‘Natural history museums can save the world’: anti-colonialism, conservation and climate change

Zoologist Jack Ashby explains why it’s vital to invest in protecting specimens stored in scientific collections

Nature’s Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums Jack Ashby Allen Lane (2025)

Natural history museums are crucial for conservation — and for communicating its importance to the public. But step through the ‘staff only’ doors, and museums look very different. In vaults and laboratories, curators store, catalogue and preserve millions of specimens collected from the natural world — sometimes in controversial ways.

In Nature’s Memory, zoologist Jack Ashby explains how all of this works, and the human choices that it entails. Ashby, who studies marsupials and monotremes, is assistant director of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, UK. He is also president of the Society for the History of Natural History in London.

In his office, plastered with posters of some of the world’s best nature dioramas, Ashby told Nature about his quest to communicate the importance of natural history museums.

Do you have a favourite?

One is the Biological Museum in Stockholm. The building looks like a wooden Norwegian church, and it’s effectively one giant diorama that goes up three storeys. It covers all of the Nordic biomes. And it shows that we do have some exciting wildlife in Europe.

Another is the National Natural History Museum in Paris. You walk into the comparative-anatomy section and it’s one giant wall with thousands of skeletons all facing towards you, so tightly packed that you cannot walk between them.

These probably shouldn’t be my favourites, because they are so old fashioned, but they are stunning.

Do museums teach science in a neutral way? In one book chapter, you highlight male biases in specimen collection and display.

Natural history museums are amazing, but of course they are built by people, and people have interests and biases. One study, by biologist Natalie Cooper at the Natural History Museum in London and her collaborators, looked at more than 2 million specimens at 5 museums, and found that only 40% of the birds were female (N. Cooper et al. Proc. R. Soc. B 286, 20192025; 2019). For mammals, the figure was 48%, but in some of the mammalian groups, particularly artiodactyls — such as deer and antelope — only 40% were female. In another study, curator Rebecca Machin found that almost three-quarters of the natural-history specimens on display at the Manchester Museum, UK, were male (R. Machin Museum Soc. 6, 54–67; 2008).

The numbers are huge, but it’s also about how they are displayed, presented and interpreted. For example, descriptions of male specimens are much more likely to give general facts: this is where the animal lives, how it’s adapted to its environment, and so on. Whereas, for a female specimen, you tend to have more of a story of ‘this is how the species reproduces’.

How did the idea of collecting natural-history specimens arise?

In a sense, all museums — but certainly natural history museums — have their philosophical origins in the Wunderkammern, the private cabinets of curiosity maintained by aristocrats and natural philosophers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Some museums today are direct descendants of those collections.

During the Enlightenment period, when scientific proof became important, collecting at an institutional level grew. And it went hand in hand with the ‘age of discovery’. Some of those voyages explicitly focused on finding out what resources were out there in the world that could be traded or acquired. And museums were both a place to study those resources — be they animal, vegetable or mineral — and a tool to promote the mission: ‘Look what we’ve got in our newly found colony’.

The British colony in southeastern Australia was intended to be founded in what’s now Botany Bay, near Sydney. And the colonists called it Botany Bay — it already had a name, Kamay, in the Indigenous language Dharawal — because, in 1770, on the voyage of Captain James Cook, naturalist Joseph Banks spent weeks collecting plants there. He came back and later said to Parliament, on the basis of what he had found, ‘this is where you should set up a colony’. Those plants are now in the Natural History Museum in London.

Specimens at the National Museum of Ireland — Natural History in Dublin.Credit: Lucas Vallecillos/VWPics/Redux/eyevine

Banks also wanted to collect the heads of Aboriginal people for his anatomical studies. Isn’t that problematic?

It was. Scientists at the time had theorized a racial hierarchy of people across the world, and then sought people’s remains without consent to try to back up this theory. It fed into the eugenics movement starting in the late nineteenth century, which has repercussions today. The desire to categorize people is inherently linked to extraordinary forms of violence and has been used in a pseudoscientific way to justify horrific social policy.

How are museums dealing with this legacy of colonialism?

There isn’t one museum that I would say is doing colonial history particularly well. But a lot of the research being done in natural history museums is, partly, understanding the true origins of the collections and who really collected them.

I bring up nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in that context, because he was relatively good at giving credit to people that he was working with. Two Malay teenagers called Ali and Baderoon, in particular, helped him during his eight-year voyage to the Malay Archipelago. Out of the 125,000 specimens that we lazily say were ‘collected by Wallace’, we know he attributed many to other people. But the institutions of science decided to ignore that and give the credit to Wallace.

Some museums have begun to repatriate human remains and artefacts. Should every collection be repatriated?

The important question is, where does an object have the most meaning? It’s always going to be on a story-by-story basis. Take the thylacine, for example, the extinct Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). There are nearly 800 specimens in museums around the world, and there are more in Australia, where they were native, than anywhere else. It is good that all of the thylacines aren’t in Australia. Because we talk about human-driven extinction in museums all around the world, that’s an important story — objects have power by being spread around.

But there are no specimens of gorillas in museums in any of the gorilla’s home states. If anyone who studies gorillas in Central Africa wants to use museum collections, they have to go to another part of the world, which is not right. If a museum has many gorilla specimens, to repatriate some of them would be a good thing.