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Remnants of ‘the eighth wonder of the world’ in a Museum drawer |Curator of Petrology

Some rare treasures are hidden within the Petrology collection of the Natural History Museum, and this brunch of a bush, encrusted with sinter, which formed prior to 1886 around hot springs on the shores of the old Lake Rotomahana (warm lake) in New Zealand, is one of them.

Siliceous sinter.BM 1911.1584-1
NHM petrology specimen of siliceous sinter encrusting a brunch of a bush, from White Terraces of Lake Rotomahana.

Read on to learn about the Pink and White Terraces, a natural wonder of the world, regarded by the Māori as a taonga (a treasure), their tragic fate and how specimens in the museum collection are helping current research. Continue reading “Remnants of ‘the eighth wonder of the world’ in a Museum drawer |Curator of Petrology”

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Digitising our jumping plant lice | Digital Collection Programme

Guest blog by Robyn Crowther, Digitiser

After digitising our parasitic lice, we were looking for another microscope slide collection to digitise using the same methodology, having cut down our imaging time for each slide to 14 seconds. So when the opportunity to digitise the beautiful psyllid slide collection arose, we jumped at the chance. Continue reading “Digitising our jumping plant lice | Digital Collection Programme”

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Portraits inspired by data |Digital Collections Programme

canvas ERN
An algorithm produced portraits of Museum visitors made up of digital specimens instead of pixels – zoom in to see the specimens in each image.

On Friday 28 September we took part in European Researchers Night and tried something new with museum visitors. We have been experimenting with recreating photographs that contain digital specimens in place of the usual pixels. Continue reading “Portraits inspired by data |Digital Collections Programme”

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CARAS visits the NHM | London Partnerships Manager

Hanouf El-Awari leading an Investigate session with visitors from the CARAS group

On 14 August 2018, the Natural History Museum welcomed a group from CARAS into the Museum for a special visit. CARAS is a community outreach charity based in Tooting, Wandsworth, who work with people of all ages from a refugee and asylum-seeking background, who live in South-West London.

CARAS had visited the NHM last year, doing a selfie trail. The group of thirty included young children and older adults, some of who were visiting the museum for the first time. The visit on 14 August included a short tour, an Investigate session, and a craft activity.

Continue reading “CARAS visits the NHM | London Partnerships Manager”

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Digitisation of unlikely pioneer’s collection answers key questions in evolution and helps train future scientists | Digital Collections Programme

Henry Buckley (1939-2002) is a relatively unknown pioneer in the world of Foraminifera. Buckley was discouraged from publicising his collection, up until recently this collection wasn’t well known in the micropalaeontological community but all that is changing.

The Buckley collection has been digitised and today is helping Museum PhD students to answer questions on evolution. Yale University also plan to use this collection to train new generations of scientists to identify modern planktonic foraminifera and to help develop automatic recognition software in the future.

Continue reading “Digitisation of unlikely pioneer’s collection answers key questions in evolution and helps train future scientists | Digital Collections Programme”

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A swarm of Madagascan moths to join our online collection| Digital Collections Programme

The Madagascan digitisation team, alongside the 5,700+ specimens digitised during this project.
The Madagascan digitisation team, From left to right: Phaedra Kokkini, David Lees, Alessandro Giusti, Alberto Zilli Geoff Martin, Peter Wing and Louise Allan.

We have finished imaging more than 5,700 Madagascan butterfly and moth (Lepidoptera) type specimens in the Museum’s collection. Continue reading “A swarm of Madagascan moths to join our online collection| Digital Collections Programme”

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4 million digital specimens and counting | Digital Collections Programme

This image of Carl Linnaeus has been created from Museum specimens rather than pixels.
This image of Carl Linnaeus has been created from Museum specimens rather than pixels.

The Museum’s Data Portal has passed 4 million specimens, representing around 5% of the Museum’s entire collection.

The Data Portal was launched in December 2014. In addition to Museum specimens, the Data Portal also hosts 5.3 million other research records and over 100 datasets from internal and external authors.  The Portal is a platform for researchers to make their research and collections datasets available online for anyone to explore, download and re-use.

Continue reading “4 million digital specimens and counting | Digital Collections Programme”