Page 206 - The Secret Museum

and a new species. Agassiz sent a description and illustration of the creature to the

Blaschkas’ studio in Germany, where they crafted this exact glass model of the
specimen. I compared the two, real and glass, both kept in storage, and, while the
creature stored in spirit had clearly seen better days and looked like nothing so much
as a large white blob, the glass reproduction’s features are still as clear as can be. It
is in such perfect condition it seems almost alive.

Beside it is a miniature glass replica of a Portuguese man of war, with long blue
tentacles. These creatures aren’t jellyfish, they are sinophores, made up of a colony
of creatures called zooids. They can’t swim properly and rely on currents and winds

to push them along.

Sadly, there isn’t a ‘fried egg jellyfish’ (Phacellophora camtschatica). They look
exactly like their name suggests. Their sting is so weak, you can’t feel it, and neither
can the little crustaceans that hitch rides on their bells and eat the plankton that gets
trapped in their arms and tentacles.

Although the glass marine creatures can’t be displayed, they will be kept for future
generations in the museum collection, along with thousands of other behind-the-
scenes specimens. These include the elephant skeletons in the attic, which can’t be
taken downstairs because the lift that was used to take things up is no longer there,

and magic mushrooms collected by ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, that kicked
off a psychedelic revolution.

New things are discovered in the collection all the time. When reorganizing the
worm collection several years ago, the curators came across a lot of parasites
arranged by street names in Boston. It turned out that the parasites were collected by
a local doctor who was recording the health of high society in Boston. Poor Miss
Lottie Fowler, from Hayward Place, could never have imagined she would be best
remembered for a tapeworm, 14 metres long, that once lived inside her and now

forms part of the museum’s back-room collection.