Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
Scientists have found that flowering time in plants can advance as much as 3.6 days for every 1°C the climate warms, but why does this matter?
Continue reading “How are the world’s habitats changing as the Climate warms? | Digital Collections”From California to digitising the Museum’s pollen collection, read about Emma Bonzo’s internship with the Museum’s Digitsation team.
Continue reading “Digitising Pollen: A Museum Studies Placement | Digital Collections”
Our pinned mayfly, stonefly and caddisfly specimens are groups of insects that have life cycles reliant on freshwater. Where these insects are plentiful, they are fantastic indicators of water quality.
Continue reading “Setting our Freshwaterflies Free | Digital Collections”
By Samantha Luciano
Biodiversity biobanks are less well known than their biomedical counterparts, but they represent an invaluable asset for meeting the global health and environmental challenges of our century. Whether they are home to animal, plant or micro-organism collections, these infrastructures contribute to research and development in many fields, including medical and veterinary treatments, breeding and reproduction, environment and conservation, agro-industry and biotechnology.
The major advantage of biodiversity biobanks is the variety of samples and taxa present in these collections: tissues, fluids, whole specimens, cell cultures, DNA or RNA from most of the vertebrate and invertebrate species on our planet.
Continue reading “Biodiversity biobanks: an invaluable resource for the future”
Published by Leonie on behalf of Learning Volunteer & Women in Science Tour Guide Alex Holding
As a taster for the free NHM Women in Science Tours, Learning Volunteers will be sharing blogs on some pioneering women of science. We can learn more about them, their work and share some information about the Museum’s displays and cutting-edge science. Our first venture is Mary Mantell.
Mary Mantell was an active amateur fossil hunter in the nineteenth century. Arguably, she is less well known than her namesake Mary Anning. Mantell’s reputation is also eclipsed by that of her husband Gideon Mantell, a medical doctor, renowned amateur geologist, and palaeontologist.
Continue reading “Highlighting Histories: Women in Science – Mary Mantell”
The Codex Vindobonenis is a Byzantine compendium of pharmaceutical knowledge produced in around 512 C.E.. In this blog, Hanouf Al-Alawi and botany curator John Hunnex discuss their recent project examining the overlooked Arabic and Persian annotations on the plant descriptions included in the work.
Continue reading “Arabic and Persian plant names in the Codex Vindobonensis | Curator of Botany”
Although estimates of extinction rates vary significantly [1], anywhere from losing hundreds to hundreds of thousands of species each year, it is widely acknowledged that we are in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Ensuring we deliver a wide range of conservation measures to protect species is key to halting this decline across all taxonomic groups. A growing area of research is focussing on biobanking as an effective way to deliver this. But what does this mean in practice, how does it work and why is it important?
A brand new scientific paper applies computer vision to over 125,000 of the Museum’s digitised Butterfly collection to understand how animals may respond to climate change.
Continue reading “Data in Action: British butterflies body size changes in response to climate change | Digital Collections Programme”
What are microfossils and why should we care? Sometimes it can be difficult to make the case for a group of fossils which at their largest usually reach just 1mm (although some are actually much larger than this), but microfossils have and continue to play an incredibly important role in many areas of natural science research.
Continue reading “5 things you never knew microfossils were important for”
As part of “Collecting the West”, an Australian Research Council funded research project that is looking at what’s been collected from Western Australia and what these collections tell us about who Western Australians were, researchers Tiffany Shellam (History, Deakin University) and Alistair Paterson (Archaeology, University of Western Australia) studied the NHM petrology collection. One of the project partners is the British Museum, whose relationship to these early collections and shared history with the NHM is reflected in the catalogue code ‘B.M.’ seen on the specimens in these drawers.
Among the old wooden cabinets, storing historical specimens from around the world, they have encountered various early collections from the period 1818-1860.
The inspection of this collection of Western Australian specimens allowed the researchers to understand the reasons for collecting rock specimens and their findings were published in the article “A historical stratum of geological collections from Western Australia in the Natural History Museum, London” in the journal Studies in Western Australian History.
Continue reading “Collecting the West and the NHM Petrology collection | Curator of Petrology”