Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
We have completed digitising the Museum’s birdwing butterfly collection. Images of more than 8000 specimens have been released onto the Museum’s data portal for anyone in the world to access. This digitisation project has enabled us to gather accurate information about what we have within our collection and this new online resource will support conservation plans to protect endangered species for the future.
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.
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”
The Birdwings butterfly collection contains many interesting specimens and species that have captured the fascination of naturalists over centuries including well known collectors Lord Walter Rothschild and Alfred Russel Wallace. Continue reading “Digitising some of the most endangered butterflies on Earth | Digital Collections Programme”
Over the past year the digital collections team have worked on incredibly varied projects across multiple collections in the Museum. Continue reading “Digitising the Collection in 2018”
October 22 – 28, 2018 is International Open Access Week during which collections and educational institutions will be discussing the benefits of giving open access to their data. Continue reading “Open Access Week 2018 | Digital Collections Programme”
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”
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”
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”
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.
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”