Inside the Oxford University Museum of Natural History

We had in fact last year nearly 700,000 visitors through the front door. That can include families, researchers and academics, it includes school children, university students, everybody basically comes through those doors. But it really is a vibrant and dynamic sort of place. So we like to look at all the rocks in the world, what we call geology. Now most people think rocks are a bit boring, but you can pick up a rock, you can whack it with a hammer, you can open it up, you can find something like that inside. And just like cakes and biscuits have ingredients, rocks have ingredients too, what we call the minerals. All of the sparkly crystals, all the diamonds and the rubies and the emeralds and the metal and the gold and the iron and the silver, it is real. We need real things in a museum if we're doing science. I'm going off to a dementia home up in North Oxfordshire. We've got a selection here of animals, of minerals, of insects. So it really covers everything that's in the museum. But the museum's for everybody. So if people can't or won't or haven't ever come to the museum, it's about giving people the opportunity of experiencing what the museum is. We don't want it falling over in the van. And off we go. So just make sure that anything delicate is secure. And then we're off. These are actually new casts that I've been making of the lower dentary of Megalosaurus butlandii, which is important because it's the very first scientifically described dinosaur. And I've actually got the real specimen on the table over here. There are actually very fine serrations on the back of this tooth which indicate that it was a carnivorous animal. I use dental drills to just gently carve away any excess. We're a group of sixth form students who have come from Northampton. And we've come because the museum have offered a workshop in order for the students to do a technique that they wouldn't be able to do in school called PCR, which is a method by which they can isolate a fragment of their DNA and then test to see whether they have a particular taste receptor gene. A type specimen is the original specimen that was used when a species is first described in the original publication. We have six million specimens and probably close to 30,000 type specimens of insects. We are about to produce an image of a very small specimen on this auto-montage equipment, which basically takes a lot of photos and stacks them all over each other. It looks like a small brown dot, like a few million metres long, and you get it up and it's full of some crazy adaptations that you just wouldn't have imagined. These are the two claws here and here. You've then got highly adapted and modified pads. So those are the bit that go on the underside of the foot and grip. That's what they use for landing and gripping. Actually, these are predatory, so gripping onto prey as much as anything else as well. You can see the red light and that will sort of pick up the distance between the scanner and the surface and create a 3D model. It means that people from all over the world who are studying ammonites can actually have that three-dimensional data available to look at, to make measurements from, and you can even create 3D printouts so you can actually see it without having to come to the museums. I've got some volunteers working on a collection that we acquired from Reading University, and it's a really nice collection of fossilised fish. The volunteers have been putting labels on the specimens with special museum numbers so that we can put them on our catalogue and people can identify them and use the collection in the future, which is really important. So volunteers play a really important role in the museum. I'm actually the first professional archivist the museum's ever had, and I've only been here four years. The biggest project that we've got going on at the moment is the William Smith Exhibition Project. William Smith is probably most famous as the father of English geology, and he devised the method of geological mapping that essentially is still used today. I work mostly on the Cambrian fossils, so these are 500 million-year-old specimens. Some of these fossils, they're incredibly rare because they're preserving soft parts as well as hard parts, so normally you think of fossils, shells and bones, but this is preserving skin, eyes, you can see the gut. Sometimes the last meal is still preserved after 500 million years. Fifteen minutes! Thank you.