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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You have a demisterium where these little demisterium bugs... That's a special room where flesh-eating dermistid beetles clean the soft tissue from new animal specimens.
You have large specimen processing facilities where you would, say, dismantle an elephant that's come in.
You've got biosecurity laboratories, you've got molecular collections facilities, you have ancient DNA collection facilities and processing, you've got digitization and trying to fit.
All those different types of functions, which in some way connect to each other and to the collections, it becomes an incredibly fantastic 3D chess puzzle.
While cranes and forklift trucks may be needed to relocate whales and giant tortoises, other creatures require tweezers.
Collections Move assistants, Aisling Brennan and Amy Wahab.
What's fascinating about it is that this particular array has been built or made especially for this specimen.
So it's completely bespoke to this specimen and there's a sense of the actual epic scale of this because there's so many specimens but they're all individuals.
Brittle cell-wise, it's probably 3,000 or 4,000 dry specimens here.
Hugh Carter, curator of marine invertebrates.
So these are brittle stars which live kind of entwined in the coral and they basically capture food off the coral more or less.
And these were piled basically on top of each other in a box but there's several different species and they're now being separated out and quite beautifully conserved.
Beautifully wrapped.
Jeff Stryker, Senior Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles.
This anaconda, collected in the 19th century, must be a good 10 metres long.
Jeff wasn't here when the anaconda arrived 30 years ago.
Even with five people carrying it, how do you get something that big and that fragile down the stairs?
Just imagine that.
The people who live around here and walk past the store every day don't know about the vast menagerie inside.
Then, one day in early 2028, they may see a wall come down and the doors will open and there'll be an extraordinary exodus of creatures, wonderful creatures, who've already been on many journeys, now setting out to meet present and future zoologists, scientists and researchers in their new home.
Showing 121–140 of 150 · page 7 of 8
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