Secrets of the Museum

What happens in the mysterious, not-so-dusty behind-the-scenes of natural history museums? Today we're talking about how museum collections extend far beyond what's visible to the public, and how they are a repository of massive amounts of knowledge for amazing (and weird) research. I'm joined today by the assistant director of the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University and author of the new book Nature's Memory: Behind the scenes of the world's natural history museums, Jack Ashby. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host
of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology,
and today on the show, we are talking about the weirdest,
most interesting stories that happen behind the scenes at museums.
Natural history museums are an incredible resource to be able

(00:28):
to go and visit and see some of the most
amazing aspects of evolutionary biology, often brought right to your city.
But there's so much that goes on that you may
not even know about. So today I am being joined
by the assistant director of the Museum of Zoology at
Cambridge University and the author of the new book Nature's Memory,

(00:51):
Behind the Scenes of the world's natural history Museum, Jack Ashby.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome, Hi, Kenchin, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
I'm so excited because I remember when I was a student,
I had an opportunity to visit There's the Harvard Museum
of Natural History, and it was really an amazing museum
to go to, Like you could go see there's this seal,
a camp that was suspended in this murky fluid. It
was it was all very old and kind of creepy,

(01:18):
but really cool. And then I had the opportunity to
actually see in the archives, so stuff that was not
available to the public, and there was so much more stuff.
I had no idea that the museum was not just
this kind of front facing thing for visitors to see
and look at the interesting taxidermy and bones and specimens,

(01:40):
but that there's like an incredible collection. Usually that the
museum is has behind the scenes that they can't display everything,
but they have so many weird, weird things exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
I've be in that museum in Harvard is amazing. Ar
could be the best plant display in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah, yeah, the glass wow, is amazing.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
It is amazing. But yeah, like behind the behind the
scenes that natiste. But honestly, I don't think there are
more interesting places than whether you're in a room with
literally millions of incredible.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, the weirdest collection of parts of animals, Like I
remember there was a an entire collection of I believe
it was moth and butterfly Genitalia, which was started by
Nabokov because you know, he was a weird guy. He
was also a lepidopterist and the author of Flowlitas, so
interesting man. But like, yeah, just there they would have

(02:34):
all these things that they couldn't display all of them,
and then also it was a collection that would be
uh was continuing. I remember seeing someone who was in
the process of stuffing this little bird, so a collected
specimen of this type of bird, and it's like, oh,
here they are, you know, just stuff in the bird
full of sawdust. Like it was kind of to see

(02:55):
that this museum it's not just sort of a dusty
old building full of stuff that just sits there and
nothing happens, like there's so much activity. So can you
tell everyone kind of about your role at the museum
of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Sure, So I'm really lucky. My job is essentially working
with the people who look after two million in speciments
here and also the people look after what about visitors,
So I've got a really diverse role across our museum.
It's incredible. We have to say about two million specimens here,
so they cover the whole of the animal kingdom, all

(03:36):
of biological time over the last half a billion years
or so, from all across the world. So it's yeah,
it's pretty exciting place to be. And also as part
of the University of Cambridge. There's really interesting research going
on behind the scenes in the museum, and like you say,
it's really important that the museums tell the story then

(03:57):
that it's not just the galleries, it's also research communities,
but also genuinely enormous store rooms of just loads of
stuff that has changed the world and how we understand it,
and it's used every day in groundbreaking research.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
I remember when I went to the back rooms of
the Harvard Natural History Museum, there would be like a
room that looked sort of maybe like a normal archive,
just a bunch of drawers, a bunch of cabinets, and
then open a drawer and then there'd just be a
bunch of sort of either stuffed birds or taxi dermaine

(04:32):
animal samples, or even just parts of an animal, like
maybe maybe a pelt, like a bunch. They might open
a drawer and just you see a bunch of little
mice pelts, as if it's like for these are the
rugs for some kind of like leprechaun or something. Just
this the but it was for, you know, and then
they would explain that it'd be for some research on

(04:52):
the change and color of these these mouse pelts. Over
seasonal changes for these field mice or something. There'd be
all this amazing research. So take us sort of behind
the scenes at the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University.
What does it look like in what is what is
kind of happening there a lot?

Speaker 2 (05:15):
It's like the first thing to say is and it's
probably obvious as soon as we start thinking about it,
but it doesn't seem to surprise people. Is that, you know,
a tiny, tiny fraction of what we have in our
collections is on display. So we have too many in
speciments here in Cambridge. You wouldn't want to see too
many specimens at once, so there's only a few thousand
specimens in our gallery. So I think it's it's about
a quarter of a percent of how collections are on display.

(05:38):
You know, go to the Natural History Museum and in
London they have eighty million specimens, so I think it's
about three one thousands of a percent of their collection
is on display. Wow, statistically almost nothing. You know. Smithsonian
Museum in the US is the biggest museum in the
world in the natural history collections, one hundred and forty
eight million specimens. So just being here about the scale

(06:00):
of what we hold like globally the distributed collections over
a billion specimen. It is, you know, it's extraordinary to
think of that, and so basically quite a lot of
what goes into looking after those specimens. Think about natural
history collections, particularly zoology and plants, is that they're all organic,
so we have to stop them from rotting, stop them

(06:21):
from being eaten by paths or being damaged by a mold,
and so that's a pretty active role. But most people
in the museums are here to share them like they
are public spaces, both behind the scenes and kind of
the public galleries public galleries where most people visit. But
we have a really active set of things going on

(06:42):
behind the scenes where either people are working to create program,
exhibitions or events to share the collections, but also just
to welcome researchers visiting from all over the world or
having you know, we have about twenty five PhD students
here in the museum's order in Cambridgry of six curators
who are researching the collection, so we're doing research both

(07:04):
in house. Also hundreds of thiss come to use the
collections in their research.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Yeah, and so like, what's an example of how a
researcher might use something a collection from a museum because
I think you know, often when you think of say biology,
research is something like maybe you go out and do
an observational study in the wild and you watch an
animal's behavior, or maybe you do some kind of research

(07:29):
on a live animal, Like you you do some sort
of mouse study, right like in medicine, where you have
you have mice in a lab. So I think often
the idea of research is like you either do something
in a lab with sort of like live things that
you've cut, or you go out into the wild and
you sit for a really long time and hope you
see something. But what in what way does museums can

(07:53):
museum specimens be used in research?

Speaker 2 (07:57):
It's a lot of ways, you know, and their use
has only ever grown over time. So since the very
earliest days of that for history museums, the main kind
of science that was done in them is still done
in them is taxonomy, so describing the diversity of life
on Earth. If you describe a new species, you have
to base it on a single specimen or small set
of specimens called type specimens, and those type specimens have

(08:21):
to be deposited in the public Museum, so that forever,
you know, hundreds of years in the future and hundreds
of years in the past. People are saying, okay, if
you're describing a new species, you have to compare it
to all of the other known species. To say why
your new one is different, you have to compared to
the type specimens, and so without you know, without knowing
what species exist, not much of biology makes sense as

(08:46):
well as all as your bosom. It makes sense even
today thinking conservation biology. We can't conserve what we don't
know exist. So just describing diversity is fundamental to music inqulotions.
But since that so much more is happening here in Cambridge.
Our insect Ecology group are taking the data off of

(09:06):
insect specimens that are collected in the eighteen twenties around
Cambridge in the East of England and working with the
local wildlife trusts for the local conservation bodies to share
with them what was here two hundred years ago before
our part of the country was drained. So Cambridgeshire is

(09:26):
massive wetland. Naturally, the fens in the East of England
is this big flat wetland and habitat which was drained
during the industrial revolution. So the Wildlife Trust are now
working to restore and those habitats, but they need to
know what was there two hundred years ago. So the
data and our specimens are absolutely valuable for that. So
the kind of the very fundamentally, what have we got?

(09:49):
What is the diversity of life? And then each of
those data points, each of those specimens tell us where
something lived when it was collected. So it's evidence for
how biodiversity has changed over time, so particularly through human interactions,
but also through climate change. So our collections in museums
are the world's best data set for how the world

(10:11):
has changed over the last two hundred years, particularly on
those two issues that affect literally everyone on the planet,
where biodiversity loss and time changed. We could we could
not understand this that museum collections. But pretty much every
week someone is coming up with a new way of
using a collection in a way that the people that
collected the specimens would have absolutely no idea what they

(10:32):
were doing. Specimens collected in eighteen hundreds. People who work
on genetics now are using those collections in ways that
can't be imagined. But there's so many more kind of
imaginative ways of using it. There's this really famous study
where it turned out that the soot the pollution on

(10:54):
the feathers of birds in museum collections ended up being
the best evidence for the use of black coal in
the US over the last one hundred plus years. So
people can track and say, okay, look at the dirt
on a bird feather and work out how much pollution
was in the atmosphere, and then match that to the
climate data from the date that the bird was collected,

(11:17):
and track that over thousands of specimens over one hundred years,
and you've got the best environmental record for air pollution
in the US. And obviously I didn't even match that
the specimen was a bird for that it was they
weren't looking at the birdyliness of the specimen, they were
just looking at the dirt on the bed. And there
are loads of examples like that, or you know, there's
there's a great one the Naturalist Museum did in London

(11:40):
and a few years ago where the first thing you
see when you walk into the museum is this blue
whale that died in the eighteen nineties off the west
coast of Ireland, and they took one of the sheets
of Baileen from the whales mats, So this is you know,
it's the big filter like civil like.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Structure, the push room that they have in their mouths
that they used to filter out krill exactly.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
So they'll take this massive gulp of water around krill
or squirered of fish and then push that water back
through these these brushes and hang out of their guns
and the same and them they just live around the
inside and how the biggest animals in the world eats
and the smalllest animals in the world. But what they
did was because by lean grows constantly throughout the animal's

(12:24):
life like you know, fingernails or head does, it provides
a record for the last they think six or seven
years of that animal because it was growing incrementally. So
they took a sample like let's say, every centimeter down
the bailey and that proved that provided evidence for where
exactly the whale was and the bailing group, because of

(12:46):
course we are what we eat. Yes, the chemistry of
the sea changes depending where on Earth it was, and
whales are really hard to study despite the fact that
they're massive, like they're super rare live underwater.

Speaker 1 (12:59):
We just cat we can't be like you know, when
we think about studies and you're sitting there trying to
observe what the animals are doing. We can't do that
with whales, despite how big they are. It seems like
they'd be very obvious to study. But we can't live,
at least not yet, like in a bubble lab in
the middle of the ocean, waiting around for a blue

(13:19):
whale to do something interesting.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Exactly exactly so they could show. In the last six
or seven years of her life she kind of the
chemistry of her baileying, so the chemical isotopes of her
bailey matched that for about a year she was around
the subtropics or maybe around Cape Third in the Atlantic,
and then she spent each year migrating back and forwards

(13:42):
to the North Atlantic and the subtropics every year, and
then they could find the hormones in her bailiing to
so that she became pregnant and gave birth again in
the in the subtropics before migrating north again and eventually
dying and washing up on the on the west coast
of the Island're thinking eighteen ninety one and not studying
This wouldn't be possible without without takings from the Museum.

Speaker 1 (14:07):
That's amazing, I mean, and it ties into so much research,
Like there's more modern research now on how whale urine
is like one of the biggest contributors to nitrogen in
the in more tropical waters, right. And then there's this
sort of funnel, this like p funnel from the from
the Arctic colder waters that actually have a lot more

(14:29):
nutritional density in them, and then they take the whales
feed there, then they migrate to these more tropical, warmer
waters and then they'll they'll mate, they'll give birth, and
so all the the leavings from them being there, like urine,
even the placenta contributes to this nitrogen in these area.
And then having this history of like, well we know

(14:50):
that whales we're doing these migratory paths for a long time.
It really contributes to our understanding of how they have
historically been behaving and how how you know, before kind
of humans started to do a bunch of whaling, how
much more of this whale fertilizer essentially must have been
in the ocean. So it gives us like a better

(15:11):
idea of like how much more nutrient and some of
these tropical regions probably were before we started our massive
whaling campaign in the in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, it's such such a cool story that, Yes, Joe
Roman has just written this book. I just read an
Eat Poop Guy exactly about what you're talking about about
this kind of contributions that different animals make. Particularly is
a big section on whales to the kind of the
chemistry of their environment and the nutrition of their environments. Yeah,
really really interesting stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
There's an interesting also when you were mentioning the whale bailing.
I remember reading about how there were various museums who
would hold on to whale ear plugs. So like ear wax,
which in whales isn't softer flake how it can be
in humans, but it actually forms these really hard, almost
like rock like chunks, and through its lifetime it forms

(16:10):
these bands like kind of like tree rings, but this
these sort of more horizontal bands as it is changing
its seasonal nutrition and it builds up over a lifetime,
and museums would get these from dead whales and they
didn't know what to do with them. They didn't certainly

(16:30):
like maybe they would put one or two on display,
but they had so many of them, but they held
onto it right, Like, this is one thing I love
about what museums do is they'll just hold on to
stuff and you know, without any guarantee that this is
going to be really important. But it's like, hey, this
is this seems very cool, very interesting, we don't know

(16:50):
what to do with it. And then in you know,
more recently, researchers are like, hey, actually we now know
how to study the chemical composition of the earwax, and
so we can track because like with the different bands
of earwax, we know that this whale is this many
years old, We know that it changes colors with the season,

(17:11):
with the nutritional cycle, and now we can actually, like
with the bay leen, we can look at hormone levels.
We can know if this whale was like stressed in
this certain season. And so all of this information like
basically the whale's life story stored in its giant chunk
of earwax that museums have been carefully taking care of

(17:33):
tending to with no you know, like with no glory, right,
Like it's not like you get an award for hanging
on to old whale earwax. But then finally it becomes
really important for research, Like are they do you have
any other examples of like very like seemingly either unimportant
or really strange or gross museum holdings that could actually

(17:57):
be really interesting for research.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
Something were called the extended specimen concept, which is a
not very inserting way of how exctually get about what
is on our specimens. So, like I said, fundamentally, it's
what is it, where is it from, and when did
it die? Is that's the basic data of any specimen.
But beyond that, we can you know, we can take
the pollen off of the bee and work out what

(18:22):
flowers it is visiting. We can take the stomach contents
of any animal worked out what it was eating. We
can take hormones, as you said, or chemical data and
work out what was it, you know, what what how
is it? How is it experiencing its life, and what
what environments is it exposed to, which can tell us
exactly where it's came from came from by matching the
soil chemistry or water chemistry. And we can take its parasites.

(18:44):
We can take a measure of how symmetrical an animal
it is, which tells us how stress it was one
of the growing They're so just infinite data on any
of these specimens literally infinite data and if you take
that across a billion specimens in the world, Yeah, it
is genuinely endless. There's another story, a bit like the

(19:06):
weal one, but perhaps less gross, and that's the longest
living animal ever discovered, with a tiny species of Arctic
clam and people realize that by sectioning, they're taking a
slice across this clamshell. It too had growth rings from winter,

(19:26):
summer and change. It's like a like a like a
treatment and you can take the you could analyze the
chemistry of each of those hundreds of bands. This this
clam lift I think five hundred and seventeen years or
something like that, and each of those bands providing an
environmental record for the sea where it lived, so they

(19:48):
can for the last night under years create a climate
record of that of that little patch of sea, which
is just present from one specimen. And yeah, well bailey
whal ear whap is even cooler and bail because it's
the whole the whole of the animal's like pretty long too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
They don't they don't like lose. That's it's so strange
because they don't like drop. Like as humans, we kind
of lose our ear wax right, like it naturally sort
of like our the cycle of the ear, like it
gets pushed out with like the skin renewal inside the
ear and then slowly and it comes out. And that's
why you have gross earwax that comes out of your ears.
It's normal and it's healthy. But for whales, it just

(20:27):
sits in there and kind of gets and collects over
time and it forms these hard plugs and they actually
like use them to enhance their their hearing because like
sound can travel through the ear plug into their skull
and it's it's wild to me. That's something that it's like, uh,
this thing that in human beings were just like, well,
this is a gross waste product, and then it just

(20:49):
becomes this fundamental part of a whale's anatomy throughout its life.
But that's amazing about the I had no idea that
there were clams that uh not only would could live
that long, but then by looking at this, like it's
such a humble little thing, right, like you don't a
clam is something I feel like we barely register when

(21:09):
when we're going along the beach. They're so common we
eat them. But then too, it's like that just this
humble little animal keeping such a detailed record of not
only its life but the environment around it. Like there's
so much understanding how much information is contained in like
one animal, Like there's the genome, right, the DNA, which

(21:33):
is vast and kind of an insanely insane amount of data,
but then everything else as well, when you're able to
study the chemical composition of say like it's shell or
any anything else that you can preserve, is it is
kind of mind blowing. Like you think of a library,

(21:53):
right with like billions of books, and then each book
is like hundreds of thousands of pages or or even
more like when you're thinking about an animal, right, So
it is it is just a bewildering amount of information
that is collected in museums.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
Likely connection hey vers is coming along. It's something coming
on with a really specific question, and we're just kind
of waiting here for question, and we we can't anticipate
what's there with asking me about dental calculus. So plaque
on mammal specimen, mambal teeth in a collection like again,

(22:31):
it's the kind of always prot back to your growth.
Is that going to provide a record of the diet?

Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah? Also yeah, it's like, hey, you know what, we
do have a bunch of plaque in our collection that
you can come look at. Yeah, it's that's incredible. And
only I think a fraction of these stories sort of
reach the news, and usually it's something really sensational or
fun to look at. Like how in a lot of

(22:59):
music collections they started realizing that there were animal pelts
from particularly from Australian marsupials, that would biofluoresse under UV light.
And then they started going like, wait, you know, but
we have to test this now on every animal we
possibly can't to see which of these which of these

(23:20):
mammals are biofluorescing, because I think we had already known that,
like there is a lot of biofluorescence, say in scorpions,
various arthropods, but then to find that there were a
lot of mammals that also had this biofluorescence. And then
of course how do you get access to being able
to test a bunch of animal pelts, Well, museums have them,

(23:43):
so like just going through these collections and then you know,
turning on a little black light and seeing which glows.
It's it's it's sort of fun to look at images
of these like glowing platyplus pelts. But there's there's so
much more that is happening all the time. I would
imagine in terms of researchers suddenly being like, wait, actually,

(24:03):
we have so many examples that we could go through
and see if this new thing that we're discovering holds
true for other species or other specimens exactly.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, museums are really unusual places and that they bring
together animals that you will never find together anywhere else.
A worus and a platypust that have steered each other. Yeah,
so my platypusts are actually my corner of zoology. So
that was super interesting finding when we found out they're biofluoresce,
and we have no idea why or even if there

(24:33):
is a reason, you know, it could just be some
random revolutionary spandrol wiggle them just it just is it's
a byproduct or something else that doesn't have any evolutionary
function because sistem most of the time daytime in their burrows,
so they probably don't experience a love, if you like,
so we don't really know what's going on there.

Speaker 1 (24:55):
Just so fun could just be a fun Easter egg, right,
like it's a yeah, Like I know that they've been
trying by kind of examining a bunch of specimens, there's
been some attempt to establish some pattern of like when
does this happen, why does it happen? But yet absolutely
sometimes it can just be sort of a structural feature
that has nothing like the biofluorescence, has nothing to do

(25:17):
with why that feature is there. Like you said, the
spandrel being that you have some structural feature of an
animal for some other purpose, and then as kind of
like a byproduct, you have this other thing because it
refers to I believe, like when you would have like
an archway in architecture, and then you have these two
corners and the archways that are just there because of

(25:38):
the structure. They don't actually serve any purpose. But in
architectural history you'd have all these sort of like highly
decorated spandrels just because it's like some space where you
can do a little motif. And then in modern times
and we're like trying to figure out, like what is
the purpose of this spandrel, like what is it there for?
And it turns out it's not there for anything. It's
just there because it's a byproduct of how you build, uh,

(26:00):
sort of a curve within a square archway and then
that's it. So it's the same thing with animals, where
it's like yeah, sometimes it's not. It's not there for
any reason. Maybe there's a different reason that their fur
has this biofluorescent property. Maybe it has something to do
with like thermal regulation, but there's no actual purpose to
the glowing, but it's it's fun to.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
See, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Uh So I one thing that I think is really
interesting is that the idea that museums are not like, uh,
there's no such thing as say, a purely objective museum. Uh.
And and this is not like a criticism of museum,
it's it's it's the idea that a museum can have

(26:44):
a viewpoints, so in the same way that a curator
of an art museum might make decisions on which paintings
or sculptures to highlight, which informs our understanding of art,
you know, Like we know that the Mona Lisa is
a big deal because when you go to the Louver,
there's a giant room mostly just dedicated to her in
a huge line, And so we have this cultural understanding

(27:05):
of like she is a big deal, even though her
painting's kind of small, And so the duration of a
natural history museum, even though it's not art right Like so,
I think we're more used to the concept of art
being subjective, but with something like a natural history museum,
I think there's often this idea like, well, science has
sort of one answer, and everyone knows what it is

(27:27):
if you do the research, and so that's just how
these decisions are made, say in a museum. But that's
not necessarily the case. So what are some examples of
how natural history museum curation can either bias our views
or change our views on the natural world in ways

(27:47):
that are not always bad, but it can definitely interact
with sort of our cultural biases that we already have.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
I think that's such an interesting question. It's something I
spent a lot of time writing about in memory. It's
just to think that visually, museums might be showing natural objects,
but they are made by people. Both the objects that
are not wholly natural they will be artifacted in some way,
but the people that have prepared them and then they've
chosen what to put on display. So it's I think

(28:16):
it's an astonishing thing that although we might have a
billion speciment in the world's naturalist museums, all of the museums,
you know, despite that diversity of stuff, pretty much all
show the same thing and they talk about the same
animals in the same kinds of ways, and that kind
of There are these just tropes and trends of how
museums talk about nature and how museums display nature that

(28:38):
I think are worth on picking it a little bit.
And yeah, the first thing to say is that today
most naturalism museums will say that their purpose, like their
mission statements, will also something like we want to make
our visitors encourage them to care about the natural world,
encourage them to care about biodiversity. And I think, you know,
they're really good at doing that. But what's interesting is

(28:59):
when you go in to a natural history gallery, that's
not what biodiversity looks like, you know, just in the
animal I mean first amazonologists. So I'm affected by lets
less than other people. But museums are really bad at
play displaying plants. Normally, ants are only on displayed in
relation to.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
Animals and kind of like a background background the carpet
on which they say yes exactly.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
So this notion of plant line. This where we can
look at a scene where you know, there's as a
photograph with a leopard in the middle of a grass,
and we ignore the grass. We just see the leopard,
even though you know what grass is ninety eight percent
of the picture. That happens in museums too. But even
among animals. You know, we've so far as we have
just described about one and a half million species of animal.

(29:50):
And I always ask people to guess how many of
those one and a half million species are mammals, And
I think people are generally surprised that they but it's
not that many. There's only about six and a half thousand,
a few in seven thousand, zero point four percent of
all life on Earth as a mammal. But what do
we see when we go to naturalism museums. We've see mammals,

(30:12):
We see loads and loads and loads of mammals, as
insects make up sixty percent of that diversity. So almost
a million species of insects has been described, But insects
are given so little space in naturalist museums, and I
think that's going to affect what people learn to value.
So museums are culturally important in our relationship with the

(30:32):
natural world, and we obviously we are mammals as humans,
and we're going to be drawn to cute things with
cute faces and fur. But if museums really are trying
to make people care about their besty, they should probably
do a better job of displaying insects.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
We've just got to convince people that tartar grades velvet
worms are incredibly cute, and we got to.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
See that they are.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
They're so cute velvet if if I could have like
one sort of a genie wish to like make an
animal a pet that should not be a pet, like
having a giant velvet worm as a pet would be amazing.
They're these little pudgy animals. They're not They're just their
whole They're kind of their own thing. They're not a worm,

(31:19):
they're not an insect, they're not a caterpillar. They just
look like these little soft, chubby pokemon like things that
have a bunch of little legs, a bunch of little
chubby arms, and then these two fat antenna and they
are they they're very cute to look at. They're terrifying
predators for smaller insects, but it's a yeah, it's I

(31:42):
just I would love to see a museum have on
display sort of like giant versions of say, arthropods insects,
so that you can see kind of up close. Because
if you're kind of looking at a display with a
tiny beetle, maybe someone's like, you know, what is I
barely notice that? But if but if you're looking at
like a giant plant hopper, and how colorful and amazing

(32:05):
it is, I don't know. I would love to see.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah, yeah, they are like obviously infectual, they have going
against them. It's that they're tiny, yes, but there are
ways of displaying, like there are ways of doing good
insect displays, including and you say, giant things, but also
just loads and special So what they make up for
is what they do insights, they make up for it.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
I remember seeing in a natural history museum like this
giant mandola of like various beetle species, just like kind
of arranged by color, and that was that was very cool.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
It's yeah, they're beautiful, and so I think that's that's
one bites is that we're not we're not reflecting the
natural world taken well. And then there's another one that's
slightly more insidious. And that's that we have way more
male specimens on display in naturist museums than where do
you females?

Speaker 1 (32:51):
He wants to see a girl lion? Nobody.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
I like that. You might think, you might think that
you know it's justified, but and you know, it's a
difficult decision. So you know, nature's men. We spend a
lot of time talking about it, that people are making
decisions about what on displayed, what stories are the most
interesting or most like, to help people feel inspired all

(33:16):
struck by the natural world. And yes, you can understand
that given the choice between you know, a massive, brightly
colored male bird and a kind of brown, small drab
female bird, there is there is some sense in them
showing the female. I would argue that it's interesting to
show that males and females can be different.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
And it's also like the manner in which that like
the manner in which they're displayed with male and female birds.
Is One thing I've noticed is that the big maybe
you have like a brightly colored male, and then they
include the female, but she's kind of in the background.
She's They don't really spend a lot of time preparing
the taxidermad specimen she's just like and there's the female

(33:56):
and she's brown and whatever and like and they have
the male in this like glorious sort of you know action,
pose wings out, you know, in a in some display,
and it really makes you feel like the female birds
are sort of just in the background, not doing anything,
when in fact, these drab female birds are the whole

(34:16):
reason in a lot of theories is that they're the whole
reason you have these like male displays, and they have
so much agency in picking mates and what they're doing
in terms of, uh, care for offspring, or they may
have some really interesting behavior and you're just not capturing that.
If you have this big, you know, display of a
truly beautiful male specimen, nothing wrong with doing that, but

(34:39):
then the females just kind of like in the background.
Like if you could maybe showing her that she's like
really investigating this male, and you'd have to be a
clever taxidermist to show that kind of action shot of
like this female is actually very active in this courtship ritual.
But it's is it is often just like, look at
this amazing male and then she's back there doing something.

(35:00):
Don't we don't really care about.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
I think it gets worse, it gets worse than that.
So you know, I do write about this a lot
in the book, but the bias, and it's particularly picked
up by a colleague of mine called Rebecca Maten who
who kind of noticed this, this this version what you're
talking about, where it's not only that they're in the background,
but the females are you know, lower on the shelf
or sometimes mounted, like literally bowing down to the males.

(35:24):
The males, as you say, be passed up domineering pose
and the and the females are literally kind of head down,
face on the floor. This is this is I say,
how how dead birds prop up the patriarchy. And it's
got absolutely nothing to do with natural history. It doesn't
reflect what happens in the wild. What these birds are
doing now.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
It's like like females are sort of like the Simon
Cowell of animals, like in the in terms of these
like they will be yeah, if you watch them, like
if you want, you'll see like a bower bird really
trying to impress a female and she is like scrutinizing him,
judging him, and he's the one sort of like no, no, no,
please stay like come back, like so it is. It

(36:07):
is not it's not only uh, showing bias, but it
is inaccurate, right, it is not it's not showing you
the truth. Right. So I think like that's kind of
an like it's an important point because I think sometimes
people think, like, ah, you know, who cares about like
you know, quote unquote feminism in museums, Like that's just
that's not science. It's like no, Actually, if you're not

(36:29):
paying attention to our kind of weird human gender biases, uh,
that will distort what is actually happening in terms of
actual animal behavior and what's happening in the natural world exactly.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
I think that actually goes beyond the specimens to what
we write on the labels as well. So Rebecca mentioned
the study of typical naturist museum labels and in those
relatively row instances where you have females on display, male
and females on display to look at them, the labels
on a male specimen in it or say something like
you know, this is how the animal eats or moves

(37:04):
through its habitat or defends itself or general natural history
facts are on the male specimens because on the female
specimens its stories about how the species really produce it,
and how they make babies, how they raise their babies,
and of course female specimens also eat and move through
the habitats and defend themselves, and male specimens also reproduce

(37:25):
and once we're babies. But it perpetuates the very human
social construct of what gender you know, gender roles are.
So you know, it's it's pushing a human and social
construct onto an animal in ways that you know, unhelpful,
that it gives a very because an obvious but subconscious

(37:47):
message to you any visitor reading that, including kids. So
you know, museums do have a role in shape and
what people think. And it's not just the specimens, it's
also what people write on the labels. And not for nothing,
but most people who work in that dressed to medium
for women. So it's such an ingrained yeah construct.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Yeah, I mean, well, you know how it is the
the male crab goes out to his little job, and
then the female crab stays at home in the in
the kitchen, raising all the little crab baby. You know. Yeah,
we there are like specific examples in nature that seem
to when it likes quote unquote subverts this expectation. Uh,

(38:31):
it's like surprising or we see it as for example,
like I think some of the myths about say, like spiders,
uh is because like there are a few examples of like, yes,
the female spiders tend to be larger than the males,
So people have a concept that all female spiders will

(38:52):
engage in uh, sexual cannibalism, and it's like, well, that's
actually not true. I think it's just that it's surprising
enough to people that female arthropod's female spiders tend to
be larger than the males that a few examples in
which there are female spiders who do engage in sexual cannibalism,

(39:13):
and sometimes it's like it's not that they always do it,
but they only do it in certain situations. Turns into
this kind of like a myth of like, well, you
know how spiders are they flip the script and because
they're so big and so scary, they always eat the
males after copulation, and so it's a you know, you know,

(39:33):
it's kind of like even once you get an example
of like, look, this clearly is subverting sort of the
human cultural expectations, that too can become mythologized because we
see that as an exception rather than something within the
spectrum of many different types of animal behaviors that are

(39:55):
very diverse. And there's a lot of different type of
spider ma eating behaviors that is not just like a
a giant evil female eating the poor little males exactly.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
And you know, there's a lot of animals in which
the females is bigger than the males for obvious reasons
where the one's producing the eggs. So for example, a
lot of birds of prey, and most birds of prey
probably even the females are bigger snakes and crocodiles as well.
And what's interesting is not only that that gender bias
I mentioned when more males are on display than females,
that's also true in the stored collections. So it's not

(40:29):
just kind of the curatorial bias in what's going on display,
but on what science is being done as well. So
there are way more males in the stored collections and females,
and that bias is actually less strong for species in
which females are bigger, ordet decorated. And but that that
bias in the stalled collection is interesting and important to acknowledge,

(40:51):
and the scientific point of view, because if you're making
study based on, however, many thousand specimens of the given
species or given group in a museum, and the majority
of those specimens of male, you need to account for
that bias in any conclusions you make. We might you know,
in many species, males and females might eat different things,
or behave differently, or have different but you know, if

(41:13):
you analyze the chemistry, the chemistry will end up being different.
So if we're not acknowledging that bias in the science
that's being done, we're going to be misrepresenting what females
animals are doing. The science gets corrupted too.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
I mean, that's it's that's really interesting because that's also
the case in medical science that uses say mouse lineages
or rat lineages, there's this, uh, this like weird rat
sexism where rat or mouse sexism, where often medical studies
will only use male male mice or male rats because

(41:47):
it's like, ah, yeah, but the females have hormonal cycles
that will interfere with our research, and it's like, okay,
but you do realize that, uh, in humans, female humans
also have hormonal cycles that might interfere with whatever medical

(42:07):
concept that you're studying. So like there's this bias of like, well,
we'll just use the male mice because or the male
routes because we don't want to really have to have
this other variable of the hormones and the female routes
and the female mice. I've been hearing stories right in
in terms of like the current sort of in the US,

(42:28):
as people probably know, we've been getting this concept that
we need to get rid of dei or quote wokeness
in research. And so what's been happening is any research
that deals with sex or hormones has been targeted for
potential defunding. And so I have a friend who is
telling me about she's an entomologist, and there's researchers in

(42:52):
the US who their content got flagged because they were
looking at sexual diversity in crickets. So this was this
is looking at sex ratios in cricket species, and they
are you know, we're getting sort of like targeted because
it's like, oh, well, you're doing something that is part

(43:14):
of a this is not objective, right, You're doing some
some sort of like social science with your research. And
I think this is kind of a I think for
a lot of people, now this is obviously strange and wrong.
But for a while, even before this current political situation,
I think that there's been this desire to completely separate

(43:39):
the hard science, the hard science, from social sciences, or
to have this concept of pure objectivity in say evolutionary biology,
that is separate from culture, it's separate from society, and
that we don't you know that is it's a political
it's it's a kind of like thing on a in

(44:02):
a vacuum. So what how do you think is like
On the other hand, though, like it is important in
science to have a certain element of objectivity. You want
to do research, you want to keep like you said,
like having collections that are more objective. Well is important

(44:23):
for research in terms of having say like an equal
balance of the sex of different specimens. So what is
like a healthy way to balance objectivity with an understanding
of how our culture and our society can influence our
understanding of evolutionary biology, Like, is what is a way
to both acknowledge sort of our biases but also try

(44:44):
to achieve this this idea of scientific objectivity.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
And I think it goes a lot deeper than evolution
biology certainly includes that I think not true His museums
represent themselves. As you say, it's a political and scientific
meaning that you know, they've excluded themselves from conversations that
have been happening in every other kind of museum discipline
about the human stories behind that collection. You know, if

(45:10):
we pretend this is just a collection of hedgehogs and crickets,
then we're ignoring the stories of the circumstances in which
those hedgehogs and crickets are collected. You know, it is obvious,
utterly obvious when when you start to think about it,
that science is part of culture and is affected by
the science society is that it's embedded in Societies are

(45:35):
different in parts of the world at different times in history,
so that what museums collect, how they display them, how
they interpret them, how they study them, how they store
them reflect the same prejudices and biases or priorities and
interests as a society that they're happening in. So, you know,
we've been starting to say this for the last few

(45:56):
years that museum naturist mediums are you know, are starting
to realize that. Yeah, so of course where human constructs, yes,
museums are not neutral, and that's a good thing. But
you know, what's happening in the US at the moment.
It's an obvious example of that because they are directly
controlling what science is happening at the moment. And that
has always happened that it's in a democratic country, it's

(46:17):
what's happening now is pretty extraordinary. So we you know,
we're we're at this point and have been for the
last really not that long seven or eight years. In
naturists museums are kind of acknowledging the fact that science
and science museums are not beyond politics. And and I'll
say that that notion has kind of crumbled as soon
as you start thinking about it. So we're going through

(46:41):
a bit of huge piece of work to kind of
add this layer of relevance. And as I said, we
are naturist medium that are incredibly important. There's just relevance
in tackling climate change by adversity of arts, but we
also have a really important role in talking about social
justice and the cultural history of our collections and the
societies that we represent. So you know's there's two sides

(47:05):
to this. I'd like to think that's why there's a
whole trunk in unless in nature's memory, the suicide some
one is acknowledging, like the circumstances in which collections were
made often exploitative or you know, actively violent, but there
were collections made during military campaigns where you know, where
European countries or the US were invading other countries and

(47:28):
taking that opportunity to build collections, just as they were
in places like you know, the British Museum or other
anthropology collections. Our Natrist museums represent the material will be
that animal, vegetable and mineral that they're colonizing. The powers
were investigating what could be, what would make money, what

(47:51):
would be exploded there, and the museums were deliberately built
to kind of house those repositories and then also present
a positive view of colonization to their audiences and audiences
obviously in the in the in the metropology and of
the countries that were doing the colonizing. That's one side
of it, just telling more honest stories about how our

(48:11):
collections came together. And in doing so, you know, people
are pushing against this push against the idea of rewriting history. Obviously,
that's all what historians do. That's the job of history
to work out what actually happened. And if it turns
out that what we have been thought had been happening
isn't actually what happened, then it is you can't really
sensibly argue against not reflecting, Oh, we know a bit

(48:35):
better about what the real circumstance is. That's one part
of it, but very much related part of that is
is you know acknowledging who was involved in those stories
in the museums, Like some museums are places of storytelling,
and whenever someone is telling a story, you need to
think about who are they and who are they telling
the story for, and that museums, like all museums, have

(48:55):
been telling particular kind of story with a particular kind
of audience in mind for very long. Those stories have
elevated certain kinds of people whilst kind of diminishing other
kinds of people. So what I guess I'm saying is
that we're doing this piece of work to try and
recognize and acknowledge and share that the big names behind

(49:17):
major discoveries and the history of science didn't work alone,
and then the story that we're telling there was a
far greater diversity of characters than some we've traditionally told.
So there are you know, countless people of color and women,
local and indigenous collectors who have made huge contributions to
the history of science and massive discoveries. And it isn't
all just about you know, the Charles Darwins and that

(49:38):
Alfred Russell Wallace is and the other rich white guys
who made huge contributions. But they didn't work alone. And
it does nothing to kind of diminish their accomplishments by saying, actually,
that specimen was collected by you know, the local charactor
who shared the coreactive of knowledge and expertise and labor
in making those discoveries. So it's just as I said,

(49:59):
a the relevance to museums because it means that more
people will feel represented in those histories and feel like science,
museums and science in general is a place for them
and something that people like them have contributed to.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
It's also like an interesting like the idea that some
guy comes in from on a boat from England, no offense,
and goes to some island, sees like all of the
behaviors that animals do at any point, comes back tells
the stories like we've now discovered everything about these animals

(50:34):
because I went on a boat to this place for
a few years. Like, it's such an unrealistic version of
how animal observations and this is just talking about observations
in the wild, right, like are actually made and how
the like how there are so many animals for which

(50:54):
it is very difficult to observe them that you have
to rely on people who live there to god your
research into these animals. So like, you know, things that
could be dismissed as local folklore or non scientific, right
because these are observations made by fishermen. Maybe you have
a bunch of people who live near where nar waals are, right,

(51:15):
and they make these observations. It's like, well, these aren't
really scientific, but we don't have anything else, right, Like
we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier about
how hard it is to study some of the largest
animals in the world, whales, because we don't live there.
There's nobody that lives in the middle of the ocean
where we can make observations and see their sort of

(51:37):
quotitian lives. Similarly, the best records of animal observations for
remote areas where well relatively remote, right remote to us.
When we don't live in those areas are going to
be made by people who live there. And so if

(51:57):
we dismiss those kinds of observations or even cultural stories
right that get passed down from generations, we're also dismissing
a huge wealth of knowledge. Right, So, like there are
a lot of animal observations that we're now of starting
to realize that oh, like this story of say like
hawks in sort of the outback like spreading fire that

(52:21):
wasn't maybe just metaphorical, They might literally do that. We
need to observe them more to know like if they're
doing this behavior. But these kinds of cultural stories or
observations made by local people are really important data points
that should be respected in that way. And I think

(52:42):
having the like not having this like idea that like, well,
science comes from you know, a white guy who came
in on a boat and suddenly like gave the gift
of science to people who were living in this area.
It's like no, Like, observations made over generations is a
type of data collect and it's something that is really

(53:02):
important should we want to actually engage in research in
a way that is, you know, taking into account a
type a type of research and a type of data
collection that takes years in generations.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
To do exactly that. And I mean, even if we
did just want to focus on Western science and scientific
understanding as the world, which as you say, is pretty
narrow a way of looking at things, even making those
discoveries required an understanding of how to catch the animals
in the first place, which requires know where they're going
to be at a certain time of year, a certain
kind of day, how they're going to react if you

(53:41):
chase them, how where they're going to borrow, you know,
and all of that. I've been studying this collection of
Central Australian mammals, which is from the first scientific expedition
in Central Australia, and it was it resulted in the
collection of a bunch of new mammal species that hadn't
been encountered by Europeans before, and all of the labels

(54:03):
on these specimens spread across museums across the world to
say they were collected by one of two white men
on this expedition or associated with this expedition, And having
read their letters, it's clear that they didn't have want
of them to collected a single specimen. It was all
it was all sudden arevent to the first nations Australian
women who were collecting these specimens, and then they were
being shipped back to the city, and they were even

(54:26):
telling them what was collectible, so that the event of
women was that, you know, were directing the collecting efforts
and describing the natural history and providing the specimens. So
it's yeah, it's huge roles that have transformed Western scientific
understanding of in that case, central Australian mammals.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's just it's the
respecting the amount of information that you can get from
having the humility to understand that. Like, look, I may
have like a lot of knowledge about biology, but if
you go to a lot area, like people who have
say lived near the Amazon based basin for many generations,

(55:08):
they will just intrinsically have sort of a perspective and
life experience that can help you. Right, Like it's it's
not it doesn't have to be a competition about like oh,
who's more knowledgeable or which method is better. It's like
all of these types of methods can work together, right,
Like the sort of you know, the scientific method that

(55:30):
you are trying to do by collecting specimens and then
whatever research you're doing works can work in tandem with
the knowledge and data collection of people who live there.
It's it's absolutely sort of a symbiotic relationship, not something
that is like has to be one or the other
or replaced by one thing. You know, it's a it's

(55:53):
sort of a it's just it's all an opportunity to
be able to share data together, which I think is
something that to me that like, that's one of the
most inspiring things about natural history museums is the idea
of like humanity collectively sharing uh, just this immense amount

(56:14):
of data, uh information and stories about our world, and
so understanding that this takes many shapes and forms. That
is not just purely like you know, Charles Darwin getting
on a boat and going to an island. No, no
offense to Charles Darwin. He was great. But you know,
it's it's that is not the only type of uh

(56:37):
kind of natural history that exists. Yeah, before we go,
I do want to ask just do you have any
like really weird or funny uh stories about something that
happens behind the scenes at the Museum of Zoology at
Cambridge that you think would like surprise people like, it

(57:00):
doesn't have to be super important to science, just something like,
you know, because like one thing that UH is like
there's this in UH at the Harvard Museum of Natural History,
there's just this like decaying elephant head that's just it's
not on display for visitors because it's too kind of

(57:21):
creepy looking. But they just sort of shoved it there
in one of the one of the research buildings, and
this elephant head that's like falling apart. It looks very haunted.
Like I I think that if there's like an elephant
haunting that happens, it's going to be because of that.
But is there any any kind of like weird or
funny stories that you can share.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
I think this isn't just for Cambridge, but it's definitely
true here. I think it's really surprising that the length
that museums can go to to change a specimen and so,
like it often surprises people to learn that most mammals
have in their penis because museums. It's surprising because you

(58:05):
will almost never see a mammal skeleton with its penis
bone attacked. So there is one specimen on display here
in Cambridge out of how I don't know how many
hundreds of skeletons that has a penis bone attached, and
it's an elephant seal. But if you go to any
European museum, including the UK, you are very unlikely to

(58:27):
see a penis bone. Interestingly, Americans are less prudish, but
the reason being is that you Victorian curatives have decided
to try to spare their visitors blushes or perhaps the
giggles or twelve year old boys by taking the penis
spats away. But what that means is that museums have
been deliberately misshaping their specimens, so deliberately telling people the

(58:49):
wrong thing right about animal anatomy, that there is a
bone in most mammals penis And I think that's astonishing
that they would do that. And so you go to
it thing, right, Yeah, you go to a museum store
and they're literally drawers of penis bones.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
To me, that's more perverse, right, like it it's way
more perverse to like rip the penis pone off the
skeleton and put it in a drawer somewhere.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
So it's like I was. I was in the California
California Academy of Science in San Francisco, and I was
walking around kind of impressed how many penis bones place.

Speaker 3 (59:28):
And then I was in their store room and I
noticed that in the stores like where you've got a
kind of a skeleton of say a seal, which obviously
in storings are not mounted into into a skeleton Shapey're
not articulated.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
They are kind of left in boxes because that is
much easier to store but also to study. Yeah, and
they don't have any human biases attached to them. Is
that they had also like so they displayed that they
had on the shelves. They had a box with the
bones in it of the skeleton, and then the skull
separate on the shelf, but then also separate on the
shelf next to it was the penis pone. So they

(01:00:06):
also removed the penis bone from the boxes, were kind
of like elevating its importance. But I just don't understand
what's going on there, and I asked the curator and
I don't know, that's just what.

Speaker 4 (01:00:16):
We do.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Un built tropes.

Speaker 4 (01:00:21):
But you go to go and.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
Look around the naturalistic collector a skeleton collection of mammals,
and it should be the primates, the rodents. What we
used to call the insectivors, which are the moles, shrews
and hedgehogs, the anevns, the bats, and the rabbits, and
they should have penis pants on most of their species
obviously just on the mail, but you will. It's a

(01:00:45):
hearty hard fish to find them.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
It reminds me of It makes me think of like
sort of artist depictions of male and female skeletons where
it's like the female skeleton has like an hourglass shape
and it's like, no, no, that's not how. That's not how
that works, or like a or like a smaller hip
bone than the male. It's like that's not that's not

(01:01:07):
that's not how. That's not how it works. But yeah, no,
that that is amazing because it's just like it is.
It's like how our prudishness then leaves people to not
understand that actually like, uh, we're kind of the exceptions,
Like there are there are other animals that do not
have penis bones along with humans and another close human relatives,

(01:01:29):
but like like we are kind of the exception, like
most mammals do have penis bones.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
Correct, Yeah, this is just like beha and bred y.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
Yeah, yeah, just just not like it's like, yeah, either
the bonobos don't I think, right, or am I wrong
about that?

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
I can't remember. I want to say, yeah, I can't remember. Yes, yeah,
I think chimps.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Have Oh no, they do.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
They do.

Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
Both chimpanzees and bonobo's have the penis phone. I'm wondering
now if it is just humans that don't have it
among primates, or if there are.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Any primary there are there are. I think there are
a couple, but they're unusual. You know, there are definitely usual.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
We're weird, but because we're the ones making the museums,
we're like, no, all your other all your other mammals
are weird freaks like not us. Well, thank you so
much for coming on today. This has been really really interesting.
And where can people get your book? Tell people what
it's called and why they should read it. I want

(01:02:38):
to read it now, to be honest.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
It's called Native's Memory, Behind the Scenes of the World's
Not Christ Museums, and it comes out in twenty fous
and a contentiary five and.

Speaker 4 (01:02:47):
So saying so you know all good bookshops, and it's
it's it's about how nature is presented to the world
in museums and the windows that we provide a naturalist
museums that kind of.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Provides a universe and tour of all the world Tristan's games.
That's one story. The other stories how we go about
telling the human stories and our collections and of the
things I mentioned there, so how well at people representation
museums and then finally talked about how natrists museums can
save the world. That first set stories we're talking about
about the research happening air questions much.

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
Yes, I think if you are concerned about the way
that science is being treated right now in the US,
reading this would be really interesting because it is like,
this is all about how our perspectives can be shaped
by sort leads the you know, the decisions of what
we elevate in science and then how you know, potentially
like going forward and what we can do. So yeah,

(01:03:38):
thank you so much for coming on, and thank you
guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show
and you leave a rating or review, that really helps me.
And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song.
Ex Alumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio for more
podcasts like the When You Just Heard But visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or hey, guess what, wherever you

(01:04:00):
listen to your favorite shows. I can't tell you what
to do. I will see you next Wednesday, m hm