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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This tortoise could have been born in the early 1700s.
So it's just that depth of time.
There's a heaviness to it.
It represents such a different time in our planet's history.
A lot of our material comes from the height of empire, right?
There is that aspect of the colonial history of the United Kingdom that is also captured in the collection and can teach us a lot.
Yes, there were kind of, I think, two different motivations for collecting specimens historically.
One was, they would say, oh, we've never been to the Tapuis in South America.
Let's see what animals we can find on top of them.
And those would be opportunistic collections.
And then there also, at one point in time, became a very focused trade in particular species.
Crocodiles for bags, for boots, and definitely with birds.
The Milnery trade is a really great example of where
Many collectors went specifically to locations to get a particular species for its feathers that someone wanted on their hat.
These tortoises that we're standing around, we have representatives here of species that may only have 30 individuals left in the wild.
In front of us we have a couple of specimens which are on corals.
Coming around the corner here and moving into a part of the collection now where we have very large taxidermy crocodilian specimens.
Those are like alligators, crocodiles.
I'll show you one example of special considerations for the move here, which is a taxidermied specimen of a green anaconda.
Fascinating, but massive, with large paired spots running down the top of the snake.
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