Post by Patrick on Feb 11, 2011 16:28:26 GMT
Links to photo video:
Curators at London's Natural History Museum describe the weird, inventive and downright devious sex on display in the new Sexual Nature exhibition
WARNING: contains graphic details about animal intercourse
Link to text:
Erica McAllister is excited (perhaps, in the context, not the most felicitous choice of word, but never mind. She's passionate, too, but that's not much better). "Flies," she enthuses, "are the best, because they're everywhere, and they do everything. They get up to the craziest stuff. Amazing genitalia. And some wild strategies."
Downstairs in the Natural History Museum's magnificently arched Jerwood Gallery, staff are (as it were) mounting Sexual Nature, a new exhibition exploring the diverse and often startling sexual and reproductive behaviour of animals (or, as the museum's posters coyly put it, "nature's most intimate secrets"). It's the museum's first adult exhibition, aimed at those over 16, and containing what the same publicity calls "frank information and imagery about sex", so everyone is, naturally, quite excited.
"I'm looking forward to seeing visitors' reactions," says Richard Sabin, senior curator of the museum's mammal group, from whose collections a number of specimens – including a red deer stag, a hyena, chimpanzees and Guy the gorilla – have been selected for display. "They'll have seen animal courtship on television, but nothing quite as, um, graphic as here. It'll get them talking, certainly. What we hope is that it wipes away the whole thing about this being a taboo subject. Because, of course, nothing could be more natural."
Curators at London's Natural History Museum describe the weird, inventive and downright devious sex on display in the new Sexual Nature exhibition
WARNING: contains graphic details about animal intercourse
Link to text:
Erica McAllister is excited (perhaps, in the context, not the most felicitous choice of word, but never mind. She's passionate, too, but that's not much better). "Flies," she enthuses, "are the best, because they're everywhere, and they do everything. They get up to the craziest stuff. Amazing genitalia. And some wild strategies."
Downstairs in the Natural History Museum's magnificently arched Jerwood Gallery, staff are (as it were) mounting Sexual Nature, a new exhibition exploring the diverse and often startling sexual and reproductive behaviour of animals (or, as the museum's posters coyly put it, "nature's most intimate secrets"). It's the museum's first adult exhibition, aimed at those over 16, and containing what the same publicity calls "frank information and imagery about sex", so everyone is, naturally, quite excited.
"I'm looking forward to seeing visitors' reactions," says Richard Sabin, senior curator of the museum's mammal group, from whose collections a number of specimens – including a red deer stag, a hyena, chimpanzees and Guy the gorilla – have been selected for display. "They'll have seen animal courtship on television, but nothing quite as, um, graphic as here. It'll get them talking, certainly. What we hope is that it wipes away the whole thing about this being a taboo subject. Because, of course, nothing could be more natural."