Wriggle! The wonderful world of worms

What a good talk we had last night from Katie Mortimer Jones on the topic of Bristleworms and its certainly made me want to go and visit the exhibition at the museum

Katie gave us an introduction to worms at the beginning and it was fascinating to see yet another link to our history we are celebrating this years because one of the other of the three subclasses of Clitellata are the Hirudinea which are the leeches and are the source of the anti-coagulant Hirudin. This was discovered by Prof. John Berry Haycraft D.Sc., F.R.S.E. (1859-1922) our 34th President

She then explained in detail the many other forms of the bristle worms and whilst I knew they had some beautiful forms I was not aware of many aspects of the diversity and biology of them and it was really good to be learning about them from someone who is obviously a real global expert in them

(Picture of Hermodice carunculata Bristleworms by “prilfish”  Used under licence)

All in all a fascinating talk and one that really interested the members who were present with a lively discussion section at the end. 

Andy Kendall

25 Presidents online

As part of our 150th year celebrations I have been reading about and extracting information about our former presidents

I have now reached the milestone that the first 25 Presidents are now on-line and available to read on The Presidents Page

You can read about: -

• The President who founded the Library
• The President who worked out how to stop coal dust exploding
• The President who campaigned for sewage to be treated before being put into the Severn estuary
• The President who completed the first Flora of Glamorgan (with a lot of help from his daughter who also became a President in due course)
• The President who was the first Chancellor of the University
• The President who found the first Welsh Dinosaur remains
• The President who beat Marconi to the wireless experiments at Lavernock
• The President who designed the Old Library and thought he should have designed the town hall and the museum 
• The President who was an expert on the brewing of sake
• The President who was one of the first up the Matterhorn
• The President who repaired an eye with an electromagnet

and many more fascinating facts 

As well as these first 25 there are the pages about some of our later presidents which were created for the exhibition at the Cardiff Story museum and are still on-line, and as I felt it was only right a brief summary about myself

(A word of warning the links at the bottom of the pages do not take you forward and back properly. I will be revising all of these once the exhibition is closed and I can do a tidy up not worrying about the pages we put live for the exhibition)