Only half of New Zealand’s roughly 4,000 mollusc species have been seen alive. Now geneticists can decode DNA from shells in museum collections to trace the life histories of extinct or rare species.
Museums across the U.S., including at Harvard University, collected human remains, which were often displayed to the public.
Smith Collection/Gado/Archive Photos via Getty Images
Proposed legislation would identify and protect African American cemeteries. But it wouldn’t cover the remains of thousands of Black people in museum collections.
Behind the scenes, natural history museums store biological samples from the field.
Ryan Stephens
Specimen preservation means researchers don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time they ask a new question, making it critical for the advancement of science. But many specimens are discarded or lost.
Davide Tanasi scans an artifact from the Farid Karam collection.
Davide Tanasi
Davide Tanasi, a digital archaeologist, thinks it’s a pity when historical artifacts are locked away in storage. He’s working to fix this by sharing them as 3D models.
Ready to spatially manipulate 3D bat skulls from the comfort of your own computer?
Shi et al, PLoS ONE 13(9): e0203022
Museums’ collections are a priceless resource for scientists, but they’re not easy to access. Digitizing specimens – like the 700 bat skulls the author studied – is a way to let everyone in.
Museum collections are repositories of specimens and data, including specimens, tissue samples and vocal recordings.
from Wikimedia Commons
Taxonomists are becoming as rare as some of the species they work on, and this puts museum collections and conservation efforts under threat and increases the risk of biosecurity incursions.
With a lot not on display, museums may not even know all that’s in their vast holdings.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
A tiny percentage of museums’ natural history holdings are on display. Very little of these vast archives is digitized and available online. But museums are working to change that.
Brazil’s gutted National Museum now resembles an archaeological ruin itself.
AP Photo/Mario Lobao
It’s a comforting falsehood that once an artifact joins a museum’s collection, it’s safe for eternity. Museums face many foes in the fight to preserve – a lack of funds might be the biggest.
Thylacine joey, from the collections of the Natural History Museum, London.
Penny Edmonds
More than 160 thylacine specimens lie in museum collections in the UK. The sight of their bodies is a shocking reminder of loss.
Unstacked allows us to see what others’ are searching for among the 6 million items in the State Library of NSW’s collection.
Unstacked/the State Library of NSW
A new website allows you to see what other people search for in the State Library of NSW’s vast collection of artefacts – and discover things you’d never think to look up in the first place.
You can ‘walk’ through the Musée d’Orsay in Paris using the Google Arts & Culture platform.
Google Arts & Culture