Some cool animals that are extinct images:
Natural History Museum - London
Image by nick.garrod
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Natural History Museum - Kensington London
The foundation of the collection was that of the Ulster doctor Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), which allowed his significant collections to be purchased by the British Government at a price well below their market value at the time. This purchase was funded by a lottery. Sloane's collection, which included dried plants, and animal and human skeletons, was initially housed in Montague House in Bloomsbury in 1756, which was the home of the British Museum. In the late 1850s, Professor Richard Owen, Superintendent of the natural history departments of the British Museum saw that the natural history departments needed a bigger, separate building.
Land in South Kensington was purchased, and in 1864 a competition was held to design the new museum. The winning entry was submitted by Captain Francis Fowke who died shortly afterwards. The scheme was taken over by Alfred Waterhouse who substantially revised the agreed plans, and designed the façades in his own idiosyncratic Romanesque style. The original plans included wings on either side of the main building, but these plans were soon abandoned for budgetary reasons. The space these would have occupied are now taken by the Earth Galleries and Darwin Centre.
Work began in 1873 and was completed in 1880. The new museum opened in 1881, although the move from the old museum was not fully completed until 1883.
Both the interiors and exteriors of the Waterhouse building make extensive use of terracotta tiles to resist the sooty climate of Victorian London. The tiles and bricks feature many relief sculptures of flora and fauna, with living and extinct species featured within the west and east wings respectively. This explicit separation was at the request of Owen, and has been seen as a statement of his contemporary rebuttal of Darwin's attempt to link present species with past through the theory of natural selection[1].
The central axis of the museum is aligned with the tower of Imperial College London (formerly the Imperial Institute) and the Royal Albert Hall and Albert Memorial further north. These all form part of the complex known colloquially as Albertopolis. Text from Wikepedia
Sacrificing humanness to save humans
Image by Pandiyan
Bonnet Monkey
Macaca radiata
Check out the hairtstyle. That stylish tuft gets her the name!
Monkeys are a common feature in India. We see them in so many places. It is one of the wild animals small children learn to recognise first. Their antics and exploits are used widely in stories be they folk tales, urban legends or even religious texts. One of the main characters in Ramayan, Hanuman is even revered as a God.
But search the web and you find very little about them. Not many scientific surveys, species classification behavioural descriptions. Of course things are changing now. Indian langurs lumped together in a bunch have recently got separated into more than half a dozen species.
However one curious fact. Go into scientific sites like medscape and others. You will find hundreds of research reports. Because rhesus monkeys and their cousins like this bonnet monkey have been the prime target of medical tests and trials. Our long removed cousins have been rendering us selfless service over the last so many decades sacrificing their health and even lives.
These animals are in no danger of going extinct because we need a lot of lab specimens.
