Recent Boos
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play0:00 / 0:37Is the Elk at Leeds City Museum Irish? Is it even an Elk?-
leedsmuseums ‘Hi Sally, welcome to the Life on Earth gallery!’ ‘Hi Poppy, thanks for inviting me!’ ‘Is that the Giant Irish Elk you’re looking at? The one located near the entrance?’ ‘Yeah, I bet there’s an interesting story behind that.’ ‘It’s funny you should say that because there is. Surprisingly, Giant Irish Elk are neither Elk, nor purely Irish. They are a type of deer found all over Europe. This particular animal was discovered in Lough Gur in County Limerick. He was donated to the Museum in 1847. The bones were artificially coloured by their Victorian excavators in order to make them look as though they had been stained by the peat bog they were found in. In fact, the bones should be dusty grey.’ ‘Wow, that’s a really interesting and important part of the museum!’
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play0:00 / 0:49The amazing love story of Mok, the gorilla at Leeds City Museum-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Life on Earth Gallery. I am Ellie. Look for the stuffed gorilla near the DNA model and the dress-up section. This is Mok the gorilla. He is originally from the French Congo, but was captured and taken to Paris where he lived in a cage in a hotel lobby for the entertainment of guests. In 1932 he was transferred from the Parisian hotel lobby to London zoo, at the same time as his future girlfriend Moena, where they subsequently fell in love. During his time in the zoo, Cecil Tresilian, the illustrator for the Jungle Book studied Mok and some of the other primemates there as inspiration for the character King Louie from The Jungle Book. After six years Mok and Moena’s relationship came to an abrupt end when Mok died. Moena was so upset that she began scratching at her feet in grief; the cuts became infected and sadly she died. I think this object is important because it helps you to empathise with the gorilla and brings to life the exhibit.
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play0:00 / 0:40A dramatic interpretation of an exchange between a guard and the prisoner of war who made this toy. It was written by Olivia Atherton, Be...-
leedsmuseums ‘Toy for sale! Toy for sale! Anyone want to buy a wooden pull along crocodile?’ ‘Oi! You’re a German War Prisoner! You can’t be selling your tainted toys in this war prison here in beautiful Yorkshire!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you’re in prison! Anymore of this ridiculous toy selling and you’ll be punished! Now get back to work in the quarry!’ ‘I just wanted to make some money. This war prison is killing my passions!’ ‘Get used to it.’ If you press the button next to the map, you can see where the Leeds Prison of War camps were. This German prisoner could’ve been in either of these or others in Yorkshire.
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play0:00 / 0:53Dramatic interpretation of the real story behind a life saving object in Leeds City Museum, written by Olivia Atherton, Erin Fuller and B...-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Leeds Story Gallery, my name is Edward Spetch. I was a soldier in the First World War. I served in the Royal Artillery until I was wounded in 1918. That isn’t even the most interesting part of my story. In 1917 I was fighting in the trenches for her majesty the King and, whilst preparing my weapon, I was hit in the chest by an enemy round. I closed my eyes and waited to die, my time had come. But, the bullet didn’t hit my chest as luckily I was carrying my cigarette tin in my lapel pocket. The bullet hit the case and saved my life. I kept the case to remind me of how close I came to death.
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play0:00 / 0:53leedsmuseums likes this.-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Life on Earth Gallery at Leeds City Museum. I am Kale Constantine-Powels and I will be talking about the Northern blue fin tuna fish. To find it look for the huge glass display case in the middle of the gallery, it’s pretty hard to miss! It’s one of the largest bony fish and throughout history it has always been eaten by people, it is featured on the reverse of the Croatian coin, it can dive up to a total depth of 1000 meters. It is silver on the top and dark blue on the bottom, this helps it become camouflaged from above and below. Because of excessive fishing this species is now endangered. I chose this object because I think it looks awesome and will probably look even better with its scales, and because it is in the endangered species case it makes me feel like we should be doing something for the planet.
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play0:00 / 0:32leedsmuseums likes this.-
leedsmuseums ‘Hi Erin’ ‘Hi Poppy’ ‘Have you seen the yak in the Life on Earth Gallery?’ ‘No I didn’t see a yak, where is it?’ ‘Behind you!’ ‘Oh this? I thought it was a bull!’ ‘Well there is an interesting story behind that!’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah, an explorer from England travelled to Nepal in Asia and killed this yak. He then dragged it across the border so he wouldn’t be convicted for illegally killing it, as it was a sacred animal in Nepal. On his return to England it was stuffed, but no one knew how yaks really looked so they stuffed it like a bull. Hence how you mistook it for a bull!’ ‘That is really interesting!’
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play0:00 / 0:39leedsmuseums likes this.-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Life on Earth Gallery. Find the Giant Panda in the endangered species case, all the animals in this case are endangered. This particular Giant Panda was named Grandma, we think because of her docile nature. She died in 1939, shortly after being transported from China to London zoo. Her cause of death was pneumonia although incidentally she may have eaten through her shipping crate during her travels. The thorough autopsy of Grandma contributed greatly to our knowledge of Giant Panda anatomy. There are only about 1800 pandas left in the world.
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play0:00 / 2:45-
leedsmuseums Welcome to the Life on Earth gallery. I’m Joe Botting, the Assistant Curator of Natural Sciences, and I look after the geology collections. If you go to the sand pit in the middle of the room (the fossil dig) next to them there are three tall cases. Go to the first of these and stand in front of the label. This case has fossils in it. Starting at the bottom there are some large slabs, the ones facing you are quite spectacular fossils. To the left there is a large crinoid, a sea lily, these are related to starfish and lived on a long stalk and filtered their food with lots of delicate long arms which unfortunately aren’t quite preserved in this specimen. The one to the right is much more obviously a starfish. Both of these have to be buried alive in order to have much chance of being fossilised because their skeleton falls apart immediately after they die. Above them there are several light-grey specimens which are from the early carboniferous period. These are from coral reefs that covered the north of England and Wales and even up into Scotland and you see pieces of coral, shells and brachiopods it’s very similar to the Wenlock limestone slab, which is another audio tour, that’s to your right behind the ‘camouflage’ case. Above the light-grey rocks there are some much darker reddish-brown specimens and these are mostly plant fossils. These are all from the coal measures, the late carboniferous period about 300 million years old and they were found mostly in the Yorkshire area, particularly around Wakefield and Barnsley but some of them also in Leeds. You’ll find that a lot of them are in large rounded nodules, these are lumps of iron-carbonate that grew in the sediment and enclosed the fossils as they started to decay. This explains why they are so spectacularly well preserved including cones and leaves in three dimensions. The top part of the case has a selection of spectacular fossils from our collections. This includes a rectangular light-grey piece which has a shrimp on it from the Solnhofen limestone in Bavaria. This is a Jurassic period deposit where the famous early bird Archaeopteryx was discovered. Around the other side of the case, if you go to the back of it, there is a large round nodule, one of these coal measures specimens again, which has a horseshoe crab in the centre. Above them is another small rectangular slab with two small fish. To the top right is a sea scorpion, a eurypterid from the Silurian of Scotland. If you would like to find out anything more about these fossils there is a ‘find out more’ sheet at the bottom of this case.
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leedsmuseums Curator Joe Botting talks about the fossils on display at Leeds City Museum.
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play0:00 / 1:23-
leedsmuseums This is part five of the geology tour for the Life on Earth gallery. We are walking around the timeline and we’ve now got to the Carboniferous case. This is the age of the rocks around Leeds and all the coal mines in the Leeds area and in South Yorkshire as well, are dug into the rocks of this age. They are full of plant fossils because, finally now, we have life on land. These are some of the earliest large forests on the planet and what we see in this case is a sample of the trunk of a gigantic clubmoss. Today clubmosses are very small plants: up to maybe twenty centimetres tall and they live on mountains and in swamps but back in the Carboniferous they reached forty or fifty metres tall and had this enormous crown with dense foliage, little leaves and cones on the end of the branches but the strange pattern that you see on the trunk is where it was covered with leaves as well. The entire surface would have been covered with little spikey leaves and the whole thing would have looked bit like a Monkey Puzzle tree today. From evidence looking at the interior of the trunk, and how the structure of the plant worked, it now seems impossible for this to have lived for more than five years. The whole plant would have grown extremely quickly, and then fallen down. It would not have been a comfortably place to be walking!
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leedsmuseums The fifth section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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play0:00 / 0:58-
leedsmuseums This is part four of the geology tour. We are walking along the timeline and we’ve now got to the case reading Devonian. In here we have a fossil fish. It’s not the earliest fish, there were quite a lot of fish before this, but you wouldn’t really recognise them easily. For a start they didn’t have jaws: they were strange sort of vacuum-cleaner like things that just sort of floated along the sea floor sucking up anything they could eat but by the time you get to the Devonian, this is about four hundred million years ago, suddenly we have a huge diversity of different types of fish which you would recognise. They had scales, they had teeth and jaws, they had bones and most of them weren’t armour-plated like the earlier ones had been. There are many places, particularly in Scotland today, where we can find these fossil remains and the north of Scotland is famous for it. The one you see in here is from a place called Achanarras Quarry which is one of the most important early fish localities in the world.
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leedsmuseums The fourth section of a tour around the geology on display at Leeds City Museum. Curator Joe Botting takes you around the Life on Earth gallery.
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