Getting Down and Dusty: Using Museum Collections for Scientific Work

Not too long ago, I was a third-year student starting my dissertation topic for the final year of my undergraduate course. I visited two different localities, Yaverland on the Isle of Wight and the beach of Folkestone to collect fossil specimens and undertake geological notes. In both these instances, I used museum collections to support my findings and notes. At Sandown, not far from where I was conducting fieldwork, there’s the Dinosaur Isle Museum. Within the main hall is a large window where the palaeontologists can talk to members of the public, and it’s here where I received a lot of help from their resident palaeontologists. They provided useful resources which I used over the course of writing the dissertation, as well as showing me fossils from within their collection that I had not managed to find during the fieldwork time.

A few months later, I went to Folkestone and had gone out and collected specimens over the course of a week, and wished to use the nearby museum to help identify them and also understand what other species had been found in the area. So, contacting the museum, I managed to get a few days where I could visit the collection and make notes and pictures on their specimens. Laying out boxes and cases, we could go through what the collection has to offer methodically. Collections are meticulously curated with everything labelled for easy identification. Using the collection, I could identify various species from my own fossils which saved a lot of time and effort had I not gone to the museum and looked. As specimens are almost always prepared, or at least made presentable, getting high quality images of them for later use was also not an issue.

Figure 1: A collection of local Gault fossils from the Folkestone Museum, including ammonites, which the author used.

I had not found all the different specimens I had wanted while out on Folkestone beach, so here’s where the collection once again came in useful. Within its drawers and on display were various examples of the rarer items to find, in this case these were marine reptiles, crustaceans, and echinoids primarily. As they are rare to find on the beach, being able to take pictures and make notes on the ones in the collection would greatly enhance my data set and provide additional information for when I sat down and wrote about my results in the dissertation. Not only were the physical specimens useful, but the museum database was also an incredibly useful resource, listing every species name, type, and accession number. Databases can often be printed out, which meant that even when I was no longer physically at the museum, I could still use the database in some capacity by having a printed-out list of all the species and information I could need from them.

Straying away from my dissertation, now, I’ll bring up some other examples of using museum collections that I was fortunate to be a part of. One such example was in Germany, during our final year study tour. We visited a lot of localities and sites during the five working day trip, and one of the final places was the Naturkundemuseum Stuttgart, or State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart. We of course had tasks to do, which we used the public floors to complete, but after that we got an exclusive behind the scenes look at one of their many collections rooms in the basement, and this one was stuffed full of ichthyosaur skeletons, nearing 200 in total. We had another task to do, naturally, but it was a wonderful opportunity to see some of the behind the scenes of the state museum and for me to get a picture with the giant ammonite cast they have! We were also able to ask professionals any questions we had on our minds, so of course I took the opportunity to ask about entering the museum profession, as well as about the collections themselves.

Figure 2: The Stuttgart collection room the author visited. Along the left are racking shelves and on the right are wall mounted specimens of ichthyosaurs.

Earlier that trip, we had visited another museum, the Dinosaurier Museum Altmühltal, also known as the “Dinopark”. It’s a fantastic museum with an amazing nature walk featuring loads of replica lifelike casts of extinct animals from across natural history. Part of our visit was being able to explore the museum, of course, but another part of it was being able to see two parts usually off-limits to the public. Their preparation lab is visible to the public, with a window in to allow visitors to see the lab and anyone working in it. We were allowed to enter the lab, and were given talks by some of the resident palaeontologists and lab workers, as well as allowed to hold a real Tyrannosaurus femur! We could see the backrooms, their collections, as well as some of the items that were not yet reported to the media and public which was very unique!

Figure 3: Author holding a real Tyrannosaurus fragment in the preparation lab at the Dinosaurier Museum!

One final example I’ll use will be from a few years ago, when I undertook a week-long work experience at the Dinosaur Isle Museum. A group of us, around twelve or so, were taught a lot basics about working with natural history including curation, preparation, specimen transportation from field to museum, as well as work in the field itself. However, we were also given a look into their on-site collection and the specimens being worked on. It was just a fraction of their total amount, as much of it is kept off-site in an underground warehouse, however we could see and interact with some of items they had on-site at the museum. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, however, as there are challenges to overcome with using collections. Museums are always very busy with staff undertaking a lot of duties, so sometimes when I went to talk to the palaeontologists at the Dinosaur Isle, for example, they were not always at the museum or free to talk. Indeed, I often waited weeks for replies from palaeontologists or museums when I went to them for questions or resources, as museums are very busy environments so emails can take weeks to be responded to.

From everything above, we can tell that museum collections are incredibly powerful and important tools for everyone from a professional to a casual museumgoer, and it can’t be understated just how valuable of a resource they are. Thousands upon thousands of hours have been put in by staff and volunteers over hundreds of years to keep them up to date, expanded and, most importantly, safe throughout war and peace. By all means, access collections if you need to and where you can, as they’re opportunities that do not arise often, but when you do, make sure you act appropriately, respectfully, and safely within them as if something is lost or damaged it can’t be replaced.

Berengar Needham is currently a student on the MA Museum Studies program at the University of Leicester. He is also a first-class palaeontology graduate from the University of Portsmouth, with a special interest in marine invertebrates and ammonites. This article was originally published by the Geological Collections Group (GCG).