4,000 YEAR OLD BUG IN A BOG | Surprising find at the Natural History Museum

[Music] foreign hello everybody welcome great to see you all welcome to another pre-history guys pre-history flash as you probably know i'm michael bott yeah i'm rupert soskin he is indeed and uh before we go any further first things first no i haven't been in a fight we just need to clear this uh out of the way i was playing with my dog i was holding his toy too close to my face he made a lunge result teeth meek nose that's enough of that let's move on [Laughter] as i said lovely to see you i hope you're all really really well indeed and so what's the the subject of of tonight's little uh escapade the subject of tonight's escapade well it's something very dear to my heart this is my my other hat of entomology uh coming together with archaeology when this came up in the news it was just had to be done uh it's uh it's the discovery of some uh some beetles actually rather large um longhorn beetles in cambridgeshire um and you know we should show you really but what happened was it's in the natural history museum and max barkley uh was going through specimens and he found these specimens in uh max max barclay is the curator uh to the at the particular department in the natural history museum yeah yeah and and that's enough do you know what the entomology department at the natural history museum the last time i was there which is some years ago they had 30 million specimens um i don't know how many they have now but yeah 30 million specimens and how do you curate that um anyway max came across um the uh it was a bogwood that had been submitted to the museum in the 1970s 1976 i believe yeah was it 76 uh by a farmer in east anglia who he had found this buried wood and with beetles included and he'd brought them to the museum because he was worried that his farm might be infested with uh with boring beetles just a bit just a bit of uh boring geography that those that don't know um uh cambridgeshire that's that bit up to the sort of top rightish there that's slightly paler green interesting thing about uh this area of england it is it is lowlands very much lowlands and so the bit of wood were talking about had been sunk in uh finland in a in a bog essentially hence the title of the of the police sorry to interrupt carry on ripper no apology necessary um uh yeah intriguingly yes that's where my mother and sister younger sister live as well actually but um uh it was because when they were submitted things like carbon dating were okay it was it was doable but it was very expensive and uh and not as accurate as it is now so uh max took the specimens to find out actually how old they were uh expecting them to be you know not that old really but but they came back as just under 4 000 years old so if you're talking about um the fact that well okay here's the thing you see this is ceramics uh cerdo is one of the longhorn wood-boring beetles it's the largest um i think it's pretty sure it's the largest in europe uh that um can you see that rupa i can see that and they are just stunningly beautiful things yep um if you look at the the length of those antennae um we get lots of them down here but not that species particularly um they are here but i've not seen one of those down here um we have similar but not quite the same um but um but the point is that that particular species ceremony number one it is an oak boring beetle it feeds specifically on oak um and the other thing is that it lives in warmer climates than uh than great britain so that told max two things straight away was that number one the climate must have been warmer four thousand years ago and number two over in cambridge here where uh uh now it's just um open uh you know it's completely deforested yeah uh but uh but again the uh you know reinforcing the thing that it was deforested by men because for those beetles to have been submerged there uh then clearly there were trees there where there are precious few now i've got a picture of the actual piece of uh uh wood there yeah which is close up alongside uh the uh the beatles there yeah um actually there's another pick which is probably better there we go there's the piece of the very piece of wood that was bought brought by the farmer to uh the natural history museum and uh from which uh they get the dating and along the side in the box yeah if it gives you a sense of scale then this here uh as long as i can show it to you in focus okay this is yeah i mean it's a it's a dreadful specimen but this is one of the ones that we get a lot of down here um which is uh uh ceramic scopoli if you you can you know you can see the length of the antenna oh my goodness yes i can see the antenna yeah my cheek you get a better idea i mean it's massively long um but this particular beetle that we're talking about is twice as big as this nearly just undertakes yeah yeah yeah i i get i get a fright if i found a beetle that big in england i'd get a fright and i think that's what happened to the farmer i love a beetle yes but the thing is i think the farmer the farmer thought that his uh crops were under threat because the species obviously is not endemic uh to the uk at all so his purpose was i i want to know what's happening because i want to know if i'm going to lose all my crops to some invader that's why he took it to the people are frightened of things like stag beetles so i mean they're just they're glorious creatures i actually look that's a close-up of uh of its face that uh can i make the other way that's it perfect the stunning thing just to be clear folks that is rupert's own photograph yes that's that's my that's that's my book from when i've got my other hand yes he would he would have got away without advertising himself did you know rupert's husking was an entomological photographer and does these extraordinary things took him how many years did it take you to compile that book to do the photographs for that book that was four years well of actual photography it was three years it was four years including you know peripherals but with seven days off in four years yeah it was yeah anyway uh nocturnal shoots as well you guys yeah sort of things that we do but so i think we've nailed pretty much you know what the significance is a warmer be the oaks the question in my mind the question in my mind is are we talking about change of climate that got rid of the oaks doubtful or is it i don't know or what whatever happened i think the the the separate things i think foreign that's what i was going to say anyway but the reason that the beatles didn't uh repopulate elsewhere because you don't you don't find them in britain um you know so it's quite possible that if we dug up uh old wood uh you know from some of the ancient um woodlands around the rest of britain it's quite possible that you'd find them um but it's just not warm enough to support them today which is i think i think it's it's more than that it's one of those lovely stories of uh something lurking in a draw in the depths of the uh natural history museum for 15 years and then the news flash but i i can tell you a lovely story about the natural history museum the entomology department there i haven't been there while max barkley has been the curator i went there with when it was uh a chat called dave carter was still the curator he's long since retired now but um when i had been on holiday down here when i was a kid and i saw a caterpillar that everybody thinks you're exaggerating but it was about uh it was about this long i kid you not it was about eight inches long and it was that fat it was acid yellow with brilliant blue spots on it and each blue spot had a plume of black hairs coming out of it and um i was i don't know eight years old something like that i didn't have uh i had a camera with me but not a camera that i could have taken a photograph like that with anyway so uh i told people this story forever and nobody believed me they all thought i was a kid who was exaggerating i got to the natural history museum and i met dave carter and i was doing a bit of work with him and i said dave while i'm here when i was a kid blah blah and i described to him uh this caterpillar and he said oh saturnia pyri hold on a second and he trotted off down the corridor and came back with a specimen draw with my caterpillar in it you know that's some the joys of serendipity yeah good word [Laughter] now it's another interesting thing to to watch out for though this is you know this is media monitor thing again and we've jumped up here gone live it's a flash pre-history flash it's in the moment we've just discovered this story not so fast it's just been this story has just been released as a bit of pr in prelude to a television program on channel 5 over here about the uh about the natural history mu museum that's i mean that'll that'll be fantastic i don't know exactly when this discovery was made but it wasn't last week put it put it that way so in case anybody spots that and calls us out on it yes it's still exciting though yeah yeah yeah worthy of note yeah well i i i we don't really have much more to to say about this we it's a little trinket of information it was right up our street well right up rupert's street anyway um and uh two interesting stories one about discovery and the other about climate and uh trees in prehistory as you must say about east anglia that over that side of the country there are no there's no stone over there there are no megaliths over there it's the only thing of i'm just going to check myself only thing of note that's that's rubbish but something that may have come to people's attention was the nearest thing to this was seahenge which was uh discovered on the north uh norfolk coast many uh many years ago but despite the parsity you know the paucity of uh stone work and megalithic stuff and this is such a ripe area for prehistory in fact we ought to redress that balance a bit rupert we must make a note to think about things like flag fan and and uh getting people up to speed with the pre-history of the area of the fence in east anglia and that part of britain um in indeed we should um we keep going on about megaliths but um there is so much to talk about yeah and we call we could uh talk about angles and jutes and um invaders from the across the sea in post-roman times but i don't think this is quite the place here anyway thank you folks thank you for being with us i see that a few more joining at the tail end but i'm afraid it's time for us to wrap up really if you've not uh i've seen obviously a lot of our good friends from patreon in in the chat here but if you're new to please take a moment to have a look at our our patreon page and think about drawing joining our patreon community who have access to loads more stuff hit the subscribe button before we go hit the like button the chat will be available in a few hours uh after this video closes down but in the meantime it's a goodbye from me it's a goodbye for me and see you again next time and if i can find the right uh button to uh to press i'll actually get us out of here cheers folks bye [Music] you

Channel: The Prehistory Guys

Views: 4,087

Keywords: british museum, archaeological discoveries, ancient discoveries, british museum curators corner, mysterious artifacts, entomology, east anglia prehistory, entomology beetles, natural history museum, natural history museum london, natural history entomology, entomology prehistory, the prehsitory guys, rupert soskin, michael bott, prehistory show podcast, big bugs, really big beetles

Id: ZCppcIGlSDs

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021