Museum's stamp of approval

An Post has issued a stamp to commemorate 150 years of the Natural History Museum's residence at Merrion Street in the centre of Dublin. The building is currently closed to the public following the collapse of a staircase during the summer, and a major restoration of the facility is planned. But what can a museum collection of stuffed, pickled or pinned animals offer to modern science?

Plenty, according to Nigel Monaghan, keeper of the natural history division at the National Museum of Ireland.

The public exhibitions are steeped in nostalgia and provide informal education, he says, but the real scientific meat lies behind the scenes in a vast repository of two million specimens, and recent techniques like DNA analysis are only starting to unlock their mysteries.

Science was at the core of the museum's origins in the 1790s, says Monaghan, when the Dublin Society bought a reference collection rich in geological specimens to help spark an Irish industrial revolution.

The collection continued to grow and finally settled in Merrion Street in 1857, and the Victorian-style layout has altered little over the last century. "To many people it's static and dusty and doesn't really change, and that's one of the charms. It's probably one of the very few interiors of Ireland that hasn't changed in 100 years, so nostalgia is a big part of what people come for."

But behind the scenes, in a separate facility, lie millions of specimens that are available to scientists. And after decades of being out of fashion, museum collections are popular for research again, thanks to the advent of new techniques, in particular genetic analysis.

"A big research area that's proving quite productive is the extraction of DNA from various Irish mammals, and trying to work out where did they come from and how did they get here after the Ice Age. It's an important area of research when you are trying to protect and preserve habitats and species," he says.

The museum, which underwent a safety audit following the accident last July, received €15 million under the National Development Plan for a major refurbishment that will improve public access and add more educational facilities.

"But we are not planning to get rid of the display cases or the whale or anything that people care passionately about, it's a restoration project," says Monaghan.