York Museums Trust Blog

Our curators Isla Gladstone and Stuart Ogilvy have been hard at work piecing together the 100-or-so sections of a giant ichthyosaur fossil in preparation for the re-opening of the Yorkshire Museum.

The massive sea creature, more than 20 feet or six metres long, was a predator in the seas over North Yorkshire during the time of the dinosaurs.
Our ichthyosaur is one of the biggest in Britain and its remains were found in Jurassic rocks near Whitby on the Yorkshire Coast. It is very rare to find one as well-preserved and complete as this one.
Isla and Stuart had to work out exactly how much space the huge fossil would take up and how it should be mounted to display it to its best effect in our new gallery, Extinct – A Way of Life.
Each piece of the huge jigsaw fossil been numbered by curators before them and each will be put back into place yet again when it goes on show.
Before then, the pieces will be sent away to be cleaned up and restored so the impact of this huge beast on visitors is as dramatic as possible. This would have been a beast you would not wanted to have encountered if you were a little fish swimming through the waters of Jurassic Whitby…

Here’s a glimpse of some of the Yorkshire Museum’s galleries before and after our building work began…

Work is well underway on transforming the  museum in time for our re-opening on 1 August, 2010, when we’ll have five fantastic new galleries.

For those familiar with the building, the difference is already striking. Not only have all the cases and displays gone, but internal walls have been torn down and covers taken off hidden windows, letting in daylight and giving the place a feeling of being much more spacious.

If there was a squirrel Olympics in Beijing next year, I am sure the Museum Gardens could send a winning team. Every day I can sit at my desk and watch at least one of these supreme athletes running up and down the rooftops outside our office in the Yorkshire Museum. Why are they doing it? There are no stores of acorns hidden away beneath the slate roof tiles or even bars of nutty chocolate in the guttering, but they always seem intent on completing some kind of vital, urgent task.

No chance of childhood squirrel obesity with the level of exercise they maintain – although maybe they are pushing the boundaries of fat intake on the footpaths of the gardens. There they boldly approach people walking through the gardens for any scrap of food they can spare. Despite the fact many refer to them as ‘tree rats’, the squirrels get away with this behaviour because they are so cute, rubbing their little hands together pleadingly and waggling their bushy tails, before scampering off for a good scoff.

Some people even get their camera out to capture the moment on film. It’s as if they think they have had a David Attenborough experience and want to keep a memento of the day they saw such a rare species. The irony is, of course, that the grey squirrel is a very common creature in this country, having largely elbowed out its rarer cousin, the native red squirrel. I remember getting as excited as our garden visitors when I saw one in the Lake District, but scared it off with the noise of opening my camera case.

The curators here have just finished a new exhibition called Aliens, about non-native animals that have made their home in the UK, and it gives the low-down on grey squirrels. But to see the real thing, you don’t have to go far outside to enjoy the sight of non-stop squirrel activity in the Museum Gardens.