Collections & Research

A species of fly new to Britain has been found from the Wye Valley by scientist Adrian Plant, working at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales. Platypalpus nigricoxa is thought to be a boreo-alpine relict (left behind when ice retreated at the end of the last glacial period). Apart from the Wye valley, it is only known from the extreme north of Scandinavia, the Kola peninsula in northern Russia and some mountains in eastern Europe.

Following on from the last post about our Natural History Halloween Open Day, we thought you might like to see some more pictures of the event.

We had some freshly collected fungi on display, including an invitation to sample the smell of a fresh stinkhorn and to speculate on the significance of the smell to the biology of the fungus. We found it got some interesting reactions (although it’s not so fun being sat downwind from it!).

There were also some less stinky but realistic wax models of fungi. These were made in the mid 1900s by our in-house botanical model-maker, a practice that continues today.

A ‘murder mystery’ had also taken place in our herbarium (the plant collections), an area not usually open to the public. Whilst surrounded by our quarter of a million pressed herbarium specimens, you had to work out which plant was used to poison the victim!

If this has whetted your appetite, keep an eye on our Natural History collections Twitter feed @NatHistConservation for more behind the scenes sneak peeks. Also stay tuned to the What’s On guide on our main website for details of the next Open Day. More stories from behind the scenes can also be found on the 'Rhagor' pages of our website e.g. conserving wax models.

During half term we held a Natural History open day in the main hall at National Museum Wales, Cardiff. It was a great opportunity for us to chat to visitors about our work and show them parts of the collections not normally seen by the public.

The day had a Halloween theme, and visitors had the chance to engage with a wide range of material from the collections. This included solving a ‘murder mystery’ in the herbarium, comparing our UK bats to the size of the largest fruit bat or studying closely a bedbug!

It was a busy, but fun day for all the staff involved. Look out on the website for the next open day.

Here at the Museum, we've started digitising some of the images from our historic photographic collections. We have been very fortunate to be given funds from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to carry out this work, and over the last few months we've been busy, putting together a project team, renovating some office space and sourcing the specialist equipment we need to carry out this work.

A lot of the images that we are working with are around 100 years old, and most of the negatives are captured on glass plates, the medium most commonly used prior to the invention of film. So far we have scanned about 250 images. Some of these show Cardiff Castle during excavation work in the grounds. These photographs were mostly taken around 1901 and they include some striking pictures of the Castle Keep completely covered in shrubs and ivy, looking very different to how local residents know it today.

We have also digitised a collection of glass plate negatives of 'Notable trees of England and Wales' some of which date back to the 1890s. There are some beautiful images contained in this collection, including oak trees with immense canopies and ancient beech woods. We have shared these photographs with some local tree experts and they have helped us to pinpoint the locations of some of these trees. In some cases, if the tree is still there, they have helped us to compare our glass plate negatives with contemporary photographs of the tree to see how it has changed over the last 100 years.

We have plenty more images to scan and I'll be providing updates on our progress as we work our way through the collections. But in the meantime, here are a few of our favourite pictures so far.