Australian Museum

Favorite Photos of 2019

A Rothschild giraffe takes a stroll in its outside enclosure on an unusually warm December day at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

A Rothschild giraffe takes a stroll in its outside enclosure on an unusually warm December day at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

2019 was a momentous year for me with my studies abroad and the launch of Natural Curios. I lived on the other side of the planet for five months in Brisbane, Australia, which spurred me to start writing this blog about the natural world’s curious nature, which was on full display during my travels around Australia and New Zealand. After a year of exploring why Australia’s koalas and monotremes are some of nature’s most curious creatures, how climate change is threatening both Queensland’s flying foxes and Grand Teton National Park’s glaciers and how a giant fossil sea monster blasted out of the outback with dynamite ended up at Harvard, I wanted to dedicate an article to highlighting some of my favorite photographs from this past year. I was lucky enough to explore the world’s largest coral reef and some of the oldest rainforests in the world. I climbed on top of volcanoes and encountered wild parrots in the snowy Southern Alps. From Australia to New Zealand to Chicago to Los Angeles, and some locations in between, I was able to cover a lot of ground over Natural Curios’s inaugural year. Thankfully, I always had a camera with me ready to capture whatever sparked my imagination. Enjoy my favorite photographs from 2019 and stay tuned for new articles in the next few days! Also, don’t forget to check out Natural Curios’s full photography gallery here!

Landscape

Below are some of my favorite landscape pictures from the other side of the world. These pictures comprise both iconic locations, like the Great Barrier Reef and the Sydney Harbor, and more tucked away places, like a quiet, secluded spot in the Brisbane Botanical Garden and Australia’s easternmost point at Byron Bay. My week-long sojourn to New Zealand (bottom row) provided some of the most breathtaking landscapes I have ever seen from the mist-shrouded waterfalls of Milford Sound to the black-sand beaches and soaring volcanic cliffs of Piha Beach to the public parks populated by New Zealand’s most populous residents—sheep.

Animals

These animal pictures are among my favorite from the past year and include animals from both Australia and New Zealand, as well as zoos and parks across the United States. Going to Australia, I was incredibly excited to see world-famous residents like cuddly koalas, gargantuan saltwater crocodiles (aka “Salties”) and ripped kangaroos. The creature that most caught my imagination while I was Down Under was the blue-headed, killer cassowary that disperses seeds in Australia’s primeval rainforests at the top of the continent. Back in the States, I captured such striking creatures as Indonesia’s green peafowl and Lowland gorillas. One resident of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo particularly caught my attention. The Guam kingfisher is extinct on its native island due to invasive snakes and only staves off oblivion in a few zoos around the world, including the Lincoln Park Zoo. There are less than 100 individuals in the whole world. I also captured animals in the wild, like Southern California’s sea lions and New Zealand’s alpine kea in the Southern Alps.

Natural History

Natural history is the study that encompasses all of my favorite disciplines, including paleontology, zoology, botany, geology and environmental studies that, together, help us understand how plants and animals have interacted with the natural world over the last 4 billion years. Natural history museums are my favorite places to visit because they provide insights into the natural world through the display of a diverse assortment of interesting and bizarre specimens, like a juvenile great white shark pickled in alcohol, a dinosaur fossil with mummified skin, or a macabre wall decorated with the ancient skulls of hundreds of dire wolves exhumed from Southern California’s tar pits. Natural history displays also help us picture the distant past by assembling skeletons, like a giant predatory mosasaur or the giant Diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever. Sometimes they even give us ideas of what these primeval behemoths would look like with flesh, skin, fur or scales on their fossilized bones, like the Australian Museum did with its Diprotodon model. Only at natural history museums can you take in the scale of a pygmy blue whale skeleton and feel the explosive power palpable in the split second before an inland taipan, the most venomous snake on earth, strikes a rat. The tuatara picture is the only picture of something that is still alive, but even it offers a look deep into the earth’s past as it represents the last vestige of a whole order of reptiles (bottom row).

Cityscape, Architecture and Miscellaneous

From Sydney’s bustling fish market to Brisbane’s skyline glistening in the late afternoon sun, there were a few of my favorite pictures this year that I could not fit in the three categories above. Among them were several glimpses of the splendid gothic architecture of Australia’s Saint Mary and Saint Patrick cathedrals in Sydney and Melbourne, respectively, and the more subdued St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Queenstown, New Zealand. Queenstown’s soaring peaks also provided an intriguing backdrop for ornate grave stones. The one benefit of a mostly rainy week in Auckland were the wonderful rainbows that would spring up throughout Auckland’s bustling port, giving the cranes and barges a magical quality. And I could not resist putting a picture of one of Steve Irwin’s iconic saltwater crocodiles moving back into its enclosure after a show at the Australia Zoo.

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Australian Museum Review

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Killer Marsupials, fearsome crocodiles, and hundreds of Australia’s natural treasures highlight Sydney’s natural history museum.

One of the first things I did when I got off the plane in Australia was head to Sydney’s Australian Museum, a treasure trove of Australian and natural history artifacts. As the continent’s first public museum, opening in 1827, its main goal was displaying rare and intriguing natural specimens. In the 192 years since its humble beginning in the city’s old post office, the collection has swelled in size and relocated several times, eventually settling into its current location outside of Hyde Park in 1846. The building has continued to expand in order to better serve its scientific and research goals. The future could not be brighter for the museum. In 2018 the museum received $50 million to improve exhibit halls, and will welcome one of the largest King Tut exhibits ever in early 2021 to mark the centenary of the pharaoh’s discovery.

The increased flow of funds and interest in the museum will do wonders for the museum and its public displays. Although a new modern wing was added in 2008, several of the exhibits inside are dated and certain specimens (especially taxidermy mammals) are literally busting at the seams in their animal exhibit. But the strength of the museum is its very interesting and peculiar collection of Australian natural history items, ranging from a huge skeleton of a thundering diprotodon to a morbidly-wonderful horse skeleton bucking its skeleton rider into the air.

The Australian Museum was hosting a traveling exhibit about whales while I was there and had an interesting display of whale skulls near the entrance to the main foyer. The species of whales and porpoises represented by these skulls ran the whole gamut, from the thin-snouted, needle-toothed South Asian river dolphin to the hulking skull and thick, curved teeth of the killer whale. This display was an interesting introduction to the museum.

From left to right: killer whale skull, short-beaked common dolphin skull, South Asian river dolphin skull and Cuvier’s beaked whale skull

From left to right: killer whale skull, short-beaked common dolphin skull, South Asian river dolphin skull and Cuvier’s beaked whale skull

After entering the main foyer, adorned with a huge inflatable whale, I made my way through both the Wild Planet and Indigenous Australia galleries. Some of the aforementioned taxidermy was worn out, making for a few depressing-looking stuffed kangaroos and wallabies, but the abundance and amount of Australian animals was impressive for someone not familiar with these creatures. The taxidermy was supplemented with some impressive skeletons including a whale suspended from the ceiling, an Asian elephant, and a hippopotamus displaying its gnarly tusks. The Indigenous Peoples exhibit gave an interesting overview of their culture through many pieces of art on wood and some less traditional media, like the bill of a sawfish.

Up the stairs is the Dinosaur exhibit, which contains several very cool set pieces like the theropod vs. sauropod battle that greets you as you enter, a cast of gigantosaurus, and coolest of all, a life-size model of a dissected Tyrannosaurus rex, made for the 2015 National Geographic special, full of corn-syrup blood and rubbery organs. But the exhibit’s information was not spaced out making some specimens and information seem cluttered. Several of the models were dated, especially the very much reptilian, Jurassic Park-era raptor models near the end of the hall, lacking any semblance of feathers we now know they had. 

I would have loved to see more space dedicated to Australian dinosaurs. The only big Australian specimen of the exhibit was a very cool skeleton of the herbivorous muttaburrasaurus. The exhibit was trying to tackle the complete essence of dinosaurs, which is a very fair goal for a dinosaur exhibit, but it comes off a bit unoriginal. It would have been awesome to see more of Australia’s very cool and unique dinosaur history displayed.

Images Above: Image 1: Cool view of the sauropod-carnivore duel that took place in Northern Africa millions of years ago. Image 2: A life-size T-rex “cadaver” after the televised autopsy, missing an eye, a tooth, and the contents of its guts. Image 3: Muttaburrasaurus skeleton, one of the few Australian dinosaurs displayed.

Surviving Australia was one of the museum’s highlights. Located on the same floor as the dinosaur exhibit, the exhibit offered the Australian-themed exhibition I had been hoping for, exploring Australia’s weird, wonderful, and often times deadly inhabitants since the end of the dinosaurs. Some highlights centered around the bones and models of several famed Australian megafauna: a giant horned turtle with a spiked tail, resembling a creature straight out of Pokemon, a huge duck known by the fantastic name “Demon Duck of Doom”, a giant monitor lizard (more about them in future pieces), and, of course, the giant marsupials. 

The exhibit did a nice job of complementing bones and skeletons of the marsupials with life-like models (albeit older models with some patchy fur) of what these creatures could have looked like in life. These included the large wolf-like prehistoric thylacine, giant short-faced kangaroo, and the largest marsupial ever, diprotodon, a fantastic cross between a rhino and its modern cousin, the wombat. But the most interesting ancient marsupial displayed to me was the ferocious thylacoleo, a lion-sized ball of muscle and teeth that fed on the giant kangaroos and wombats of its day. The museum displays its fossilized jaws which may have equipped thylacoleo with the strongest bite of any mammal ever. All of these monster marsupials make prehistoric Australia seem like a fantastically strange and treacherous land, which is clearly the exhibit’s goal.

Image 1: Thylacoleo is also known as the marsupial lion and has the bone-crushing bite to back that up! Image 2: Thylacoleo’s murder weapons were its jaws (lower jaw shown here) which it used to dispatch other megafauna, like giant kangaroos. Image 3: a giant short-faced kangaroo skeleton.

A menacing look at the museum’s diprotodon model

A menacing look at the museum’s diprotodon model

The museum’s diprotodon skeleton perched above the rest of Surviving Australia

The museum’s diprotodon skeleton perched above the rest of Surviving Australia

The rest of the Surviving Australia exhibit contains awesome specimens of the continent’s modern natural marvels, including a spectacular saltwater crocodile that truly lets you take in the species’ immense size. In the next room are interesting displays about the continent’s marine wonders, ranging from the Great Barrier Reef to penguins. On level three, there is a great display of the many unique birds that call Australia home. 

The standout exhibit at the museum was the 200 Treasures of the Australian Museum, taking up the lower two floors of the Westpac Long Gallery. The second floor of the exhibit contains information on 100 people who have had significant impact on Australian scientific discovery, along with display cases depicting specimens from every department at the museum. The other half of the 200 is on the first floor, where 100 of the museum’s standout specimens are displayed together in large exhibit cases. The items were selected for historical significance, scientific importance, rarity, or just plain wonder, like an opalized (petrified with the mineral opal) plesiosaur skeleton that shimmered in soft hues of pink and gold. 

A few other specimens worth mentioning are the large Irish elk skeleton perched off the second floor balcony; a large gold nugget found in Australia; specimens and equipment from an early Australian Antarctic expedition, including a beaten-up sled and a penguin; and a thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, pup embalmed in a jar. One interesting story I will take away from this exhibit was conveyed by a large red chair towards the front of the exhibit. It belonged to Gerard Krefft, an early museum director who was ousted over his belief of evolution by creationist museum trustees. Krefft decided to make a statement with his exit, refusing to leave his office or his chair. The trustees’ solution was to hire two prize-fighters who broke down the door to his office, picked up the chair and carried him out.

Image 1: The main exhibit hall containing the Australian Museum’s treasures, including the skeleton of an Irish elk, one of the largest deer species in history. Image 2: The opalized remains of an Australian plesiosaur. Image 3: Former museum director Gerard Krefft’s chair, which he was carried out on when he was ousted from the museum. Image 4: A preserved Tasmanian tiger pup from 1866. These large marsupial carnivores were hunted to extinction last century.

A piece containing a few of my favorite specimens from the exhibit. The only two not pictured above are a stuffed emperor penguin from an early Australian Antarctic expedition (top right) and the skull from the giant turtle, Meiolania (bottom left),…

A piece containing a few of my favorite specimens from the exhibit. The only two not pictured above are a stuffed emperor penguin from an early Australian Antarctic expedition (top right) and the skull from the giant turtle, Meiolania (bottom left), mentioned earlier in the piece.

Stories like Krefft’s, and the incredible specimens collected by the museum in both Australia and around the world, are what I took away from the Australian Museum. It is at its best when it plays on Australia’s natural history in the Surviving Australia exhibit, and its own history, in 200 Treasures. It is worth a visit for both natural history lovers and those who are just curious about Australia. 

All photographs and art in this piece was taken or created by Jack Tamisiea