I took a quick look at our local museum the other day, Putrajaya’s Museum of Nature, or Natural History Museum as it is sometimes called.
There is not a great deal to see. Mostly information about endangered Malaysian mammals such as tapirs, tigers, bears and so on together with stuffed specimens so that kids know what they look like ‘in the flesh’ .
I was more interested in the insect section upstairs where they have a number of old fashioned display cabinets containing somebody’s meticulously mounted and labeled bug collection.
This colourful chap is called tagesoidea nigrofasciata. The common name is Yellow Umbrella Stick Insect or Yellow Fan Stick Insect. These are native to Malaysia and I see they retail for USD55 on My.Bugs.com.
Curiously, each display case had a small bag of moth balls inside. I always though moth balls were intended to protect our clothing from moths rather than to preserve moths from disintegration!