Stephen Coates
speaker
150 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 14 May
Stephen Coates’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
That means it's chemically stable and won't spoil the specimens.
Specialist teams use all these things to make repairs.
Stretching tissue over delicate animal skin before packing up the specimens for travel.
Every single item is labelled by barcode with its type, origin and when it was collected.
Digitisation has been at the fore of what we've been doing with the collections.
Digital systems, but also digital photography and 3D scanning, producing 3D models of a lot of the material.
We're walking past rows of red deer, arrays of zebras.
a grizzly bear showing its huge teeth.
Some of them are what scientists call type specimens, which means that they define a species of animal, plant, fungus or other organism.
They're its essential form.
So there's also a sense of keeping these things for the future because it may not be apparent right now what the value of this particular specimen is.
Single hairs, fragments of horn, sections of teeth can tell us about diet and health, disease, movement.
I think as a curator, you certainly don't work in museums for the money.
You do it for the interests.
not just the science, but the stories, the histories, the people behind the collections, the politics of the time, the way the world was and the way the world is becoming.
It is emotionally very affecting.
There's no two ways about that.
We're constantly learning.
You never stop.
That's one of the beautiful things about this job.
Showing 41–60 of 150 · page 3 of 8
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