Before I realise what’s happening, the lid is off – and James Maclaine is pulling out a fistful of deep-sea anglerfish. I hadn’t been expecting him to plonk his bare hand inside the jar. I peer more closely. It looks... squishy.
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Maclaine, senior curator of fish at London’s Natural History Museum, is giving me a behind-the-scenes look at some of the specimens that aren’t on public display: some are too large to feature in the main exhibits, others too precious.
Dotted around the room are glass jars filled with curious specimens preserved in spirits, many over 100 years old. Maclaine removes a few with the casual air of someone who’s been surrounded by rare curios every day for decades.
Animals that are too big for the jars are placed in steel tanks. The clanging of chains as a heavy metal lid is winched off announce that one is being opened. A chemical smell with a hint of smoked mackerel wafts our way.
Then Maclaine hauls out the wrinkled snout of a primeval beast from the dark liquid – over time, fish oil seeps into the preserving fluid, staining it a rusty red – and I see one of the planet’s longest-lived species: a Greenland shark.
These behemoths can live to at least 250 years old, but might even reach the age of 500.
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Though only half the size of the expected maximum length for the species, this 3.5m-long specimen is too heavy to lift clear from the tank. Its gaping mouth reveals teeth perfectly designed for chomping on large food items such as dead whales: the top teeth latch on while the bottom slice.
“It grabs on, rolls and saws through flesh,” explains Maclaine. What’s not immediately evident is that the carcass is stuffed with something rather unorthodox.
The shark had looked sunken and strange after dissection, so the team “just shoved a load of lab coats in it”, says Maclaine, laughing at the idea that the stitches might burst in 100 years’ time, spewing foetid lab coats and puzzling future researchers.
Sharing the same tank, like commuters in a busy Tube train, is a mako shark, a common thresher, a swordfish and a couple of enormous sturgeons, among other specimens.
The Spirit Collection
Not many people get to witness the opening of that tank, nor those hands-on extras. But members of the public can go into the bowels of the building on a tour of the Spirit Collection – items preserved in jars or other containers. Ticket sales help to support the upkeep of the collection, adding to donations, merchandise sales and government funding.
The Natural History Museum holds some 83 million specimens, more than 23 million of them perched on 17 miles of shelves in the spirit rooms. In past centuries, samples were collected by explorers from across the British empire, or provided by industrial whalers.
Today, though, strict rules govern what the museum can take into its growing collection. “We can’t even accept a shell unless we know it was taken from a beach where that’s allowed,” says Joe Morrin, guide for the public tour I joined.
We start with a peek at a box of flesh-eating beetles nibbling away at a rabbit carcass. Eventually, just a skeleton will remain, ready to be cleaned, dried and stored in a small box.
These voracious carrion feeders are being put to use working through freezers full of specimens stored since the 1970s.
Next, a blast of cold air hits us as we’re whisked through a room filled with shelves, each one crammed with jars. After the warmth of the main museum, I get goosebumps.
It’s essential to keep the specimens cold to minimise evaporation and the risk of igniting the spirits used for preservation.
Entering the tank room, the centrepiece immediately demands attention: it’s Archie the giant squid. This fan favourite (actually a female despite the moniker, a nod to the species name, Architeuthis dux) dominates the room, stretching a whopping 8.62m from the end of her mantle to the tip of her two tentacles.
When Archie was hauled up from a depth of 220m in a fishing net off the Falkland Islands in 2004, she was still almost entirely in one piece.
Although she looks a little tattered, like a well-loved soft toy, she is remarkably intact for this species, more usually found in fragments washed up on beaches or inside sperm whales’ stomachs.
These deep-sea creatures don’t cope well with the reduction in pressure when brought to the surface, says Morrin.
First, Archie was frozen for six months while the museum constructed a special acrylic tank, with help from the experts who’d worked with artist Damian Hirst, known for creating works featuring animals preserved in formaldehyde, including a shark and a bisected cow.
“There was nobody else who could make the tank strong enough,” explains Maclaine. “I’ve been told that you could fire a shotgun at it and it won’t break.”
Deep-sea finds
We amble among the collection, peering at the most notable items: a now-extinct Chinese paddlefish, a bloated Chinese salamander that died riddled with disease, a gulper eel (which can expand and change its shape like a balloon animal), and a crumpled goblin shark – “Its jaws fly out of its face to catch its prey,” Morrin tells us.
At the end of Archie’s tank we see another super-rare find: pieces of a colossal squid’s clubbed tentacles.
Next, Morrin shows us a cookiecutter shark. Despite looking like an oversized cigar with a cartoonish grin, this little fella can take bites out of prey as large as dolphins, whales, even great white sharks.
“Their jaws work like ice cream scoopers,” he says. “They bite, they scoop, they swim away.”
We move on to look at a bearded anglerfish and hear about its unorthodox sex life. When a male, much smaller than the female, finds a mate in the deep ocean he bites her – and their bodies fuse together, so he can provide sperm on demand.
“He gets plugged into her blood supply, and she seems to have complete control over him hormonally,” says Maclaine.
A male bearded anglerfish sometimes accidentally attaches to the wrong species – but, once he’s latched on, it’s too late to change his mind.
We move on to look at a spherical deep-sea weirdo with tiny pinprick eyes: a football fish. Living hundreds of metres down in the ink-black depths, this curious species detects movement in the surrounding water via acne-like sensory cells all over its body.
Origin of the species
At the end of the row stands a glass cabinet emblazoned with a large letter S, for salvage. In an emergency, these specimens would be saved first.
Why so special? They were collected by Darwin himself, and some are the ‘type specimens’ used to first describe those species. You can even see his handwriting on some of the labels.
“That tortoise appeared two years ago,” says Morrin, pointing. “Just popped up.”
It had been sitting in an office for years – perhaps as a paperweight. One day, it was moved and a label fell out of the shell, revealing that this old reptile had belonged to Charles Darwin himself – a reminder of the importance of preserving not just the specimens but also the data detailing what they are and where they came from.
“Without the label: paperweight,” he says. “With the label: get it locked behind glass immediately!”
The challenges of today
Some specimens arrive with a mystery to be solved. Take the hairy anglerfish with a mysteriously bulging belly that showed up in 1999; Maclaine vividly remembers his desperate attempts to find out what it had eaten that created that distended midriff.
Not wanting to damage the delicate fish by dissection, it was put through a computed tomography (CT) scanner combining thousands of X-rays to create a 3D digital image that can be viewed from all angles.
“Suddenly we could see all this detail,” says Maclaine. The hapless victim’s ear bones were so clear that the experts could identify the exact species of prey: a deep-sea fish called a softskin smooth-head.
Despite its size – at least twice as long as the predator – it was no match for the anglerfish’s terrible teeth. “Once you’ve started going in, you’re not coming back the other way,” adds Maclaine.
Working in the spirit rooms is like being a librarian, he says. As curator, he is responsible for helping people work with the specimens by sharing photographs, X-rays, measurements, data and samples.
And, of course, trying to get hold of the latest goodies to grow the collection. Many hours are spent in maintenance: updating species names that have changed, checking jars are sealed, making sure labels aren’t falling off.
But he’s learned to expect the unexpected. “Being asked: ‘do you want to meet Tom Cruise?’ was quite a big surprise,” he says – the actor filmed a scene in the 2017 movie The Mummy here.
Another unusual request came from a researcher who was designing tyres that might withstand the abrasive substrate of the planet Mars.
“He wanted to look at spiky, grippy, durable things in nature,” says Maclaine, who gave him samples of pangolin scales, ostrich feet and a square of the Greenland shark’s skin.
One day, secrets gleaned from those specimens might help robotic vehicles move around on the red planet.
Some specimens can have a vital impact even after sitting quietly on a shelf for decades. When the pandemic hit, researchers digitised all the bats in the collection to help with Covid-19 research.
“Those bats could have been in here for 100, 200 years,” says Morrin. “Then, all of a sudden they’re really, really important.”
