The Paper Museum, formed by the collector and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), contains more than 200 watercolours of birds, ranging from song-birds, caught locally in the environs of Rome, to exotic species from Africa, America and the Indies. The majority of images were made from living, freshly dead or preserved birds, and many of the drawings are of exceptional quality.

Henrietta McBurney Ryan FLS and Carlo Violani FLS, will address how the corpus of drawings, together with the texts which were written to accompany some of them, provide a fascinating insight into the collecting and keeping of birds in early 17th-century Rome; as well as into the state of ornithological knowledge a century before Linnaeus.

Arthur MacGregor, SHNH President and Ian Rolfe, SHNH Past President will also make brief presentations on Other Animals and Minerals and Natural Curiosities in volume B.V.