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Well-loved specimens by our South Asian scientists
Our South Asian scientists share what they’re working on and what their favourite specimen is in our collections.
Ashwini grew up in Bangalore, India. Her fascination with lizards, frogs and snakes began on an undergraduate field trip that eventually led her to doing a PhD studying geckos in island ecosystems.
Ashwini has a soft spot for the Rodrigues day gecko
Dr Ashwini Mohan is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher with us. She’s studying the evolution of genomes and is currently working on coming up with a new method to extract information from DNA.
‘I’ve always been interested in understanding how genomes evolve and how they influence other organismal traits, such as morphologies,’ says Ashwini. ‘My team and I are exploring a new perspective to study genomes and coming up with a method to do that.’
Ashwini’s favourite specimen from our collections is the Rodrigues day gecko. The lizard was endemic to Rodrigues Island, a small volcanic island in the Indian Ocean.
It went extinct in the late-nineteenth century due to habitat destruction and the introduction of predators, such as rats and cats, to the island by people.
‘There are records of people seeing the gecko alive in its habitat on the island,’ says Ashwini. ‘It was a chunky, friendly lizard and would eat fruits off people’s hands.’
‘There are only about five Rodrigues day gecko specimens in the world, and the Museum holds three of those.’
Gothamie grew up in the mountainous terrains of Sri Lanka and was encouraged by her parents and teachers to explore nature. This fostered a deep love for biodiversity, which led her to becoming a lichen scientist today.
Gothamie is in awe of Darwin’s handpicked Usnea lichen from Antarctica
Dr Gothamie Weerakoon is our Senior Curator of Algae, Fungi and Plants. Her job involves managing and curating our lichen collection, which includes a whopping half a million specimens.
As well as curating, Gothamie also carries out research for and consults on the South Asian Nitrogen Hub - an organisation that's tackling nitrogen pollution in South Asia. Using lichens as bioindicators, Gothamie and other international scientists monitor high levels of atmospheric nitrogen and its adverse effects in the Himalayan mountain region and Sri Lanka.
One of Gothamie’s favourite specimens is the beard lichen collected by Charles Darwin.
‘It was picked up in Antarctica in 1863,’ says Gothamie. ‘During that time, scientists had limited resources so it’s really impressive that they travelled to the end of the Earth where the temperature was freezing at around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The specimen’s label has Charles’ original handwriting. It’s a real piece of history.’
Anjali was born in the US and lived in India for a year when she was four years old. Whilst there, she encountered large mammals, such as boars and tigers, in the wild - an experience that set her on the path to becoming a palaeobiologist.
Anjali is moved by the extinct Tasmanian tiger
Our Research Leader Professor Anjali Goswami leads a team of scientists who are developing new ways to measure different characteristics of specimens.
This includes building 3D models of fossils and living animals using CT scans, using complex maths to describe what they look like and analysing how they have changed shape over time.
‘One of the things I’m fascinated by is mammal evolution because it’s the group that includes humans and my favourite animal - the tiger,’ says Anjali. ‘In fact, my very earliest memory is seeing a tiger in Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh, India, when I was a small child.’
‘In recent years, I’ve been particularly fascinated by looking at the differences between marsupials - mammals with a pouch - and placental mammals and exploring why they evolved in such different ways.’
Anjali’s favourite specimen from our collections is the Tasmanian tiger - a stripy marsupial that looks superficially like a medium-sized dog. Also known as the thylacine, the animal was endemic to Tasmania, mainland Australia and New Guinea, but went extinct mostly due to hunting in the early twentieth century.
‘Tasmanian tigers are just really beautiful,’ says Anjali. ‘We have a baby one in our collection - it’s possibly the youngest taxidermy thylacine specimen in the world.’
‘There’s a video of one of the last Tasmanian tigers and it’s really moving to see footage of an animal that went extinct less than 100 years ago, solely because of human activity.’
Ranee’s passion for botany was initially sparked by her father who introduced her to nature as a child, but it was a teacher at her secondary school who encouraged her to pursue it as a career.
Ranee reveres the symbolic lotus flower
Dr Ranee Prakash is our Senior Curator of Flowering Plants and oversees one of our four general herbarium collections. She is currently working on digitising thousands of plants from India that have been collected over the last three centuries.
Ranee says, ‘We’ve digitised around 40,000 specimens from South Asia so far with the assistance of various people, including scientists from the Botanical Survey of India. They helped to digitise some economically important plant families such as the sunflower family, grasses and legumes.’
Ranee’s favourite of our specimens is the lotus flower - a highly symbolic plant in many religions and cultures. It’s perhaps most widely associated with Buddhism where it represents enlightenment. In Hinduism, the lotus plant symbolises divinity and Hindu gods are often depicted sitting on the flower.
‘The beauty of the lotus plant is that it grows in muddy water, but the flowers are offered to God,’ says Ranee. ‘The lotus plant is a rich source of protein and has many benefits when eaten. Lotus seed is now considered a superfood in the west, but we have been eating it for thousands of years in India. We call it makhana.’
