My (almost) elephant skull

If you were asked what the two closest living relatives are to the elephant, you would think along the lines of something grey, hard-skinned and massive, and so guess that it might be a rhino or a hippo. The other close relative to the elephant is the sea cow - that's manatees and dugongs - which are heavy and grey, but they are aquatic. The other one is much harder to guess !

It all came about because of a visitor to my blog who also runs a taxidermy business in South Africa called Blue Duiker and who very kindly asked if I would be interested in a skull from there ! So a few weeks ago I was sent the skull of one of the closest living relatives to the elephant - and it arrived in a much smaller box than you might think ! That's because the close relative to the elephant is in fact:

The Kelvingrove Museum (and my 300th post !)

This is my 300th post since I started blogging in July 2009 ! I did a big post when I reached 100, but I haven't really bothered with any milestones since then (I almost forgot about this one too !). It is also a good time to write about the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow because it is the museum I have visited the most, and each time I plan to write a blog post but never get round to it.

It is one of my favourite museums in Scotland, and I've visited a few, like the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the McManus and the D'Arcy Thomson Museum in Dundee, Perth Art Gallery and Museum, the Huntarian, the Stirling Smith Museum and the Bell Pettigrew Museum. So here's my write up of it !

Looking closely at an Indian elephant skeleton

On Thursday dad and I went to the Hunterian Museum of Zoology which is part of the University of Glasgow. I'm going to write more about it later but for this post I'm going to focus on just one exhibit, their juvenile Indian elephant skeleton (the scientific name is Elephas maximus indicus).

There are two different types of elephant, which are the African and Asian. The Indian elephant is one of the three subspecies of the Asian elephant (the other two are the Sri Lankan elephant and the Sumatran Elephant). The African and Asian elephants look quite similar, but African elephants are larger with much bigger ears and tusks.

I must have seen elephant skeletons before, but the one at the Hunterian Museum of Zoology was nice because you could go right up to it and touch it.

The Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL

The Grant Museum is a brilliant museum. When I was planning my trip to London I knew it was definitely one of the places I wanted to visit. It's not the biggest museum in the world. It doesn't have huge moving dinosaurs. It's not the best museum for toddlers (I know because I went with my baby brothers Sam and Harry). But if you are the tiniest bit interested in bones, or maybe just interested in cool or gross stuff you should definitely go.

Whoever picked the exhibits (or even just Robert Edmond Grant who set up the museum 170 years ago) seems to have a good idea of what's cool and what's not. Their jar of moles probably doesn't teach scientists anything but it's cool. (I bet more people go away talking about that than the tiger or quagga skeletons.) The micrarium (that's it at the top) is tiny but deeply cool. You could spend all day in there. Even the walrus baculum is cool, (but also slightly gross and weird to tell your mum about). Here's some of the other cool stuff:

Half term trips: The National Museum of Scotland

Last week me mum, dad, Harry and Sam all went to the new National Museum of Scotland which is in Edinburgh. It isn't really a new museum but they closed it for years to move things about. It reopened about two months ago and now it's even better.

The picture above is of the big natural history gallery. They have moved all the animals around and mixed them all up. Here are some of the things that I saw when I visited.