I found these pictures from the old Valencia Zoo (the link will open article in Spanish), which closed in 2007. It was small zoo with nothing too exotic as far as I could see and at the end seems it was deemed not worthy to be maintained anymore. The quality of the photos is pretty low, but in internet there are not many from that place, so I'll post them anyway for historical reasons in case anybody wants to have an overall idea what was it.
Grey crowned crane (Balearica regulorum), mandarin duck (Aix galericulata), Carolina duck (Aix sponsa) and in the middle, the small ruddy duck (Oxyura jamaicensis) (or less likely hybrid between ruddy and white-headed duck (Oxyura leucocephala))
Greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus)
Ruddy duck (Oxyura jamaicensis)
White-cheeked pintail (Anas bahamensis)
Ruddy shelduck (Tadorna ferruginea)
Ruddy duck (Oxyura jamaicensis)
Canada goose (Branta canadensis) or Cackling goose (Branta hutchinsii)
Difficult to say from this picture, but likely one of these three species: Brown-cheeked hornbill (Bycanistes cylindricus), White-thighed hornbill (Bycanistes albotibialis) or Black-and-white-casqued (or grey-cheeked) hornbill (Bycanistes subcylindricus)
Today I decided to visit the Natural History Museum in London. I've seen it a few times before, but never bothered to take any pictures. It was nice to see again the stuff there, but I couldn't notice the few shortcomings this museum has. First, despite the rich collection of millions of specimens, very few are on display, I've seen much smaller museums having more exponates shown. Second, even if pretty big and spacious building, a lot of that is wasted of souvenir shops, kid's entertainment, restaurants and plainly bad space management, instead of being used to put on display hundreds of thousands more specimens. All in all, shame its made to look like "Disneyland"-style show with section called "Creepy Crawlers" and other bullshit instead of being place where one can see more about the nature. Third, most of the first and second floor and some sections on the ground floor were closed. Reasons being: "Puppet show" for pre-school age children in the shellfish section. And last, despite being promoted as place were one can do some research or find answers of nature related questions, happen that due to the nature and size of the collections, this is not so easy and I am not yet sure if its even possible.
Seeing that I feel sorry for the pitiful condition of the now-day life sciences, but I guess it is simply reflection of the human nature, which makes us more interested in things that can bring us direct benefit and sorting the taxonomy of some obscure insect family is not one of these.
On the bright side, even if not many some of the specimens are exceptionally rare, like full sized Moa model, Sivatherium skull and others. Below I'll post few of the pictures and video clips I took.
H. neanderthalensis life size model. Its said that Neanderthals have some specific differences, like shape of the rib-cage, skull, etc, but I wonder if they actually lay somewhere on the range of the H. sapiens variations
I'd say that a Neanderthal could pass for modern human, which is not so much because of the similarities, but rather, because of the huge variations of the human phenotype.
Australopithecus sediba between chimp and human skeletons. It really looks like something in the middle, body and head ape-like, but limbs are rather like ours.
Knapped hand axes, the age of some of them is up to 0.5 Million years old
Knapped hand axes, the age of some of them is up to 0.5 Million years old
Knapped hand axes, the age of some of them is up to 0.5 Million years old