Behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum

 We were very lucky to meet in the summer at Waterperry gardens a lovely lady Jackie McKenzie-Dodd who works at the National History Museum she mentioned that a trip around may be possible. So a plan was put forward for a group from OldHorts who would meet up and have a behind the scenes tour. The resulting day has non stop been talk and discussed continually since.

Normally you expect to go in through the grand front entrance not us it was the side doors. So what do we think the collective noun for OldHorts should be?

Once inside poor Jackie and Justin had the unenviable task of getting us all sorted into 2 groups with all passes in place. Then making sure we did not get left behind down all the different corridors, too much to look at.

Perhaps we all felt at home?

It's quite different being taken to the working areas hidden behind those little doors that say staff only.

You move from the rich tapestry of wooden panel rooms amazing brickwork and tiled floors to the stark reality ......

Oh well what do expect there is always an upstairs /downstairs in these places nothing new....

So once we were in this area it was time to see what Jackie gets up to, and where all those dead specimens are stored for use at a later date for research. ( no Paddington is not in here)

It was time for us to get all dressed up, some make this look good others well I leave it to you to describe it....

Now we were ready to clean the floors, it was time to look at the amazing range of storage for all the samples. The lines of freezers are all named not with what you may think is inside. The names are for ease of knowing which to go to should there be a problem and also for extracting samples to send off all over the country and globe. Everything is wired to the main control board and the temperatures monitored. They can send an alarm to a mobile should there be a powercut or a breakdown. Being called at 2am by a polar bear is so much better than freezer number 00251, most of us would be motivated to answer.

The freezers have numerous drawers should there be a major catastrophe the red drawer in each are the ones to be saved first. 

Obviously gloves are required to handle the trays as you can see the temperature is low. The room temperature is also low so there is not too much temperature raising when the doors are opened.

Within the trays the samples are held inside small phials, as not a huge amount of material is required to be kept. The samples sent out are small shavings, the scientist are looking at the cellular level, so sending too much material is a waste. It does mean that this is a huge resource for the world.

But obviously collecting out in the field travelling with a large freezer is impossible so mobile options range from hi tech to simple...

The cards will only store DNA but sometimes that's all that's required.

Dry samples are the easiest to transport.

So much information to take in and we had not been to see the mega storage that is the liquid nitrogen  vats.

Behind lock doors.....

Ooh this was like being in one of those science fiction movies.....oh or just an over vivid imagination taking over...

Some amazing sample material kept in here.

Jackie gives us the full demonstration, we get to see the samples in racks that were brought back from Vietnam. Although above these were some elephant blood samples taken by someone called Sir David Attenborough?!?

Oh no it's time to go on the other half of our tour.

We want to stay, there's a robot to look at...

Thank you Jackie and Justin 😊🐝🐞🐜