Rylands Seminar Series: Fossil Histories: South Asian Natural Heritage in the Manchester Museum

Описание: Join us online to explore fossils from the Indian subcontinent which are commonly found, if not always exhibited, in many natural history museums around the world. The collections at the Natural History Museum in London and the Yale Peabody Museum are among the most sizeable, but smaller assemblages also exist in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Palaeontological Collection of the University of Tübingen and the Tohoku University Museum in Japan. The histories of these collections are poorly documented, notwithstanding the historical and scientific value of the specimens. How and why did museums collect fossils from the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What happened to these relics of past geological ages once they were removed from their original abodes and incorporated into institutional and political imaginaries elsewhere? This talk addresses such questions by reconstructing the history of the small collection of fossils from the Indian subcontinent in the Manchester Museum. It focuses particularly on the circumstances of acquisition of several vertebrate fossils from the Siwalik Hills in the outer Himalayas and their subsequent afterlives as museum specimens, seeking to locate this collection within a broader, imperial and global, landscape of natural history collecting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

We'll be joined by Amelia Bonea is Lecturer in the Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. Dr. Tabitha Tuckett is Research And Postgraduate Development Manager in Curatorial Practices at the John Rylands, and Lecturer in Library And Archive Studies at the University Of Manchester.