The Horniman Museum and Gardens in Forest Hill
(Picture: Emli Bendixen)Bear with me, okay. Phylum and class Rotifera (wheel animacules) are animals that: 1. Are microscopic; 2. Are aquatic, usually found in freshwater; 3. Have a trochal disk with a fringe of cilia that looks like a revolving wheel; 4. Have excretory organs consisting of a pair of nephridial tubes with flame cells; and 5. Have separate sexes.
This is not only the worst intro of my journalism career, this is also one of the cheerful captions in the Horniman Museum’s Natural History gallery, a splendid room in which the display very obviously hasn’t been updated since the Sixties.
