The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Online Free Page A

museums. Most significantly, the collections were studied by researchers to record measurements and write plumage descriptions for the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds , researched over twenty years and published in seven volumes from 1990 to 2006. This joint venture of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists’ Union and Oxford University Press summarises all that is known about the birds of the region. It is our most important bird book in a hundred years.
    The bigger a museum’s natural history collections and the more numerous its scientific experts, the greater are its opportunities to serve humanity. This point is illustrated by two examples from the Natural History Museum, London. The first involves poisonous snakes. Doctors in north-east Nigeria used to treat people bitten by carpet vipers with a serum produced using local snakes. When this supply ceased, they changed to antitoxin from Iranian carpet vipers but many snake-bite victims died. Scientists were able to turn to the museum’s collection to examine hundreds of specimens of carpet vipers collected from Africa to Sri Lanka over one hundred years. They quickly (and cheaply) showed that Iranian and Nigerian carpet vipers were different species. The museum collections provided a rational explanation for the failure of the serum, and the basis from which to seek a solution.
    The second example concerns an entomology curator, Martin Hall. Hall, who had specialised knowledge of flies with flesh-eating maggots, worked among the roughly twenty-eight million insect specimens held at the museum. In Libya in the late 1980s, he discovered and identified an accidentally established population of the New World screwworm fly. Realising this damaging insect could spread across Africa and destroy cattle and wildlife, Hall raised maggots in his hotel room to help convince local officials to take action. The infestation was eventually eradicated in an expensive United Nations programme that involved the release of millions of sterile male flies reared in a laboratory. The museum had been instrumental in helping save Africa from a potential plague.
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    Museum bones have recently solved the mystery of New Zealand’s large extinct flightless birds, the giant moa. For decades it was thought there were three species, large, medium-sized and small, all present in both North and South Islands. They were told apart not by unique characters, such as different bone shapes, but by average size. This was always a concern, for how could you identify a bone that fell in the region of overlap?
    To help sort out the taxonomy of moa, scientists turned to DNA. They developed ever better techniques to recover ancient DNA fragments from old moa bones, mostly those in the collections of the four main New Zealand museums that had been collecting moa bones for over a century. The DNA results, published in 2003 in the British science journal Nature , showed there were two species of giant moa, not three, and instead of overlapping in distribution they occupied mutually exclusive areas—one in the North Island and one in the South. The DNA also permitted sexing of the giant moa bones. It transpired that the larger bones were from females, and the size differences were extreme, with females two to three times bigger than males. Scientists had been misinterpreting giant moa bones for 150 years.
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    Every natural history museum around the world has its own store of fabulous tales. These stories—of which a selection from my own experience make up this book—show how developing, curating and understanding collections can provide richness and endless fascination. Even more importantly, museum collections help us understand, and so protect, the vital biodiversity on which our existence depends.
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The owl that fell from the sky
    Towards the end of 1955, a man and his young son were driving along a road a couple of kilometres from the mouth