Thursday, May 28, 2015

Moments from South Africa...

                           
For the next 3 weeks I am visiting the marine invertebrate collections at the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, South Africa!   


Things are keeping me busy.. so here are some moments that give you some ideas of life on the road!

Spines and arm from the South African goniasterid, Calliaster acanthodes...
The mountains surrounding Cape Town as the fog clears...

The original catalog of the South African Museum invertebrate specimens! (mostly now databased)
This nudibranch, described by Dr. Terry Gosliner, named for Nelson Mandela...
This lovely walk through the Company Gardens outside the Iziko Museum...
Similar to the New Zealanders and the Australians, it seems that Cape Town also loves its fresh, hot meat pies!
More to come! 


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Chris, does working with old bleached specimens make things much harder, isn't there a better method of preservation of colour, shape and DNA.

Dan

ChrisM said...

Certainly, there is stark difference between working on old bleached specimens and living ones but I'm not sure it necessarily makes working on them that much more difficult. It simply becomes a dynamic of the field. Unfortunately there is no one method which allows preservation of specimens AND permits recovery of color, shape and DNA. The best we can do is a compromise between the three.