Discovery collections

Details

Organisms included: 

Bryozoans, cetacean parts, chaetognathes, cnidarians, ctenophores, crustaceans, echinoderms, echiurans, fish, molluscs, plankton, polychaetes, pteropods, sipunculids, sponges, urochordates, foraminifera.

Geographical location covered:

Collections are primarily from the Atlantic, most notably from the southern Atlantic and Antarctic waters.

Plankton samples were collected from the south Atlantic and southern oceans between the 1920s and 1950s.

Timespan covered:

The collections begin with the expedition to the Antarctic in 1901-1904 and continue through the 20th century.

The most prominent research ships that made collections are:

• RRS Discovery (1901-1931)
• William Scoresby (1926-1950)
• RRS Discovery II (1929-1951)
• Discovery (1962)

Location of collections:

All the Discovery expedition collections are located at the Natural History Museum, London. They were moved here in the 1990s when the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (IOS) relocated from Wormley to the National Oceanographic Centre at Southampton.

The foram slide collection and ocean bottom residues can be found in the in Palaeontology Department. All other specimens are housed in the Zoology Department or within bulk samples from the ocean bottom deposit collection in the Mineralogy Department.

Curation and Collection Management

Zoological Discovery specimens are curated separately from Discovery foraminifera.

Zoological specimens

Preservation and storage:

There are an estimated 5 million specimens in the Zoology Department (Rainbow 2005) preserved within:

• 70,612 spirit jars (in an alcohol and formalin mix). There are approximately 5,200 spirit jars of Discovery pteropods.
• 3,623 slides

Every spirit jar is labelled with precise collection information, including:

• station numbers
• dates
• depths

With the exception of 26,542 plankton samples, the collection has largely been split up into taxonomic groups, but generally not at the species level (Rainbow 2005). 

See a complete taxonomic listing of the Discovery collections in the Zoology Department

Database information:

12,888 zoological Discovery specimens (11,633 of which are fish) have been entered into the online Zoology specimen database.

Collection date and station number are not currently available online. However, all collection information is readily available on the jars themselves for all taxa.

Foraminifera

Preservation and storage:

Forams are the only Discovery expedition organisms not housed in the Zoology Department. They can be found in:

1. Mineralogy Department: 
   • 677 ocean bottom deposit accessions (containing samples from multiple stations from 1901-1966)
2. Palaeontology Department:
   • 782 samples (mostly in glass tubes/bottles) of washed ocean bottom residues from 332 stations (1925-1936)
   • Close to 500 slides (generally containing more than one species)
   • A portion of the Discovery foram slides were curated and identified by Edward Heron-Allen and form part of his type slide collection.
   Go to the Heron-Allen slide collection

Database information:

An excel database is available for the Heron-Allen collection that contains a portion of the Discovery foram slides. Information is arranged according to research ship. For each slide, it contains:

• taxonomic information - genus and species
• collection locality - including station number, written geographic locality and depth

Complete Heron-Allen foraminifera type slide collection database Excel (5.6 MB)

There are also databases of the Discovery ocean bottom deposit and residue samples:

Discovery ocean bottom deposit samples database Excel (330.5 KB)

Discovery residues database Excel (134.5 KB)

Supporting information

Scientific reports on the taxa collected during Discovery expeditions are available online.

The Discovery foraminifera reports are in three volumes and contain a detailed list of the species collected - predominately from RRS. Discovery and William Scoresby. All of the listed specimens have been curated as slides and are stored in the Palaentology Department.

Besides the taxonomy, the most important feature of these reports is the station information where particular species were collected.