Specimen Stories artwork

Specimen Stories

6 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★ - 3 ratings

Have you ever wondered what secrets lurk in the basement of a natural history museum? Museums around the world are the keepers of vast natural history collections with millions of specimens, ranging from fish in jars to dinosaur fossils. Most of the specimen are not on display, but are an invaluable resource for researchers. But what exactly can we learn from natural history collections? What stories do the specimens tell us? In this podcast, I talk to the people working in collections, and explore some of the amazing and surprising science they discovered.

Natural Sciences Science
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Episodes

5. A frog's eye view of the world - with Kate Thomas

December 14, 2021 02:29 - 33 minutes - 22.6 MB

There is a saying that someone is "eagle-eyed" if they spot minute details - and if I asked you to name an animal with good eyesight, you'd probably think of an owl or an eagle. But in this episode we'll hear that the largest relative eye size of any vertebrate is found in an entirely different group of animals - frogs and toads. Kate Thomas, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, surveyed eye size in hundreds of frogs and toads and asked how eye size has e...

4. Fluttering migrations with Micah Freedman

November 04, 2021 16:42 - 43 minutes - 28.4 MB

Fall is upon us and it is high time for many animals to be on the move. Millions of birds migrate south each fall. But another animal currently migrating south is the monarch butterfly. The monarch butterflies migrate over 2000 kilometers every fall to reach their wintering grounds in Mexico. It's an astonishing journey for an insect. But not all monarchs migrate. Some populations stay cosy and warm year round on tropical islands in the Pacific ocean. How did these monarchs end up there? And...

Trailer

November 04, 2021 15:32 - 1 minute - 955 KB

Specimen Stories Trailer

3. Foraminifera - tiny time machines of the ocean with Marina Rillo

August 28, 2021 10:56 - 32 minutes - 23 MB

How do we know what the climate was like thousands or even millions of years ago? We would need some kind of record of what the planet was like in the past. Ideally, we'd want a record with not only high temporal resolution - showing the changes year by year - but also with wide geographical scope, showing changes not only in one place, but globally. It turns out that an obscure microscopic sea organism can provide just that for us - foraminiferans. In this episode, I talk to Marina Rillo, w...

2. Weird and wonderful fish with Kory Evans

August 28, 2021 10:56 - 33 minutes - 25.9 MB

How do you evolve to have the entire right side of your face moving to the left side? Seems like a pretty outlandish thing to do - but the humble flatfish achieves just that feat during its lifespan. In this episode, I talk to Kory Evans, Assistant Professor at Rice University, to learn much more about how strange fish skulls evolve, and what this can tell us more broadly about how extraordinary lifeforms evolve. I promise, you will want to take a closer look at fish after this episode! If ...

1. Super-black feathers with Dakota McCoy

August 28, 2021 10:55 - 34 minutes - 25.6 MB

Super-black materials are blacker than black - they are so good at capturing light that almost no light escapes them. While a normal black object still reflects some light, which allows you to see the shape of the object, super-black objects appear almost shapeless. You can see this in objects covered by a human-made super-black material, Vantablack. But how do birds produce super-black colors? And why do they produce them? What can engineers learn from nature’s way of making super-black? To...