Corrie Tan Straits Times 11 Jun 13;
The Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research's public gallery looks like it has just been ransacked.
Exhibits are gone from the walls. An eclectic mix of colourful information panels, seemingly pushed together at random, form an impenetrable wall. Cardboard boxes and conservation-grade packing paper take up most of its floor space.
Tucked away on the third floor of the concrete maze that is the National University of Singapore's faculty of science, the cramped 200 sq m gallery looks even smaller when Life! visits. But have no fear - nothing has been stolen. This is simply part of the big move to a spanking new building.
When the museum opens its doors in the second half of next year, the 8,500 sqm, seven-storey Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum will be home to a priceless collection of about 500,000 specimens of vertebrates and invertebrates, along with three dinosaur fossils. This is more than three times the size of the Raffles Museum's current storage facilities.
For now, the rest of the specimens are under lock and key in the back rooms. It closed to the public in March for the small team of staff and four curators to start on their daunting task: cleaning the thousands of specimens both wet and dry, taking inventories and chasing researchers and students to return specimens they have taken out on loan.
All of the specimens shown to Life! by collections manager Kelvin Lim, in his 40s, do not usually go on public display.
He explains: "Type specimens are the original specimen which the species is described from. We usually don't display or let people play with it. Especially when something is known from only one or two specimens, it's quite precious."
The geography and sociology graduate from NUS has been working at the museum since 1991. As exhibition manager of the public gallery when it opened in 2001, he was in charge of its layout and design. One of his main interests is in documenting the diversity of fishes, amphibians, reptiles and mammals found in Singapore.
He shows Life! a drawer full of three- striped squirrels that are extinct here. When packed tightly, dozens of the dark brown creatures can fit into a single drawer. The reason why most of the animal specimens are stiff and flat is a practical one.
Mr Lim says: "They are preserved in such a way that you can store them in a small space. If you were to mount them in a life-like pose, one specimen would take up a lot of space. When they're flat, you can stack them up and put them in a box."
Specimens that need to be stored in ethanol, such as fish, are kept in a different room on the floor below. The museum also receives calls to pick up roadkill - including pangolins - once or twice a year.
The collection has grown from 160,000 in 1988 - when President Tony Tan, then education minister, opened the Zoological Reference Collection at the NUS science faculty - to half a million today.
The new building will be located about 850m from the current premises. NUS has raised $46 million for a purpose-built museum that will house one of the largest collections of South-east Asian animals in the region.
But there is still some way to go. The museum needs another $10 million in endowment for professorships, fellowships and staff costs. Members of the public can give to this fund-raising drive at http://rmbr.nus.edu.sg/buildingfund/index.html.
In the vault
RAFFLES MUSEUM OF BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH
Year of founding: 1849, as part of the old Raffles Museum, which was mooted by Sir Stamford Raffles who was himself an avid naturalist. In the 1970s, the museum inherited the natural history collection after the old Raffles Museum was renamed the National Museum of Singapore. It was closed in March to prepare for the move to the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum.
Year it will reopen: Next year
Floor area: 2,200 sq m
Number of visitors last year: 5,856
Number of artefacts: About 500,000
Oldest known artefact: Believed to be a flycatcher, a type of bird collected in Malacca in 1862. However, it was acquired by the museum only in the early 1970s when the zoological collection of the old Raffles Museum was transferred to the National University of Singapore.
Most common animal groups: Fish and crabs. These animals are the research subjects of a number of professors, staff and graduate students associated with the museum.
Mr Kelvin Lim, collections manager at the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, highlights six specimens from the museum’s collection:
MENTAWAI PALM CIVET (PARADOXURUS LIGNICOLOR)
The museum has one specimen of this golden-brown, cat-like creature, collected on Sipora Island in October 1924. Sipora is one of the four Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, where the Mentawai Palm Civet is endemic.
The wild population numbers of this particular palm civet are unknown and it is considered by some researchers to be a subspecies of the Common Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), the mascot of the Raffles Museum.
SARAWAK MUD GUDGEON (POGONELEOTRIS HETEROLEPIS)
The fish pictured was bought from a fish market in Sarawak in January 1996. The museum has three specimens in total.
Very little is known about the habits of this fish, save for the fact that it lives in large muddy rivers where it is possibly a bottom-dwelling carnivore. So far, this species is known only from the rivers of Sarawak and is very rare in museum collections. Wild populations have not been studied.
SODHI'S SNAIL (KENYIRUS SODHII)
This species was named last year, in memory of the late NUS biology lecturer, Professor Navjot Sodhi, who was highly regarded in the fields of ecology and conservation biology. Out of the two specimens presently known of Sodhi's snail, the museum has one. This species was found in the forests of Terengganu in Malaysia and nothing is known of its habits and biology.
Kenyirus is named after Lake Kenyir, where the terrestrial snail was discovered in 2006 in the rainforest surrounding the lake.
SINGAPORE RUBBLE CRAB (FAVUS GRANULATA)
The English naturalist W.F. Lanchester discovered this elusive crab on Singapore's shores in 1900. The tiny creature has been found only in Singapore's coastal seas so far and has not yet been collected anywhere else.
The museum has two specimens of the Rubble Crab and the one photographed was obtained at Sentosa in 1982. It is possible that this crab may in fact be common, but due to the fact that it looks almost like a coral pebble, it is very difficult to detect.
BORNEAN BRISTLEHEAD (PITYRIASIS GYMNOCEPHALA)
The Bornean Bristlehead pictured here was collected at Mount Dulit in Sarawak in October 1891. It is one of three specimens in the museum's collection.
This bird is named after the coarse and stiff feathers on its yellow head. It is endemic to the island of Borneo where it lives in lowland rainforest in flocks of six to 10 birds in the forest canopy and appears to feed largely on insects.
KINABALU FERRET-BADGER (MELOGALE EVERETTI)
The museum has four specimens of the Kinabalu Ferret-Badger, a brown animal with white stripes. They were collected in 1929 from Mount Kinabalu in East Malaysia.
This species is endemic to the montane forests of Sabah on Borneo. It is nocturnal and rarely seen and also scarce in museum collections. It apparently feeds on earthworms, insects and other small animals.