Buckley collection
Scanning electron microscope image showing the spiral side of a planktonic foraminifer from Challenger station 280 in the south Pacific. This species evolved in Middle Miocene and is still living today.
Henry Buckley worked at the Natural History Museum for much of his life as a curator in the Mineralogy Department. His curatorial work focused on the ocean bottom deposits collection. From this he developed a research interest in the taxonomy of planktonic foraminifera. He published relatively little (important exceptions are Shackleton et al. 1973 and Buckley and Johnson, 1988) but he amassed a large collection of planktonic foraminifera slides and metadata over the course of his career.
His meticulously curated collection encompasses material from all over the globe and represents a potentially valuable resource for the study of the effects of global change on recent foraminifera.
Details
Organisms included:
Planktonic foraminifera
Buckley collection slides - species information PDF (31.0 KB)
Geographical location covered:
The collection encompasses material from all over the globe.
Timespan covered:
- Collection dates range from the 1870s (HMS Challenger) till the 1960s.
- Approximately a third of the collection comes from plankton samples collected from surface tows in the 1950s and 60s.
Collection location:
Palaeontology Department at the Natural History Museum, London.
Curation and collection management
Preservation and storage:
The collection is housed in two large cabinets and bookcases. The modern part of the collection consists of:
- 1,500 slides from 260 samples.
Each slide contains numerous specimens of one species from one sample. - 71 faunal slides.
These can be indicative of environmental, temperature, geographical and ontogenetic variation. - 4,200 thin sections of ocean bottom deposits and sample washings from sample locations corresponding to the slide collection.
- Approximately 10,000 scanning electron microscope micrographs.
These are organised taxonomically in over 100 books. Each micrograph can be cross-referenced with the rest of the collection.
Curation:
Each slide is well curated with:
- collection locality details (latitude, longitude, cruise and station numbers)
- type of sample (tow, core, dredge)
- depth
Database information:
A complete catalogue of the slide collection is available as an Excel spreadsheet. Notes on the organisation of the spreadsheet are given in a separate sheet within the Excel file.
Complete Buckley collection database Excel (91.5 KB)
Associated collections
The Mineralogy and Palaeontology Departments hold large collections of ocean bottom deposits and residues from the same locations where many of the specimens on slides come from.
In many cases, research cruise station numbers from the Buckley collection database can be cross-referenced with corresponding bulk samples in the residue collection and ocean bottom deposit database.
Ocean bottom deposit collection
Contact information
Clive Jones
Palaeontology Curator
Natural History Museum, London
Email
Database
- Complete Buckley collection database Excel (91.5 KB)
Excel files
If you are unable to open any Excel file on this page, please email the project coordinator Jeremy Young to request the document in another format.
Toolbox
References
- Buckley, H A, Johnson, L (1988) Late Pleistocene to Recent sediment deposition in the central and western Mediterranean. Deep Sea Research, 35(5), 749-766. doi:10.1016/0198-0149(88)90028-3
- Shackleton, N J, Wiseman, J D H, Buckley H A (1973) Non-equilibrium isotopic fractionation between seawater and planktonic foraminiferal tests. Nature 242, 177-179. doi:10.1038/242177a0