Reading this week about the fate of the Natural History Museum – which has been closed for refurbishment since September 2024 and does not yet have a rough date for reopening – I had cause to reflect, as I often do, on my favourite museum exhibit of all time.

As with any relatively cultured and well travelled person, I have visited (not to brag) quite a lot of famous and important museums over the years. I’ve seen the Ishtar Gate of the ancient city of Babylon at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. I’ve seen the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Sculptures and the bust of Rameses the Great at the British Museum. I have seen Michelangelo’s David in Florence and the Venus de Milo in Paris and the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Mykola Syadristy Museum of Microminiatures in Kyiv, I have seen, through a microscope, a preserved flea, all but invisible to the naked eye, on the end of whose dangling hind legs were affixed two tiny and impossibly ornate golden shoes.

But none of these objects resides anywhere near as close to my heart as a certain artefact that once filled me with giddy delight as I gazed into a cabinet on the upper floor of our own Natural History Museum: a dead tarantula in a small plastic container on whose transparent lid was visible, in raised print, the message: “MICROWAVE OVEN SAFE.”

I’m not sure how long this tarantula was on display in the museum. I first saw him in 2016, on a visit with my then-toddler son, and was so intrigued and amused by it that, on a handful of subsequent visits over the years, I made a point of checking to see it was still there – which it was. The tarantula in the microwave-safe container was charming........

© The Irish Times