Geoff Stryker

speaker

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

So if we want to know about how species change through time, how they're changing in response to how we've impacted the planet, we really can't just look at one individual to give us those answers.

So while many of the specimens around this room were originally stuffed to be put into a Victorian museum,

Now, as technology has advanced, we can scrape a little skin off of them and we can actually sequence their genome and compare it to that of living bird populations or living turtle populations.

Potential use is only going to grow.

100%.

And we know that because sadly, we have many, many examples of species that used to be numerous, but are now extinct.

And we have some of the only examples of this biodiversity that is now lost from our planet.

And they had no idea that was going to be the case when they first arrived at the museum.

And this, I personally think, is a very special part of the collection here.

Along this long row of shelves, we have hundreds of giant tortoises.

You can see them lining the rows on both sides.

There are three tiers of shelves, each filled with giant tortoises.

And these all come from really just two places on our planet, the Galapagos Islands and the Aldabra Islands.

And even though I've been here for more than a decade, every time I walk through here, one of the things that I'm just always impressed by is just the age of some of these specimens.

This particular giant tortoise we're looking at now, I'm looking at a label.

It says that it was donated to the museum by Captain David Porter in 1813 or 1814.

This is a very large tortoise, over a meter long from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail.

So this is something you could ride if it were alive.

And that means that this was a full-grown adult specimen.

These are very long-lived animals, and so it would not have been impossible for this to be over 100 years old when it was prepared, which means that

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