Heron-Allen slide collection

Details

Organisms included:

Foraminifera (forams)

Geographical location covered:

The collection covers locations from around the globe. It includes specimens gleaned from samples from notable research cruises such as:

• HMS Challenger
• Discovery I and II
• Terra Nova
• William Scoresby
• Goldseeker
• Scotia

Timespan covered:

1873-6 (HMS Challenger) to the 1930s (Discovery expeditions).

Collection location:

Palaeontology Department at the Natural History Museum, London.

Curation and collection management

Curation:

Each of the 740 slides contains more than one species. 

Most - particularly when the specimens were obtained from notable research cruises - have detailed collection information on:

• latitude and longitude
• cruise station number
• written geographic locality
• date

Database information:

A complete catalogue of the slide collection is available as an Excel spreadsheet. It is mostly organised by:

• broad geographic locality (eg North Sea, Mediterranean, Antarctic)
• research ship / cruise name

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

Associated collections

Heron-Allen co-wrote the Discovery reports on foraminifera with Arthur Earland, and his slide collection contains representative foram samples from these expeditions. 

Since the specimens were picked from the Discovery ocean bottom deposit (OBD) collection (677 accessions) and the washed residues (782 samples from 462 stations), many slide specimens have corresponding bulk samples from the same locations which can be used for future analysis.

The same is true for other research cruises represented in the slide collection, most notably:

• HMS Challenger (185 stations, residue collection; 596 OBD accessions)
• Goldseeker (240 stations, residue collection)
• Albatross (127 stations, residue collection; 12 OBD accessions)
• Terra Nova (71 stations, residue collection; 44 OBD accessions)

Ocean bottom deposit collection

Ocean bottom residue collection

In addition, there are 508 residue samples from 450 stations in the Heron-Allen and Earland collection of forams. The majority come from coastal locations around the British Isles and Western Europe, but also from localities off the coast of Africa (Kermiba) and in the Mediterranean. Most of the other specimens in the Heron-Allen slide collection came from these residue samples, which can also be re-sampled for further analysis.