Oxford University Museum of Natural History

See the owls (mentioned below) in large ("L").

Gosh, long and varied (and very tiring) day...
My day started off in a familiar-feeling place: the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I was visiting a supervisor to discuss a possible project: it would involve comparing the anatomy of a group of crustaceans using a scanning electron microscope (SEM). That sounds seriously cool, but the problem is that it is competing with an alternative project which'd involve bird photography (still photography to identify subjects captured by a post-triggered high-speed video camera). So it is SEM and the anatomy of crustaceans, or high-speed video and still photography to study the aerodynamics of bird flight. I have to decide between the two. HOW?! I'm leaning towards the birds... Watch this space.

ANYWAY, back to the museum: this is the main entrance. The doors are actually closed at the moment as the museum is being renovated (well, its roof/ceiling is). BUT, the point of my image is in the details. Notice the ornate engraving around the door frame; look at the innermost layer, and notice rough engraving at the right, and no engraving on the left. Hmmm; what's that all about?
Well, the whole museum is like that: the window surrounds and door surrounds were all meant to be engraved, but very few are. The front of the museum is totally asymmetric in this regard, with engraving around 5 of the windows on the left hand side, and engravings on 3 on the right hand side (not 3 of the 5 either...). I'll take a photograph of the whole façade another day!
It turns out that there was a lot of conflict between the university and the stone masons (a pair of men; brothers if I remember correctly)... They started work, and then tensions developed. It reached a deadlock and in the end the masons either had their contracts terminated, or quit. I can't remember the exact details (I was told the story in detail when I had my museum induction perhaps 6 years ago...), but I do remember the end of the story, which is the best bit. Back to the main entrance: the innermost engravings were the last ones that the engravers performed, and took place overnight once the engravers' contracts had ended. They returned to the museum under cover of darkness and started to engrave owls all around the doorway as they thought that the dons were just fuddy old owls sitting around disconnected from the world, and they wanted to immortalise their view in stone. They were cut short so only began the owls and didn't finish them, but they remain there unfinished like engraved graffiti. Apparently it isn't advisable to mess with people whose opinion can be immortalised in stone.

p.s. I so hope that it is all true! I'll have a dig and see if I can find out more.