Skip to page content

Primary navigation

Collections management

The Zoology Department has over 22,000 square metres of storerooms where 29 million specimens - ranging in size from microbes to whales - are housed.

The majority are based at South Kensington and Wandsworth in London, while the Natural History Museum at Tring in Hertfordshire is home to the world-class research and collections of the Museum's Bird Group.

Preservation and arrangement of the collections

To allow efficient retrieval the collection is arranged, where possible, in systematic order. The material is preserved in diverse ways, including:

  • wet-preserved in alcohol
  • skins
  • skeletal material
  • mounted skins and articulated skeletons
  • eggs
  • microscope slides
  • scanning electron microscope stubs
  • frozen tissue
  • video

These present a range of challenging curatorial problems.

Collections management objectives

The collections management objectives of the Zoology Department are to:

  • Maintain the zoological collections of the Natural History Museum as a relevant and comprehensive research infrastructure of world importance.
  • Develop the infrastructure so that the range of the zoological collections is enhanced and maintained for future generations.
  • Continue to provide national and international access to the specimens and knowledge contained in the collections.
  • Maintain and develop the scientific scholarship and expertise of the departmental staff who research and manage the collections.

Curation teams

The maintenance and development of our zoology collections is undertaken by a team of collections management staff.

For administrative purposes, the Zoology Department comprises 5 curation teams:

  1. Mammals
  2. Birds
  3. Amphibians, reptiles and fish
  4. Higher invertebrates
    Mollusca, Bryozoa and Entoprocta
  5. Lower invertebrates
    Annelida, Cnidaria, Crustacea, Echinodermata, free-living Nematoda, Parastic Worms, Porifera and other invertebrate phyla

Each team is led by a collections manager and has 3 or 4 curators. Each curator is responsible for a specific taxonomic area of the collection.

Print version
Bookmarks

Collections management staff

The Zoology Department collections management staff are responsible for fostering the preservation, accessibility and responsible use of our collections and associated data for education, research and exhibition.

This includes managing all aspects of curation, specimen conservation and specialist taxonomic knowledge.

Curators

A curator is a member of the collections management team. Their primary role is to acquire, enhance, document and care for the physical and intellectual access to the specimens in the Zoology Department’s collections.

They achieve this through identifying and organising specimens according to specific recommendations laid down in the scientific taxonomic and collections management literature.