The secret collections of the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum

by Gillian Lim

Photos by Najeer Yusof

IF YOU’VE been to the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, located in the National University of Singapore, you would have probably marvelled at the the sperm whale skeleton exhibit, or the dinosaur fossils on display. But had you known the secret back rooms of the museum, you would have marvelled more at what was actually stored behind closed doors – what the museum doesn’t put on display.

And how big is this secret library of specimens? The stored collection makes up about 99.8 per cent of all the specimens in the museum, said its facilities manager, Dr Tan Swee Hee, who has been working there for 11 years. It isn’t open to the public, and is stored within three floors of the seven-floor museum. The museum currently has about 2,000 specimens on display in the exhibition galleries, but it has an estimated one million specimens, mainly from Southeast Asia.

Accompanied by Dr Tan, TMG took a peek at three floors of preserved specimens of flora and fauna, including bottled sea creatures, mammal skulls and skins, and straw-stuffed birds. Stored inside secret vaults were species ranging from falcons, bears, and mongoose, to dolphins, porcupines, and jellyfish. Precautions are placed to ensure that these specimens are preserved for current and future generations of scientists—the floors are kept between a chilly 23 to 24 degrees Celsius—with humidity levels kept below 60 per cent. The rooms are dimly lit as light can cause the specimens to bleach, thus damaging them, said Dr Tan.

Most of the specimens in the dry collection, including mammals and birds, are stored on the fourth floor of the museum, while the wet specimens (anything stored in liquid preservatives such as ethanol) occupy the second and third floors of the museum. While most of the specimens in the dry collection were inherited from the Raffles Museum, which was established in 1849, the museum is still actively adding to its collections, which includes freshwater fishes, insects, molluscs, and other marine invertebrates.

WET COLLECTION: This is what a typical shelf looks like on the wet collection floor, which houses the museum’s storage of invertebrates. This particular row of shelves stores part of the museum’s crab collection. Other specimens on this floor include sea cucumbers, shells, marine algae, sea anemones, and jellyfish.

 

INVERTEBRATE COLLECTION: This spider is housed on the museum’s third floor, which stores its invertebrate collection. This particular spider is from the family Nephilidae, also known as golden orb web spiders, and is commonly found in tropical and subtropical environments in America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Other specimens on this floor include water scorpions, insects, squid, pangolin, starfish, and sea worms.

 

VERTEBRATE COLLECTION: The museum’s stored collection of bats includes those from the genera Cheiromeles, Mops, and Chaerephon. Specimens stored in ethanol tend to lose their original colours. “That’s why they look very pale,” said Dr Tan, but added that scientists don’t usually depend solely on colour to identify species in the collections. Rather, they rely on hard data and measurements, such as the number of teeth, arrangement of teeth (dental formula), or a specimen’s anatomical morphometrics.

 

XENELAPHIS ELLIPSIFER: Slug-eating snakes, mud snakes, keelbacks, elapid snakes, vipers, pythons, and wart snakes – these are just some of the snakes in the museum’s collection. This particular snake is called the Xenelaphis ellipsifer, or the ornate brown snake, and was collected on June 2, 1907, at Cameron Highlands. The ornate brown snake can grow up to 2.5m.

 

PIGEONS AND DOVES: Some of these birds, which fall under the order Columbiformes (left), date back to 1891. When birds are collected in the field, their insides are removed, leaving the skin and feathers, said Dr Tan. He added: “If possible, we save the skeleton, but sometimes in the field you’re limited by the things you can carry back.” The birds are then stuffed with either straw or synthetic fiber, and laid out flat so as to save space, and for ease of measurement.

 

PRIONAILURUS BENGALENSIS: Research specimens like these leopard cats, or the Prionailurus bengalensis, are rarely prepared like how a taxidermist might prepare a dead animal for display. Rather, the skin is separated from the skull and other parts of its skeleton, like the jaw. This is to save space, and also makes it easier to take measurements for systematic and taxonomic studies.

 

COLOURFUL FEATHERS: While colour might not be the identifying factor for specimens in the wet collection, it is for birds, said Dr Tan. For example, the Ptilinopus porphyreus, or the pink-headed fruit dove, is characterised by its purplish-pink head, white bordered neck, yellow undertail, and greyish-green feathers. The Caloenas nicobarica, or the Nicobar pigeon, has a metallic greenish-blue coat.

 

ENDANGERED: Out of the four tapir species, the Malaysian tapir, the Tapirus indicus, is the only one that is native to Asia. All four species of tapir in the family Tapiridae are classified as either endangered or vulnerable to extinction. Science and research news site, Phys.org, said that about 50 per cent of the population of these species are left after being hunted down for poaching and deforestation. This number is predicted to halve again within the next 30 years if the current threats continue.

 

Featured Image by Najeer Yusof.

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- Gillian Lim