“But I still don’t know why there aren’t any marsupial whales!”
This was the reaction of my date – let’s call him WR – to our most recent liaison. We’d gone to hear a lecture by Dr Anjali Goswami at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, a lecture titled (you’ve guessed it) ‘Why aren’t there any marsupial whales?’. Interesting in parts, but we both left with no idea what the answer to that question was, though we did have a better knowledge of the gestation period of a joey and the stupidity level of your average raccoon.
I felt sure that a talk with a blurb beginning ‘Reproductive strategies vary wildly across vertebrates…’ couldn’t fail to create an erotically-charged atmosphere for our encounter. And if somehow sitting in a lecture theatre watching a video clip of a blind kangaroo embryo attempting to claw its way out of its mother’s hooha and into her pouch failed to get him going, then there was a free wine reception in the museum itself to help things along afterwards.
Having helped ourselves to a couple of glasses of merlot, we started to explore the collection. I’d read that the Grant Museum housed 67,000 specimens (we all know men love numbers, so I’d been boning up, if you’ll excuse the pun) and was slightly surprised to find myself in a space not that much bigger than my bedroom. The similarity to my bedroom ended there, however, since my bedroom isn’t full of animal skeletons. (Actually, I’ve not tidied my room in so long that I can’t entirely rule out the possibility of there being some small creature slowly decomposing in a neglected corner. Yes, I know, I can’t understand why I’m still single either.)
Highlights of the collection included a whole jar of pickled moles (the Animals of Farthing Wood kind, as opposed to the “Oh god, sorry, I thought you had a bit of chocolate on your chin” kind). And we’re not talking a diddy little jam jar here, this was a large vat of dead critters. I also very much enjoyed the walrus’s penis bone (or ‘baculum’ if you want to get all Ecce Romani about it) which, at 66cm long, risked making my date, or indeed any human male, feel decidedly inadequate.
If my relationship with WR were at a more advanced stage, I could think of no better way to cement our love than for us to ‘adopt a specimen’ together. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to see their name in small printed letters next to a Cornish sucker fish or an ocelot’s mandible?? Actually, if you’re interested, you can find a list of ‘orphans’ here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/zoology/support/orphan-list. I’ve already put the dissected pigeon, the squat lobster and the glass model of a sea cucumber on my Christmas list. And just imagine how much luck you’d have if you adopted a whole box of rabbit legs.
The only slight awkwardness of the evening came when I spotted another guy I’d recently been on a date with, clearly on his own, hovering by a cabinet full of glass jellyfish. I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name, so spent the next ten minutes staring intently at the remains of a dodo just to avoid making eye contact, for fear that I might find myself forced to introduce two guys I barely knew to each other.
When we were satisfied that we’d examined pretty much all the specimens on display – a point in the evening which, entirely by chance, coincided with the draining of the last bottle of free wine – we decamped to a nearby cocktail bar which WR insisted was fantastic, a claim slightly undermined by the fact that it was completely empty. Still, the cocktails were impressive – one of mine arrived on its own wooden board with accompanying olives and cornichons, along with a short briefing from the bartender on the order in which I should consume the various components. (Who knew getting drunk could be so complicated?) The complimentary popcorn was also delish. Actually, I’m assuming it was complimentary, but WR picked up the bill… Hmm.
So, how did it end? Well, a lady really shouldn’t kiss and tell, but… Yes, I ended up going back to his. I guess that walrus baculum wasn’t so off-putting after all.
Unprecedated 