Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution will be part of the Galway Science and Technology Festival and pupils from Galway schools will be able to see some of the original specimens which Darwin collected in support of his theory.
Darwin gathered the specimens on his historic five-year voyage aboard HMS Beagle in the early 1800s, and a number of the specimens are safely collected in The Zoology and Marine Biology Museum in NUI Galway’s Martin Ryan Institute.
The museum will be open for arranged visits by schools as part of the Galway Science and Technology Festival, which runs from November 7 to 21. It will also be open to visitors on November 21, the day of the Festival Exhibition to be held in NUI, Galway. The museum is proving one of the popular choices for visits by schools taking part in the festival.
The Darwin specimens are a selection of three mammal species – a grison, a cavy, and an Azara’s fox – and one bird species (a guira cuckoo ), all of which were collected by Charles Darwin on his epic voyage around South America.
During the voyage, Darwin collected some 80 specimens of mammals and 400 specimens of birds and in 1832 they were gifted to The Zoological Society of London.
Due to a shortage of storage space, the specimens were later sold and distributed between Queen’s College Galway (now NUI Galway ), Cork, and London, while the vast majority is currently housed in The British Natural History Museum.
“It was a great collection to get at the time and it was a fantastic stroke of luck really. At the time the college was opening here, the zoological society was considering ditching some of its collection. They arrived as part of the consignment in 1855 to start off the natural history collection which at that time was considered a vital part of teaching to have a full working museum,” explains Eoin Mac Loughlin, senior technical officer at NUI.
The NUI Galway Zoology and Marine Biology Museum opened its doors in September 2009 and its collections are among the hidden gems which will be open to school visitors during the Science and Technology Museum. The collection was previously located nearby in Áras de Brún.
Also housed in the museum is a collection of extremely valuable marine mammal reproductions in glass by German father and son, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. Darwin’s specimens are joined by a cross section of others such as coral, shark-jaws, swordfish, hippopotamus and whale skulls, a snake skeleton, a wild goat, a koala and a selection of skeletal feet which provide a practical demonstration of the naturalist’s theory of evolution at work.
“For example, we have an ape, a cat, and a kangaroo and we can see that all the tetrapods (four-footed animals ) have a very similar forearm because they have inherited it from a common ancestor. All the same bones are contained but they look different because they have different functions,” explains Dr Grace Mc Cormack, head of the Zoology Department at NUI Galway.
Further information is available at www.galwayscience.ie
