Making it part of the collection

Every year, thousands of specimens are collected and brought to the Museum to be studied, preserved and looked after in the collections. Once a specimen has arrived at the Museum, it needs to be prepared, identified and labelled.

Many of the specimens are fragile and need to be handled as little as possible, whereas others are unstable and sensitive to changing light and moisture conditions. So, specimens are preserved and this is done in many different ways. No method will keep every characteristic of an organism in its original state but the aim is to preserve as many of the key features as possible.

Watch these videos, which highlight some of the ways specimens are prepared for our collections, such as plant mounting, pinning and slide preparation.

Plant mounting

Felipe Dominguez-Santana, who works as a herbarium technician in the Museum’s Botany Department, talks us through the process of plant mounting in this video.
Pinning beetle specimens

Watch Deborah Denovich, scientific preparator at the Museum, as she demonstrates how beetle specimens are prepared before they can go into the collections.
Slide preparation

In this video research assistant Zoe Adams explains how specimens are mounted on to slides to be examined under a microscope.