I feckin love the Dead Zoo

I’ve just got back from a short holiday in Ireland which was divided into two parts – botanising on the West coast (of which more later), and a short stay in Dublin, one of my favourite places to visit. Because we had a few first timers with us on this trip, we had to pay the required pilgrimage to the home of Student’s t test, and while we were there, it would have been rude not to sample the local produce in the fabulous Gravity Bar – one of my favourite watering holes and thus familiar territory. But one of the places in Dublin I’ve never managed to visit before was the Natural History collection of the National Museum of Ireland, known to locals as the Dead Zoo (as you may be able to tell from the title, I picked up a smattering of the local patois on this trip).

I was blown away by the Dead Zoo
I’ve got a lot of respect for David Attenborough, but when you see a two year old come face to face with a polar bear for the first time you know the impact of that meeting is going to last the kid a lifetime. The best thing about the Dead Zoo is that there are no crappy, inoperative multimedia interpretations of anything – no greasy iPads, no frozen Windows displays, this is just pure zoology. It certainly took me back to museum visits in my childhood that have stayed with me and influenced my choices. I could have spent hours browsing the entomology displays alone – whole cabinets of springtails (my favourite) – but there were so many highlights, such as the glass sea anemones, and the “wall of bats”.

But where are all the plants?
I am aware that the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin are very good, and I hope to visit them on a subsequent trip, but I have a problem with a national museum which advertises itself as a Natural History collection when the only plant life on display is a few fossil ferns. Just what do they think all those dead animals are going to eat? Based primarily on Victorian and Edwardian collections, the Dead Zoo tells us something important about botany – that the public perception of plants as second rate science is not a new phenomenon. That was the only depressing thought to come out of my discovery of the Dead Zoo. It means we still have a mountain to climb.