Professor John Simons

For the first time, fish became our companions and a corner of many a Victorian parlour was given over to housing tiny fragments of their world enclosed in glass. The experience of seeing a fish swimming in a glass tank is one we take for granted now, but in Victorian England, this was a remarkable sight. People had simply not...

Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London is the story of Obaysch the hippopotamus, the first 'star' animal to be exhibited in the London Zoo. In 1850, a baby hippopotamus arrived on English shores, allegedly the first in Europe since the Roman Empire, and almost certainly the first in Europe since prehistoric times. Captured near an island from which he took his...