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Show us your Cabinet of Curiosities or Wunderkammer I’ve been thinking about museums a lot, their beginnings and the roll they play in understanding of our society and the planet. A lot of museum’s started their humble beginnings as one person’s private collection. Cabinets of Curiosity can arguably be seen as an ancestor of the modern day museum. Our own forum also could very well be seen as a museum without geological, physical or social boundaries. For example, we showcase themed collections that are sometimes collaborative and often intentional like the “show us your’’ posts or sometimes more individual in their natures as with member collections with the original poster being the sole custodian. As with museums the forum is a place to share knowledge and to learn/discover in equal measures. So moving on to this post “show us your curiosities or wunderkammer collection’’. As with most museums and private collectors, a verity of different objects can be seen on display. The objects that we collect and display reveal something about the owners. Every quaint item that a person selects and displayed in their home has a part of the owner’s personal or idiosyncratic history. As collectors, we add a value and meaning not only to the things that we choose to collect but also to the items that are destined, given or bestowed upon the next generation. I am interested in seeing your weird and wonderful objects that you keep alongside your fossil collection, anything belonging to natural history (not fossils), geology, historical artefacts and works of art. In fact any object of beauty and interest that is placed in the juxtaposition within your fossil displays. Please provide some information about each object you choose. Finally if possible it would be fun to choose and show one or two objects from a museum collection (not a fossil) that would fit into your fantasy Wunderkammer. My objects 1. Blister pearl in a clam shell from Norfolk coast, UK. 2. Juvenile Meta Menardi orb-weaving spider’s web dusted silver pigment to enhance the web structure and placed behind mirror glass. Ethically collected from a cave in New Jersey. 3. Libyan Desert Glass –created from sand exposed to the thermal radiation of a nuclear explosion. This piece has also been knapped and used as a tools during the Pleistocene period. Polished by the winds and sands of the Sahara desert. There is a piece of Libyan Desert Glass used in the scarab in a piece of jewellery called a Pectoral – found in the tomb of Tutankhamun My fantasy Wunderkammer 4. Witch in a bottle from East Sussex Brighton and Hove . Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford UK 5. Charles Darwin's favourite octopus A common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, collected by Charles Darwin in 1832 off the Cape Verde islands natural history museum London.