The seaweed forests at the Natural History Museum
We were lucky enough to have the seaweed display to all to ourselves when we visited the Natural History Museum - it seemed that most other visitors were there for the dinosaurs! Specimens were collected from Pembrokeshire and Devon for the exhibit, it was amazing to see the diversity of the seaweeds of the British shoreline displayed together. The array of colours and the shapes made by the overlapping fronds was truly breathtaking.
We have become accustomed to seeing small scale pressed seaweed because of the size restraints of our presses and workspace, so it was awe-inspiring to be able to wander between the displays and see such big specimens at close quarters. Each specimen was carefully dried and pressed for the display, from the huge fronds of Kelp down to to the tiniest leaves of Sea Oak and everything in between.
The algal herbarium at the Natural History Museum is absolutely fascinating, it is one of the largest in the world, with more than 250,000 specimens from around the globe, some of which date back to the 17th century. The collections are being used to provide evidence of which species were present at a particular time and place, this historical record is then compared with which species are present now in order to track the effects of the changes in the British shoreline.
