in Miller’s Wynd, where a much smaller version of the museum was created in the 1990s.

In 2007 the collection moved again as part of the relocation of the Life Sciences School of Learning & Teaching to the Carnelley Building, where Curator of Museum Services Matthew Jarron and honorary zoology curator Cathy Caudwell have spent the past few months redisplaying the collection.

For media enquiries contact:
Roddy Isles
Head, Press Office
University of Dundee
Nethergate Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384910
E-MAIL: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk