The museum team getting under the skin of the animal world around us

Professor Andrew Kitchener at the National Museums Collection Centre.

From blue tits to blue whales, the skilled team of preparators at the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) have dissected, inspected, stuffed or displayed the lot.

While some of their work with the blood and guts of dead animals isn’t for the squeamish, they’re playing a crucial role in conservation work around the world, as well as creating incredible exhibitions for us to marvel at.

The latest display is the much-anticipated return of Monkeys: Our Primate Family, which returns to Edinburgh after a six-country world tour later this month.

Georg Hantke, Curatorial Preparator, preparing big cat skins.

All the taxidermied primates featured are part of the NMS collection, which spans from dinosaurs and minerals to insects, birds and mammals.

“While the job definitely has its moments – climbing inside a 20 tonne whale carcass, for example – these are necessary steps to gain a much sought after specimens that can and will be used in our research collections,” explained curatorial preparator Georg Hantke.

“It is often gruesome, but these are valuable opportunities for finding out more.”

Whale strandings

The NMS collection is vast, with more than 10 million specimens in constant use for cutting edge scientific studies.

Georg often gets called out to whale and dolphin strandings along the Scottish coast, when the animal sadly cannot be saved and their carcasses are in need of disposal.

This includes an adult female sperm whale, beached on South Uist in 2019.

“Weighing more than 10 tonnes, this specimen was reduced to a skeleton and was taken back to the lab,” he explained. “It had to lose about 95% of its original weight, and the waste had to be buried to leave the beach clean.

“This was only possible thanks to the team. Even so, the skeleton had to be moved about 800m back to our camp, with its skull alone too big to be moved by truck.”

Georg Hantke (right) and Professor Andrew Kitchener examine a marine mammal skull.

He also describes responding to an unprecedented mass stranding of almost 100 Cuvier’s beaked whales washed up on Scotland’s shores in October 2018.

“One whale on Eriskay’s stomach contents were still present, giving us the rare opportunity to study its diet and the possible impacts of pollution,” he said.

“Once I’d taken all possible required measurements, I started taking blubber and tissue samples, removed soft parts, disarticulated bones and eventually carried the skeleton back to the van.

“Friendly farmers came with trucks and volunteers tried to help out.

“Was it okay to leave the flesh on the beach to rot, or should the animal remains be taken away? Is it a health hazard or a blessing for local wildlife?

“Luckily, in most cases people were used to seeing stranded whales and regarded them as an opportunity for local wildlife to feast on.”

The collection

The NMS collection is vast, with more than 10 million specimens in constant use for cutting edge scientific studies.

They can come into the collection from a range of different sources, including animals which have died naturally in zoos, wildlife parks or the wild.

“We now collect around 150 whales and dolphins every year,” Georg said. “For these specimens, volunteers around the country report beaching incidents to us.

“If it will enrich our collections, I’ll meet pathologists from the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme and carry out a necropsy (an animal autopsy) on the beach or at a local laboratory or the National Museums Collection Centre in Edinburgh.

“After the necropsy, samples are taken for our Biobank. It houses over 10,000 frozen tissue samples, containing a wealth of information that can be used for fundamental scientific research and supporting conservation management of endangered species.”

A western lowland gorilla, as featured in the exhibition.

Georg first joined the museum as a volunteer and developed a keen interest in preparation, becoming a taxidermy assistant and later a preparator.

“You must have respect for any organism and understand why you’re about to work on it,” he said.

“We quite often learn more from a dead animal than from a living one. What they’ve been feeding on, if there are diseases, physiology, parasites, when they give birth, size, variation, ages. Sometimes we even find species new to the UK.

“Our research is varied but has contributed to our understanding of climate change in Scotland and further afield, informs conservation efforts around the world and has helped improve conditions for animals in captivity.

“I love being in the outdoors, collecting, picturing, and studying animals.

“Sometimes I get to travel to zoos or breeding centres in the Netherlands, Sweden, France and many other countries where I have worked on tigers, snow and amur leopards, or primates from every corner of the globe.

“I get to work on killer whales in the UK, fish in Australia, reptiles and amphibians in Mexico and Taiwan.

“You see so many fantastic places, meet incredibly interesting people and, most importantly, you get to work on some of the world’s most endangered and rarest species.

“While much of this takes place behind the scenes, visitors will have the chance to see some of this material up close in the new exhibition.”

Our Primate Family

From huge gorillas to tiny mouse lemurs, Monkeys: Our Primate Family brings together more than 50 species and explores the incredible yet threatened lives of our closest animal relatives and continuing conservation efforts to protect their fragile habitats.

First opened at the National Museum of Scotland in 2016 before embarking on an international tour, it returns to Edinburgh for a final time having been seen by over 500,000 visitors.

A mandrill, as featured in the exhibition.

“It will be good to see some old friends,” said curator Professor Andrew Kitchener. “Coming up with the storyline for the exhibition, choosing the species and deciding how they should be posed has been an enormous privilege and great fun.

“It’s a really interesting job having the privilege of being able to see these animals up close.

“It took a few years, but we were collecting the primates a lot longer than that. Some of them were living in the freezer, as it were, for many years until we were ready to do the exhibition.

“Acquiring the specimens in the first place to some extent is down to luck.

“The beautiful proboscis monkey we have in the exhibition was one of the last individuals in a European zoo that unfortunately died. We were able to bring it back to Edinburgh and show it in this magnificent roaring display.”

The exhibition captures primates acting as they would in the wild, showcasing how they’ve evolved and adapted, their unique methods of movement, and the tools they have developed to obtain food.

It also reveals the fascinating ways they communicate and their complex social systems.

“There’ll be very familiar species, like gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and baboons, but also some more unusual ones,” Andrew said.

“There’s an aye-aye, for example, a very peculiar lemur. When first discovered, it was thought to be a giant squirrel because of its rodent-like teeth.

“It uses its big ears to listen for beetle larvae within rotting trees. Then it can bite a little hole to get to the burrow and use its long finger to hook it out. It’s an amazing piece of evolution and adaptation to that particular lifestyle.”

Species under threat

The final section of the exhibition looks at conservation as well as some of the threats humans pose to primates today, including the climate emergency, conflict, and the bush meat trade.

“Unfortunately, most primate species are now threatened with extinction,” Andrew said. “There are some where there’s literally just a few tens of individuals left.

“I think people feel empathy with primates because they recognise themselves within them, to some extent, because we’re all very similar structurally.

“Even if some of our wrappers are different colours and shapes, a lot of basic behaviours are very alike.

“The exhibition has been very successful in engaging people about what they can do to change things in their lives to make that little bit of difference. If thousands or millions do a that, it adds up to a huge amount.”

Monkeys: Our Primate Family is at the National Museum of Scotland from June 28. Kids go free thanks to support from the People’s Postcode Lottery and discounts are available for those receiving Universal Credit and other benefits.