Bird skeletons take flight at Museum and Art Gallery

A new eye-catching display is being installed in the main foyer of Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery on Monday 2 June.

Skeletons of nine different birds including two robins, two songthrushes, a green woodpecker, a buzzard, a heron, a guillemot and a swan will be hung from the roof of the Museum’s foyer. The installation is part of the revamp of the Museum’s foyer space, which is being overhauled along with most of its ground floor in a £1.2 million refurbishment.

The skeletons, which have come from the Museum’s natural history collections, have been mounted and wired to show them in flight. They have been specially prepared by taxidermist and osteologist Luke Williams in Staffordshire – a process which has taken five months to complete.

The installation is intended to give a visual impact to our main foyer space and we will be introducing other interesting artefacts from our collections over the coming months as we build up to our official re-launch in late 2008,” said Helen Fothergill, Keeper of Natural History. In the meantime, the skeletons look incredible and will be quite a sight to behold. It’s an amazing thing to see the scale of some of them, particularly the swan, without flesh and feathers.”

The preparation of the skeletons has been made possible thanks to a grant of just over £1,000 from the Preservation of Industrial and Scientific Material (PRISM) Grant Fund.

29 May 2008