Geoff Stryker

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70 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 14 May

Geoff Stryker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Documentary Podcast · An animal exodus · 14 May 2026 podcast

Here we go.

My name's Geoff Stryker.

I'm an evolutionary biologist.

I look after the museum's very large collection of amphibian and reptile specimens.

So these are animals like frogs and snakes, toads, lizards, crocodilians.

We've got shelves with hundreds of specimens.

So we've got the storks there, and on our other side we have some very colorful tropical birds.

Watch your step.

We've got some warning tape as we go through this narrow area around a very large leatherback sea turtle, the world's largest living turtle.

And now we've come to the part of the collection that I helped look after.

So the monitor lizard in front of me is probably about a meter and a half in length.

Look down here.

This is the original display plaque.

So you can see that it says water monitor.

from Kedah in the Malé Peninsula, 1895.

And so that tells me that this would have been one of our display specimens in South Kensington shortly after it opened in the late 1800s.

This specimen was sitting there, and it is still here with us today and still educating people about the natural world.

You can see that our conservators have carefully tied the tail down with some archival-grade string.

You may wonder why do you have 15 representatives of the same species of turtle, for example.

As individuals, they have massive research potential.

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