Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Two beautiful Sacred Kingfishers have come into the Discovery Centre in the last few days - sudden and unexplained demises, and both found in local backyards. Their passing won't go unremarked or wasted - they'll go into the ornithology collection, and may be turned into study skins or mounted specimens, for the use of researchers. Artists too, for that matter - we often have illustrators, sculptors and even jewellers coming in to access specimens from our collection for their studies and inspiration.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

The beautiful plumage of these birds would seem to render them too glamorous for a suburban lifestyle, but in fact, these birds are widely distributed throughout Australia, in all but the most arid zones.

Keep an eye out for a flash of brilliant blue and turquoise in your backyard - you may be lucky enough to see one of these beautiful creatures.

Resident Discovery Centre chameleon Leon did something really weird this morning - he just about doubled his size.

Photo: Nicole Davis  Source: Museum Victoria

We know he can flatten himself out to increase his height to look all tough and menacing to rival males or predators, but this morning, he was both twice his size in height, and width. He looked like he was about to explode. Or that mysteriously overnight he had been replaced by an entirely different, larger animal. His colours were also really, really dark.

We panicked, thinking he was ill, and phoned one of his keepers in the Live Exhibits department and told her that he was big and fat - she immediately asked if he was really dark too. We said yes. She told us not to worry about him exploding - apparently he has been known to do this of a morning; he will stretch himself out and puff himself up to maximise the surface area of his skin so he can absorb as much light as possible to warm himself up - presumably the darker he is the more light he will absorb as well.

So, today we learned yet another interesting thing about chameleons... although, fat and puffy isn't exactly how I'd like to look while sunning myself on the beach...

Photo: Nicole Davis  Source: Museum Victoria

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.

The important question of the visibility of the moon will become even more resonant, this weekend, as Muslims around the world look to the skies for a glimpse of the lunar sliver that will signal the end of Ramadan.

This morning I was on the telephone to a devout man in the "naked eye tradition" - those who will only end the fast when the moon has been spotted - who wanted clarification of the moon's rise and set times on the website of Melbourne's Planetarium. Where should he look? When will it rise? At another (American) website a dismal-looking black square signified invisible moons until halfway through the weekend, but the man on the phone insisted that he could see the hint of reflected light, on his own screen, "like a reversed C." I said: "you look with the eyes of faith..." 

Photo: James W. Young  Source: NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

Īd mubārak!

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria

On Thursday, Melbourne Museum's Discovery Centre hosted a group of young art students along with a number of marine birds. The birds were set up on tables across the centre for the inspection of the students of Torquay College doing a cool program run by the Geelong Gallery which involved drawing things realistically by looking and copying. They'd already been upstairs to sketch the blue whale...

We were impressed not only by the final results (I wish I could draw!) but the quietness and concentration displayed by the budding artists - never before had we seen so many children so still, with only their wrists and pencils moving.

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria