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Insects brought to National Museum of
Wales from Kurdistan region-Iraq
17.5.2007
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May 17, 2007
Two hundred insects collected in Iraq have been
delivered to the National Museum of Wales to be
identified. Beetles, flies and grasshoppers were
among the specimens brought to Cardiff by a small
delegation of curators from the Kurdistan region.
Experts will use their knowledge to aid the Iraqi
efforts to rebuild the country's natural history
collection, which has been destroyed in the war.
The bugs are being classified using the museum's
extensive insect collection.
Helping arrange the visit has been Dr Hassan Dawah,
a Cardiff-based Iraqi professor, who said he
collected around 30,000 insects and fauna which were
lost when the Natural History Museum in Baghdad was
destroyed.
Dr Dawah, who has lived in Wales for many years,
said: "All the specimens which we collected from the
whole of Iraq by Iraqi scientists (and) by all
British and American and German visitors, they were
destroyed."
"I hope very much the Iraqis will be able to rebuild
the collection again."
Museum ambitions
The specimens brought to Cardiff have been collected
in recent years, according to Dr Mike Wilson, head
of entomology at the museum in Cardiff.
"They've been collected by university people and
students in the north" he said. |
More than 200 insects were brought to Cardiff from
Kurdistan-Iraq
There are more than one million insects in the
collection in Cardiff
Photo: BBC |
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The specimens are thought to have been kept in a
small museum space in Kurdistan but the curators
have ambitions to develop a larger natural history
museum.
Honer Othman, from the Salahaddin University in
Erbil, Kurdistan's capital city, is one of the two
natural history experts who travelled to Cardiff.
He said: "We hope a large museum will be
educational, scientific, a tourist [attraction] and
a cultural place to preserve the natural heritage of
Kurdistan and Iraq as a whole.
"All nations and all peoples all over the world
everywhere have their shared responsibility to
protect and conserve nature."
The National Museum of Wales has more than one
million insects in its collection, ranking it among
the top 10 collections in the UK.
Experts in Cardiff will use this along with other
methods, such as their extensive knowledge and guide
books, to match the correct names with the 200
insects.
They will then be returned to Kurdistan where a
duplicate example of each specimen is currently
being stored.
Dr Wilson said: "We're always keen in the museum to
see visitors and to help visitors with problems with
natural history specimens and identification.
"Over the next weeks and months we'll try and go
through them and with our collections here try to
identify them, for them, as best we can."
BBC
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