We had a curious donation the other day - a well-dressed gentleman came in bearing a heavy plastic tub full of ice and one sadly-deceased echidna. He had found the echidna's body on the road when driving. He hadn't wanted to leave what was an almost-perfectly intact specimen for the crows to eat, thinking that the Museum might have a use for it.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Given that many carrion-eating birds are killed by cars whilst dining on previous roadkill victims, this was probably not a bad move! Sadly, according to an echidna monitoring group, one in five sightings of an echidna is of one killed on the road. The spines of an echidna, which are actually modified hairs, are sharp and strong enough to pierce a car tyre - not that this really helps the echidna.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Our Collection Manager came to collect the echidna, remarking as he did so that he wasn't able to tell us whether it was a male or a female, as unless the echidna has young in her pouch, they are fairly indistinguishable on the outside. Australian Echidnas are one of the few species belonging to the order of monotremes. Two species of echidna and the platypus are the only egg-laying mammals, or, as one young visitor to the centre described them, "animals dat lay eggs and boopfeed their babies!" They have other traits that distinguish them from other mammals, including their lower body temperature, slow metabolism and relative longevity.

That is, unless they try to cross a road.

A curious donation-offer was delivered to Melbourne Museum's Discovery Centre, today, namely a vintage handbag built from colour-coordinated emu feathers:

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria

The prospective donor explained that he'd found the item at a church fete, once, and gotten himself a bargain. My only thought was: "when and where was this stuff fashionable?" The poor bird...

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria

One of our loveliest tasks at the Discovery Centre is dealing with donation offers to Museum Victoria's collection. Today we were offered a rather marvellous poster from 1948 which inspired waves of immigrants to Australia after the War. A mood worth recalling during the gloom of the GFC? 

1948 immigration poster  Source: Stephen Morgan

I just took a phone call from an employee of Melbourne Airport asking if the museum would be interested in acquiring a specimen of a Brown Falcon.

Apparently, in a match of falcon versus plane, plane won.

And museum scored a nice study skin.

Falcon really lucked out.

Photo: John Broomfield  Source: Museum Victoria

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria

The collections of Museum Victoria partly depend on donations received from members of the public, and generous Victorians are often seen visiting the Discovery Centre with offers of all sorts of things - owls, rocks, shoes, skulls... It's one of the nicest parts of our work, here, getting to see these curious objects, and helping possible donors make contact with our curators whose job it is to decide if they will become public property.

This morning at the Immigration Discovery Centre a couple showed me a beautiful tablecloth they'd received as a wedding gift in 1964. The groom's sisters had sent the hand-embroidered cloth from Slovenia to Australia along the same route that he himself had travelled fourteen years previously; they'd done the needlework themselves.   

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria 

The tablecloth got me and the visitors talking about life in Melbourne back in the '50s. The woman said: "it was a different place, then." Her husband added: "they needed a hell of a lot of interpreters."