WoaW: Whale Tales by the Natural History Museum

Friday 27th June, Saturday 28th June and Sunday 29th June

Various timeslots

FREE entry!

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Meet experts from the Natural History Museum to explore the whale collection and learn how it reveals secrets of whales and South Georgia.

What to expect from this talk

The Natural History Museum (NHM) is home to one of the most significant Cetacea (marine mammals) collections globally with 6,000 specimens of whales, dolphins and porpoises. Collected from across the world over the course of nearly two centuries, the diversity of species can tell us about the past, present and potential futures.

An important part of this collection is linked to the South Atlantic and Antarctic, and the commercial whaling activities focused around South Georgia in the twentieth century. Working together on a project about marine mammal specimens from the Southern Hemisphere, Principal Curator of Marine Mammals Richard Sabin and NHM researcher Dr Sophia Nicolov, an environmental historian, will share reflections on the historic and ongoing importance of this collection.

Join us to take a behind-the-scenes look and learn about the extraordinary specimens in the NHM collection from South Georgia. From enormous vertebrae of blue whales to delicate spectacled porpoise skeletons, the collection is a rich archive of biological and historical information about marine mammal populations and marine ecosystems. Each specimen exists as an individual animal with its own life history, as a record of how it was collected and as a carefully stored museum specimen.

Introducing the speakers:

Richard Sabin is a Principal Curator of Mammals at the Natural History Museum in London, where he has worked since 1992. His curatorial work primarily focuses on the study of cetaceans using the NHM’s world-class research collections. Richard collaborates with colleagues internationally, generating new data from old Museum specimens. He is currently exploring historical contaminants and stress levels in baleen whales using wax earplugs and sperm whale population structure using teeth. He supports wildlife conservation, UK and international law enforcement through his endangered species identification work and is NHM advisor to the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme.

Dr Sophia Nicolov is an Early Career Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum (NHM) where she is leading a two-year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project called ‘Cetacean (Re)Sources’ in close collaboration with Principal Curator of Marine Mammals Richard Sabin. She is an environmental historian and focuses on the entangled histories of humans and cetaceans since the 1800s in the contexts of whale strandings, whaling, empire, science and conservation. She was previously based at the University of Leeds on a project exploring the role of cetaceans in Yorkshire’s coastal and maritime heritage through whaling, museum collections and whale-watching.

We encourage visitors travelling to Whale of a Weekend to use public transport where possible.