When Herbert Wernham died, he left – surely against his better judgment – a curiously personal archive. Wernham was a botany curator in what was then, nearly 100 years ago, the natural history section of the British Museum. He was not good with money, colleagues recalled. He had greater success with women. We know this because he recorded all his “conquests” in alphabetical order in a card index. The lucky girls weren’t just named. On each card was a neatly pinned sprig of pubic hair. “Once a curator, always a curator,” muses Richard Fortey in Dry Store Room No 1, his affectionate portrayal of the institution in which he spent his working life.

Having retired in 2006 as the Natural History Museum’s senior paleontologist, Fortey sets out to lead us through its physical and social labyrinth. He sneaks us in behind the scenes with all the glee of a small child seeing for the first time the museum’s iconic Diplodocus skeleton (actually a cast) in the central hall. The various awards that this eminent scientist has won and nearly won (his last book, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize) have not gone to his head. His erudition is underpinned by the endearing humility that characterises all the best scientists; they know that they are merely scratching the surface.

Fortey is frankly nostalgic for the old days, when curators were hired only if their handwriting was up to scratch – before classification labels were churned out by computer – and when the museum’s galleries were full of lovingly polished wooden display cases in which specimens were arranged in rows, with little explanation. He laments that many visitors today fail to see what is in front of their eyes, from the paintings on the ceiling of the main hall to the label explaining that one of the ichthyosaurs probably died in childbirth.

The remarkable has become unremarked, he comments. When he talks about the passing of time – of how our natural history has made us what we are – you can almost hear him sighing.

Linking the macrocosm of the museum to the microcosm of our individual selves, he suggests that we are all collections of facts and events that we curate through memory, tidying and ordering the jumble of our lives into shape, tucking away the less noble moments into inaccessible corners. Then he dazzles us with the sheer size of the museum’s collection (three floors of fossils alone), the majority of which is not on public display. There are strange little staircases and locked doors – it would be all too easy to get lost in the building for ever. Which is essentially what happened to Fortey and his colleagues, past and present.

An odder bunch you could never wish to encounter. These curators are exceptional people, fabulous geeks dedicated to the most obscure branches of study of fossils, minerals, animals, plants and insects. Here’s a man with an eye patch, reconstructing a badger; here’s someone observing a dead creature being eaten by maggots. They have all been working for so long on one tiny detail of creation that some of them have come to resemble their objects of study: the small-mammals man with the twitchy, vole-like manner, the bee man who wears furry jumpers, the butterfly man who is fond of brightly coloured paisley waistcoats.

Their Victorian predecessors were extraordinary polymaths. Edward Heron-Allen was a violin maker, a Persian linguist, a novelist, a historian and a world authority on the family of single-celled organisms called foraminifera. Mervyn Herbert Nevil Story-Maskelyne was keeper of the mineralogy department in 1857. As well as starting off the museum’s meteorite collection, he continued working as an Oxford professor, and went on to become an MP and a pioneering photographer. Are we lesser people today, Fortey wonders, or do we expect less of ourselves?

He is always authoritative, but that doesn’t stop him grabbing the reader’s attention any which way: “Laying out a plant for pressing is like laying out a corpse before a wake.” And the beauty of the book is that – just like a museum – you can visit the different sections in any order you choose, lingering in the places that most take your fancy. The Dry Store Room of the title is a basement area filled with desiccated specimens – a giant sunfish with a “silly little mouth out of proportion to its fat body”, the shells of gigantic tortoises, boxes of human remains. “It was rumoured that it was also the site of trysts,” he observes, “though love in the shadow of the sunfish must have been needy rather than romantic.”

For all the personalities who walk in and out of its pages, the book’s protagonist remains the natural history itself. There are so many wonders in store. My favourite is a mineral called proustite, which can never be put on display – it is a compound of silver, arsenic and sulphur that forms as blood-red crystals that fade, poetically, when exposed to light.

Fortey tells us that several bad jokes were removed from his first draft, but many quirks remain. He can’t resist mentioning, for example, that just beyond the stuffed giraffes outside his office, there was a notice on the wall that read “Departmental cock”. Serious aficionados of natural history might find such asides irritating, but there is plenty of solid science to enjoy, elucidated with brilliant flair.

DRY STORE ROOM NO 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey
HarperPress £20 pp348

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