Friday mystery object #15

It’s Friday again and I feel it may be time to introduce an object from the area of my original training (that’s palaeontology). Imagine that you’re me, searching through the drawers in a museum and you come across this:

What is it from? It looks scaly, but that’s about all you can tell from looking at [...]

Friday mystery object #14 answer

On Friday I gave you a bit of a change from museum specimens and presented you with this:
Everyone managed to get the identification to at least within the Order level (it’s in the Orthoptera), which is good going when dealing with insects. The hard bit came down to whether it was a cricket or grasshopper. [...]

Friday mystery object #14

Last week I let Harrison pick an object that proved a bit too difficult (although perhaps I could have been more generous with the clues I gave…). This week I am giving you something that is actually alive and commonly found in gardens in the UK – so it should be a doddle to identify:

Simple [...]

Friday mystery object #13 answer

Crumbs, it appears that last Friday’s object stumped everyone! Harrison certainly chose a difficult one…
SmallCasserole came closest, asking:
Is it antler or horn?
but my response:
Antler or horn that thick?
was perhaps too ambiguous – because there is a horn out there that is this thick, that of a

Friday mystery object #13

Today’s mystery object has been selected by a very helpful work experience volunteer who was assisting me in the collections yesterday, so my thanks to Harrison! He is rather more cruel than me, so there’s no multiple choice on this – we just want you to see if you can work out what it is. [...]

Friday mystery object #12 answer

Still no internet, so this is drafted on my phone. Well done to those of you who worked out that Friday’s object was indeed a rattle-snake’s tail.
I will expand on this answer, once I can use a computer to type comfortably!
Right, internet is finally working again, so here’s a (slightly) fuller answer to what this [...]

Friday mystery object #12

I am still without internet at home, so apologies for slow responses to comments and the lower quality of my recent posts.
This Friday’s mystery object is pretty straight-forward, a simple case of ‘what is it?’

If you think you know what this is just leave a comment below – I will attempt to respond to any [...]

Friday mystery object #11 answer

Last week I gave you some detective work – I asked to work out what this was:

Unsurprisingly to me, most of you worked it out pretty quickly – it is indeed a

Friday mystery object #11

My internet is still down at home, but here’s a Friday Mystery Object anyway!
This time I just want you to work out what group of animals this ribcage comes from:

Here’s a close-up that you might find useful:

Now you don’t need to be an expert to work this out – just work out how this ribcage [...]

What is Natural?

People often use the argument that something is ‘natural’ or ‘not natural’ to defend an intuitively derived position. But what does this actually mean, and does it have any validity as an argument?