Natural History, Singapore


Today we went to the National History Museum, over in the National University. There are some huge dinosaur skeletons and the skeleton of a sperm whale that washed up on a Singapore beach a couple of years ago.

There’s also, in the entrance to the main hall, a plastic Rafflesia, lacking the all powerful odour of a genuine one, but then I suppose that’s seen as an advancement these days. Downstairs feels a little sterile, like every other modern, clean museum that’s been built in the last few years: concrete painted in neutral tones, lots of space between exhibits, the usual. Upstairs it’s a bit more fun; like a reimagining of the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, there’s lots of black cases with card files, animals preserved in glass jars, and squashed animals. It turns out that as well as pressing flowers, naturalists used to like bookmark-shaped rodents:
The kids liked this, even if La Serpiente was trying to throw herself over the parapet of the mezzanine, and Destroyer’s favourite part was the manhole cover she found that made resounding noises when she trod on it. I was shocked by the photo showing how much of the area around Marina Bay didn’t exist before the most recent land reclamation. Or rather, Marina Bay didn’t really exist before the reclamation.

I’d eaten something dodgy, and my guts were revolving, so my experience of the museum was less than what it could have been; after an hour and a half we packed the kids into a taxi and took them home. Thus the museum isn’t the kind of towering labyrinth that is its London equivalent, but it’s big enough for now.


2 responses to “Natural History, Singapore”

  1. Man, I knew you could weird stuff over there, but rodent bookmarks?!! From the look of the size of these things you’d need to have a hefty slab of a book to squeeze one of these dead critters between the pages.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.