National Museums Liverpool Blog - Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Christopher Howse from The Telegraph recently enjoyed a visit to Wirral, guided by an updated edition of Nikolaus Pevsner’s architectural guide to Cheshire. He gave the picturesque Port Sunlight village and the Lady Lever Art Gallery a glowing review.  You can read the full article here.  

Here's our own Marketing Officer Ann Flenley to tell us why she loves Wirral and why you should too!

Lady Lever Art Gallery

I love Wirral. It's a relatively undiscovered gem that lies between Liverpool, Chester and North Wales with sandy beaches, endless countryside and golf courses. It really is great place for day trips and family fun in the north west. 

In addition to our own Lady Lever Art Gallery there is plenty to discover, such as Port Sunlight Museum in the same village as the gallery. I also enjoy the odd visit to Church Farm, which is an organic family run farm offering tantalising treats and endless activities to entertain the children.  

Other great attractions worth a mention are; The Floral Pavilion Theatre in New Brighton, The Williamson Art Gallery, the historic Birkenhead Park (famed for being a template for New York’s Central Park!), Ness Gardens, Birkenhead Priory, the Voirrey Embroidery Centre and Spaceport: a family attraction which takes you on an inspirational journey through space.

You can find out more about all the things to see and do in Wirral on the Visit Wirral website.  

If you love Wirral too and want to be in with a chance of winning £50 in a prize draw, then why not take a few minutes to fill in this online survey about Wirral attractions? Easy!

This week's dinosaur blog focuses on the biggest and most ferocious dinosaurs in our blog series so far. Read on to see what our curator and dino expert Geoff Tresise has to say about these predators...

Tarbosaurus

Tyrannosaurus rex is the one dinosaur that everyone knows.  What is often forgotten is that it is also one of the rarest.  Predators at the top of the food-chain are much fewer in number that the animals they prey on.  It was also one of the last of the dinosaurs.  It lived late in the Cretaceous period and by the end of that period all dinosaurs were extinct.

Tyrannosaurus bones come from the American Mid-West but very similar fossils found elsewhere have been given different names.  The late Cretaceous sediments of Canada yield Albertosaurus, those of Mongolia Tarbosaurus.  They all walked on powerful hind-legs and had tiny two-toed forefeet.  They had large skulls with a predator's pointed teeth.  One difference is in the position of the eyes - those of Tyrannosaurus looked forward giving it bifocal vision.  Tarbosaurus, by contrast, had eyes on the side of its head.

You can come and see a life-like animatronic Tarbosaurus in our 'Age of Dinosaur' exhibition, at World Museum from 22 October... if you dare! 

Politician, Harrison Line, leaving dock in Liverpool (reference McR/38/142).

Ok it's a poor link, but as we don't have any photographs of politicians, apart from ex-merchant seafarer John Prescot, I thought I'd throw in this photograph of the Harrison Line vessel Politician while the Labour Party Conference is on in Liverpool. 

T & J Harrison, like many shipping companies, used a theme when naming their vessels.  In their case it was professions, which are slightly easier to remember than Blue Funnel's(Ocean Steamship Company) use of characters from Greek mythology.  Harrison Line never named a ship Archivist, but they did have 3 vessels named Custodian, which is pretty close to my job description. 

The Politician is more famous as the ship that ran aground in 1941 off Eriskay in Scotland with a cargo that included a large amount of whisky and inspired the book and film Whisky Galore.  There is possibly some joke to be made involving politicians, whisky and running into rocks, but I'm not going to risk it.

Glazed composition frog amulet (about 3350 years old)

This week World Museum has been hosting two curators from the British Museum who have been cataloguing items from our Egyptology collections. Between 1883-4 the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated the ancient city of Naukratis, a Greek trading post in Egypt. Liverpool was one of over 60 museums that sponsored his work and was rewarded with a small share of the finds that were not kept by the Egyptian authorities. The British Museum is now tracing all of the 13,000 or more artefacts as part of a research and publication project - more details on can be found on their Naukratis website.

At the same time myself and volunteers are also busy cataloguing other artefacts from Flinders Petrie's excavations that are now part of our collections of over 16,000 Egyptian items. Trillion Attwood has spent the summer helping me catalogue over 2000 tiny amulets from the ancient city of Akehenaten at Tell el Amarna, such as the handsome frog in this blog photo. Meanwhile Anna Garnett is carefully sorting through our material from the cemeteries of Abydos, Esna and Hierakonopolis that were excavated by Flinders Petrie's Liverpool contemporary John Garstang, who was trained by Petrie. Eventually all of this work will be available to view an online museum database that National Museums Liverpool is creating.   

Here's another blog in our run-up to the opening of the 'Age of the Dinosaur' exhibition at World Museum. This week our curator and dino-expert Geoff Tresise tells us about a mysterious dinosaur surrounded by myths!

In 1929, an American Museum sent an expedition to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia.  They found the desert floor strewn with dinosaur bones along with nests of their eggs - the first ever found. 

They also solved an age-old mystery. In the 6th century B.C., traders from central Asia came to Greece selling gold.  Gold, they claimed, was plentiful in their homeland but was dangerous to collect.  It was guarded by griffins, fierce animals with the bodies of lions and the heads of giant eagles.  Griffins were said to lay eggs and nest on the ground.  For the next thousand years griffins, shown with eagle's wings as well as eagle's heads, were popular subjects in Greek and Roman art.

The American expedition of 1929 found the most common Mongolian dinosaur was Protoceratops, which had a beaked and crested skull resembling a giant eagle.  It was easy to understand how the living animal could be imagined to be half eagle, half lion.  The nests of dinosaur eggs supported the myth although hoards of gold were sadly lacking.

We're lucky that in the 'Age of Dinosaur'  exhibition we'll have on show a Protoceratops guarding, not gold, but its nest of eggs threatened by a hungry Velociraptor! I'll be blogging about Velociraptors soon, so watch this space.

My name is Rebecca Watkin and I am curator of maritime collections (ship models and paintings). I will be updating you about displays and the fantastic collections we have here at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

The main project I’m working on at the moment is next year’s Titanic and Liverpool: the untold story exhibition but I’m also involved in different aspects of work at the museum.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the issue of the first licence to mine gold in Australia on 21 September 1851, the Goldfinder bell is now on display. The Goldfinder was built in Canada and owned by Jones & Co. of Liverpool. When gold was discovered in New South Wales there was an increased demand for vessels like the Goldfinder. Many Liverpool emigrants joined the gold rush to seek their fortune. The Merseyside Maritime Museum acquired the bell which is available to view for the first time in the Emigrants to a New World gallery at Merseyside Maritime Museum.

Bye for now.

Jigsaw of RMS Queen Mary, issued to mark her launch in 1934. Accession number MMM.2010.26

"We've created a new display in the Life at Sea gallery to mark the arrival of two Cunard liners to Liverpool this month. Cunard's new flagship the Queen Elizabeth arrived in Liverpool last Thursday, and the Queen Mary 2 is due this Thursday. 

It's great to see Cunard Liners back in Liverpool, and the new display looks back at some of the older Cunard Liners, depicted in five spectacular jigsaws, including the one shown above. These unusual objects are rarely displayed due to their sensitivity to light.

The display also features a pennant from the QE2, one of a number made to mark the end of QE2's service. It was presented to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool by John Prescott, on behalf of Cunard, at a special concert at the Anglican Cathedral on 3rd October 2008.

On the Merseyside Maritime Museum's website you can also see the Cunard Queens online exhibition, featuring material from the Maritime Archives and Library."

On Friday, we were lucky enough to welcome a special visitor to the Wondrous Place Gallery at the Museum of Liverpool.

Curator Paul Gallagher met wrestler Henry Cejudo from the USA, who won a gold medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Bejing. He is the youngest American wrestler to ever win gold for his country.

Olympic Gold medallist wrestler Henry Cejudo from the USA meets Wondrous Place curator Paul Gallagher

Henry is currently touring the North of the UK to get a taste of the country ahead of the London Olympics next year.

Looking round the gallery, Henry was particularly inspired by Liverpool’s sporting achievements, and spent some time looking round the Boxing Clever exhibition, exploring the history of boxing in the city.

Dinosaur fever is never far away at World Museum. Our curators are currently gearing up for the forthcoming exhibition 'Age of the Dinosaur', which will be roaring its way into the building on 22 October.

Here's one of our curators (and top dino-expert!) Geoff Tresise to give us the lowdown on another dinosaur you can expect to see in the exhibition... 

Image courtesy of Natural History Museum

In 1861 a fossil found in Germany caused a sensation.  Named Archaeopteryx, it had the skeleton of a reptile but the wings and feathers of a bird.  It caused a stir - was this one of the 'missing links' predicted by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution?  Richard Owen, who opposed Darwin's views, nevertheless bought the fossil for London's Natural History Museum.  A second specimen, found 10 years later, went to a Berlin museum.

No other fossils have caused so much controversy, but did they prove Darwin's theory?  Could Archaeopteryx fly or only glide from tree to tree?  There was even a suggestion, quickly disproved, that the first specimen was a fake.  Then in the 1990s new fossils were found in China, covered in feathers but clearly dinosaurs.  It was back to square one: was Archaeopteryx just another feathered dinosaur or did its wings prove it was a bird?

In the 'Age of Dinosaur' exhibition, you can see and hear Archaeopteryx in the Jurassic forest.  Then visit the our permanent dinosaur gallery at the museum, to see a cast of the Berlin Museum fossil.  A feathered dinosaur or an early bird?  Come along and judge for yourself. 

In the run up to the blockbuster exhibition, Age of the Dinosaur, our curator Geoff Tresise is going to tell us some interesting facts about the different species of dinosaurs you will be able to see. This week he tells us about dinosaurs from the deep:

During the Jurassic period, 180 million years ago, England was covered by warm tropical seas.  The fossil remains of the giant reptiles that swam in these seas have made Dorset's "Dinosaur coast"  famous.  When these fossils were first found, early in the Nineteenth century, scientists wondered if these strange creatures might still be living deep in the world's oceans.  We now know that these reptiles, along with the land-living dinosaurs, became extinct 65 million years ago.

In the 'Age of Dinosaurs' exhibition, you can visit the Jurassic seas to see how these reptiles looked and lived.  Some were Plesiosaurs with bodies like turtles but with long tails and even longer necks.  Ichthyosaurs looked much like modern dolphins and, like dolphins, gave birth to live young.  Thus they could spend their whole lives at sea, unlike the Plesiosaurs which may have laid eggs on land.  However there were also Pliosaurs, the Jurassic equivalent of Killer Whales and the top predators of these oceans.  Be warned - if there are Pliosaurs around, the Jurassic sea is a dangerous place to be.

World Museum's exhibition is the first chance to see the dinosaurs outside of London

'Age of the Dinosaur' opens on 22 October at World Museum – you can watch our video trailer and buy advance tickets now.