London

In a six-month exercise that will provide an important fillip for systemic biology, London's Natural History Museum has started moving its collection of over 20 million zoological samples from storage into a new, purpose-built public archive.

On show: staff at London's Natural History Museum move a 12-foot oarfish to the Darwin Centre.

The first specimens being transferred to the £27 million (US$39 million) archive are the museum's 'spirit collection' of fish, reptiles and invertebrates stored in alcohol. Many of these were brought back from Charles Darwin's five-year voyage on the Beagle in 1831, and others were collected on Captain James Cook's Endeavour expedition in 1763.

The collection includes rays, komodo dragons and tuatara lizards, the last survivors of a group previously considered to have become extinct at the same time as dinosaurs. Many of these specimens will be going on public display for the first time.

The transfer will provide an opportunity for the museum to compile an electronic database of its specimens, in line with efforts to build up a global computerized catalogue of the specimens currently sitting in jars and display cases across the world (see previous story).

But a global computerized catalogue is some way off, museum officials say. “There is a drive to get some conformity but it will be a long time before those kinds of standards are agreed,” says Paul Henderson, director of science at the museum. “That would be just too labour intensive at the moment because too many institutions have their own systems.”

The London museum is making an effort to standardize species names, however, and is trying to make records about where the specimens came from as accurate as possible.

This first phase of the new archive is expected to open in spring 2002. Phase two will then see the 'dry' entomology and botany collections moved to the new facility, which will be known as the Darwin Centre.

→ http://www.nhm.ac.uk/darwincentre/index.html