Parker sent a display of a series of skulls to the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880, which was later reused in the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin. The display used coloured wires and painted bones to show the evolution of the vertebrate skull. Indeed, Parker was noted by a Tuapeka Times correspondent as having a "mania for skeletons...[and] has procured some splendid and interesting specimens of birds and fish." In 1883, Parker obtained a fin whale specimen from Captain William Jackson Barry, who had himself bought and exhibited it in Nelson. The fin whale skeleton is still a central feature of the current Maritime Gallery.