Page 197 - The Secret Museum

THIS GREAT AUK EGG IS one of the oldest and most valuable eggs in the Natural

History Museum, which holds the largest egg collection in the world. No egg like it
will ever be laid again because, around 1844, the last great auk (Pinguinus
impennis) in the world was killed. There are five other great auk eggs in the
collection, and all six eggs are kept in the back rooms of the Natural History Museum
at Tring, where the museum stores its eggs, birds and nests. I know where they are
kept, but I’m not allowed to tell you.

Very few people at the museum have ever seen them, let alone members of the
public. They are very fragile, and the colour on the eggs can fade in daylight, so it’s

best not to display them. ‘Sometimes people come to do research on them and I have
to stand over them with a stick,’ the curator of eggs joked. His predecessor at the
museum was too nervous to touch them but, recently, they have been re-boxed and re-
examined.

I was lucky enough to be allowed to see them. The egg curator laid the eggs out on
the floor. Each one is wrapped in cotton wool in its own box and labelled with its
history. The eggs are quite large: if you cup your hands in front of you they’d just
about fit inside. They’re smooth and oval shaped and come in shades of white, green,

blue and brown. This particular creamy white egg is covered in wiggly lines that
make it look like a toddler has been scribbling with a felt tip. No two eggs ever have
the same pattern.

It’s impossible to put a value on them. In a way, they’re priceless, as there are so
few of them in existence (only 75 in the world) and they very rarely come up for
auction.

Seventy-five eggs in the world is actually quite a few. There are far rarer eggs in
the back rooms of the museum in Tring. The curator showed me a tiny egg that
belonged to the Samoan wood rail (Gallinula pacifica) collected on the island of

Savai’i, Samoa, in October 1873. The birds nested on the ground and were gobbled
up by greedy rats and pouncing cats which Europeans had introduced to the island.
This mini egg, the only one in the world, is cracked. There is a handwritten label
with it, dated 1971, which says, ‘This egg was already broken,’ from a previous
curator to the present one, as if to say, ‘It wasn’t me!’ He wanted future generations
of curators to know that it wasn’t broken on his watch, when the egg collection was
moved from the Natural History Museum in London to Tring in the 1970s.

The great auk eggs are not only precious because they are rare. Much of the reason

they are so valuable is because they are iconic. In the Victorian era, it was quite a
fashion to collect interesting things from around the world and display them at home
in a ‘cabinet of curiosities’. The idea was that it was possible to create a microcosm
of the world in one room, which could be used to amaze and impress visitors.

This had been going on since the Renaissance in Europe, where ‘cabinets’ were
entire rooms (rather than a piece of furniture), and would be stuffed full of paintings,
sculptures, curiosities from overseas and unusual animal specimens. Royals and