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Pseudochromis flavivertex Welcome to the NHM Fish Group Electronic Register, a database of over 128,000 records of fishes in the collection of The Natural History Museum. This database is a work in progress. As such, it is a complete set of our registration records but it does not yet contain all the information about the NHM Fish Collection the Fish Group holds in paper format. In particular, only some of the handwritten information in various Fish Group manuscript catalogues has been included to date. Work is in progress to incorporate these sources as funding and resources permit.

It is intended that this database will be updated at monthly intervals in order to keep abreast of the progress in incorporating information from Fish Group manuscript catalogues. All other information concerning NHM Fish Group records and specimens is welcome and will be included during our regular updates.

Solea solea BMNH register numbers associated with specimens in this database are the original numbers assigned, as far as is known. While building this database numerous discrepancies between BMNH registration numbers actually assigned to particular specimens and those published in the literature for those specimens have come to light - in nearly all cases these discrepancies are resolved in favour of the original assignment.

Type specimen designations in this database are as in the Fish Group registration records. These must be treated cautiously and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Lepidocephalus macrochir Information in this database can be downloaded as a text file rather than just as screen dumps. These text files have more information about each specimen than is reported to the screen as a summary of a record. Clicking a download link will produce a plain text format, but an appropriate choice of File Type ( ie - Text file (*.txt) ), in the Save As dialogue available from your browser's File menu, should be made in order to save the file to your disk.

A few words about search strategy

Rasbora johannae Curatorial practice in the Fish Group at The Natural History Museum has not usually included keeping nomenclature up to date. This can make it difficult for inexperienced users to locate appropriate records from among NHM Fish Group holdings, especially if the taxa have complex or extensive generic synonymies. Changes in the termination of specific epithets that accompany generic synonymy can also trap the unwary. It is possible, nevertheless, to find all appropriate records with the right search strategy. The surest way to include all holdings of a taxon is to search on a family. This will obtain all records associated with that family. The drawback is that for large families an alarming number of records will be returned, for instance more than 12,000 records are reported for a search of the Cyprinidae. To circumvent this we recommend a search using family and the root of the specific epithet of the species you are interested in. This will obtain all holdings of that species in the family no matter what genus the specimens were registered in and no matter what termination the specific root was given at registration.

Contacts:

Loan requests and general enquiries:
Database information and corrections: 		   Oliver Crimmen
Darrell Siebert