Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid in London's Natural History Museum
There’s a 28-foot (8.62-meter) giant squid on display at the Natural History Museum in London:
It took several months to prepare the squid for display.
“The first stage was to defrost it; that took about four days. The problem was the mantle – the body – is very thick and the tentacles very narrow, so we had to try and thaw the thick mantle without the tentacles rotting,” Mr Ablett told the BBC News website.
The scientists did this by bathing the mantle in water, whilst covering the tentacles in ice packs, after which they injected the squid with a formol-saline solution to prevent it from rotting.
The team then needed to find someone to build a glass tank which could not only hold the huge creature, but could leave the squid accessible for future scientific research, and they decided to draw upon the knowledge of an artist famed for displaying preserved dead animals.
The website has a video. Here is another news story. Damien Hirst got involved in the defrosting.
Note that this squid is larger than the 25-foot specimen on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Mike • March 3, 2006 4:12 PM
Well, I have this blog loaded into my RSS reader, and I’ve been following the post for about the last 5 months… and I have yet to understand the connection between security and giant squids? please clarify.