{"id":10920,"date":"2026-04-10T13:50:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T20:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=10920"},"modified":"2026-04-10T13:50:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T20:50:26","slug":"ooops-no-zoology-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2026\/04\/ooops-no-zoology-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Ooops, no zoology yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

A day in the life of a historical novelist often involves research showing you made a mistake. Or in this case, two.<\/p>\n

I wanted a scene where my character meets a girl in a place of intellectual discovery. I chose the London Library. Ooops \u2014 entrance was by membership only, and he is too poor to be a member.<\/p>\n

So instead, I envisioned the scene, set in 1882, taking place in the newly opened Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had a bit of trouble finding a floor plan, and I wanted my characters to walk through several galleries.<\/p>\n

On this map, which I later discovered was made in 1905, I found a fish gallery and wrote the scene.<\/p>\n

My character followed the girl from the Shells gallery, got lost because the Starfish gallery doesn’t go through, lost her while she went through Corals, and they both wound up in Fishes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Alamy<\/p>\n

(Yes, this is a watermarked image from Alamy. Such companies make a lot of money copyrighting public domain images because they digitized them.)<\/p>\n

At the display cases in the museum, my character looked at a stuffed pike, and the pike looked back. Trying to impress the girl, he inquired about dogfish, and they found one. He then expounded on how dissection of the dogfish, combined with rabbit and frog, provides all the biology student needs to know about vertebrates.<\/p>\n

But once I discovered the map was 20th century, I needed an older map and began searching the usual places: Internet Archive, Google Books, DuckDuckGo. I found a floor plan for which the Museum wanted to charge me<\/a>. Then I thought to look in my Baedekker guide book (1883). It had no floor plan, but rather a detailed description of the exhibits that ended with this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Uh oh. So I went here<\/a>, to British History Online, one of my favorite sources for London. It had a much better map.\u00a0 And there I found out it’s true: the zoology exhibits wouldn’t have been there in the summer of 1882, or at least not yet open to the public:<\/p>\n

“The building was handed over to the British Museum by the Office of Works in June 1880 and opened to the public in three of its four departments in April 1881: the last (zoological) gallery was opened in 1886.”<\/em><\/p>\n

So now I must see if there’s a fossilized pike and dogfish, otherwise my clever scene won’t work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A day in the life of a historical novelist often involves research showing you made a mistake. Or in this case, two. I wanted a scene where my character meets a girl in a place of intellectual discovery. I chose the London Library. Ooops \u2014 entrance was by membership only, and he is too poor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[84,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10920"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10929,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions\/10929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}