Welcome to a weird old world

"You'll think this is odd," chuckles Edward Meyer, vice-president of exhibits and archives at Ripley's Believe It Or Not emporium, when I ask about the most peculiar place he's ever been to pick up weird objects for Ripley's 25,000-strong collection housed globally in 30 museums.

"Iowa. They speak the same language but that's about it. I recently went to India and felt more at home there. One man in Iowa has the world's largest collection of matchstick models, about 80 of them."

This is indeed an odd answer from the man who joined Ripley's fresh out of college in 1978, cataloguing the collection of Robert Ripley, the American cartoonist and amateur anthropologist who died in 1949.

Meyer has spent 30 years globetrotting, spotting or picking up twotrunked elephants, bits of Mars, cattle hairballs the size of footballs, chunks of the Berlin Wall, shrunken human heads, two-headed cows, 500-year-old wood carvings with Mary Magdalene on one side and the Devil on the other and people with plants growing inside their forearms.

"Human curiosity draws people to the exhibits," insists Meyer, who was top of the list when his kids' schools in Orlando wanted parents to talk about their jobs. "I prefer the man-made objects because they beg the question, why would someone make this? But it's the mix that makes us unique, we believe we display things you can't see anywhere else." Until now England's had just one Ripley's museum, in Blackpool.

Meyer's excited about Wednesday's opening at the Trocadero in Piccadilly.

Among the 500 quirky bits'n'bobs, including a Mini covered in Swarovski crystals, is the most bonkers thing he says he's seen in 30 years.

"There's a man in Mexico City who paints faces on preserved ants," Meyer explains.

"He's done a royal diorama so London can see Lady Di and Prince Charles painted on to ants."