Nature’s Memory review: A new book reveals the deep flaws in our natural history museums

Nature memory
Jack Ashby (Allen Lane)

Museums are strange things, Jack Ashby, deputy director of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, United Kingdom, underlines in his new book, Memory of nature: behind the scenes of museums of natural history of the world. These are signifiers of our society and our natural recordings of our ecosystems and habitats, yes. But they are also deeply imperfect and considerably biased.

Museums, in particular the natural history on which Ashby concentrates in his book, were formerly considered as a giant taxonomy of everything that has ever experienced – and continues to live – on our planet. From flora to fauna, mammals to insects, the objective of the first catalogers was to document and present everything in our world to help us better understand it.

It was then, and it is now. Reality bites, as Ashby skillfully shows this engaging book, which convincingly casts a critical eye on museum imperfections and how they are not what we often thought they were. On the one hand, large volumes of our natural history are not really exposed in these institutions, but are recorded for weakly lit stores.

We quickly learn how the areas behind the velvet ropes and polished glass are: around 70,000 species of additional flower plants existed in the world that scientists have described, explains Ashby, with about half of them being probably already seated in the catalogs of the back of the museum waiting to be analyzed.

His ideas on how things work behind the scenes are among the most striking points of the book, because he describes how animal skeletons are stripped of their flesh for conservation and how insects are preserved and then pinned to display boards. How the taxidermia models are presented and why the frogs displayed are rarely real (they shrink badly) are two more enlightening passages, as is a section on a high -end glass manufacturer renowned for producing the most realistic recreation of flowers.

But there are even more important problems in play than these 70,000 missing plants: the exhibitions that we exceed during school trips while we formatively learn our planet and its populations are biased.

Ashby underlines a 2008 case study which revealed that only 29% of mammals and 34% of birds of the average museum of natural history are women, largely underestimating their contribution to the habitats. This is partly because the male of the species is often more decorative and lends itself better to be displayed. However, it is also because people who collect and display the articles are invariably men – and Western white men, says Ashby.

He is the strongest in his rallying cry to change this problem of false declaration in museums. Ashby makes a convincing case that we have all been seriously educated on our world and our nature because of the delimitation and trends of past generations. Most skeletons of male mammals differ from humans in a significant way: the presence of a hug or a penis bone – not that you know it of exhibitions in most museums in the world, thanks to the prudent conservatives who simply removed the bone from the basin.

This book was written before the voluntary destruction of scientific institutions in the United States, but with the aim of a general anti-expert discomfort-and this is seen. It is for this reason that he should be read. We must consider the consequences of what is excluded from the museum exhibitions as much as we do for what is preserved.

As Ashby says: “The work that takes place in natural history museums has never been so important, and the role they have to play in the safeguard of the future of humanity is only realized.”

Chris Stokel Walker is a scientific writer based in Newcastle, in the United Kingdom,

New Scientist Book Club

I love to read? Come join our friendly group of book lovers. Every six weeks, we immerse ourselves in a new exciting title, with members who have given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.