Author: More than a Dodo

Comings and goings

The summer’s a time of comings and goings in the Museum, and a perfect opportunity for all sorts of people to get a bit of experience of working in a museum. Last week saw the end of a placement for Naomi, a 3^rd year Earth Sciences undergraduate here at Oxford. She has just spent two weeks helping us to catalogue a large collection of North of England minerals. She was fascinated to find specimens of rare minerals from mines and quarries near her home and her student mapping area, both of which are in Cumbria. Many of the mines were still working when the collection was made, but today they are disused and many are flooded or lost.

School student Robert also joined us for a week as part of his school work experience scheme. He spent a day repairing fossils and helping staff spruce up the palaeontology displays. There’s lots of competition for our very few work experience placement opportunities, but we could see why Robert was keen to work in the Museum. He loves geology and is really keen to study Earth Sciences at university – maybe here at Oxford.

Afternoon tea  break gave Robert the perfect opportunity to find out from Naomi what it is like to be an Earth Scientist at Oxford, and indeed what made so many of the staff sitting round the table want to study and make a career in geology. Geology is a subject that can make a big difference to lives, whether prospecting for ores, oil or water supplies, or understanding geo-hazards such as earthquakes and volcanoes. But there’s no doubt about it, working outdoors in the field was a big attraction… and so was working with amazing and rare specimens in a museum!

We’ll be looking forward to following Naomi and Robert in their geological careers.

Monica Price
Assistant Curator, Mineral Collections

Shell-sorters

The mollusc collection at the Museum is formidable, estimated to comprise in excess of 100,000 lots, collected by several notable amateur shell collectors over the last 200 years. Unfortunately, until quite recently, this collection was in a fairly disorganised state. Parts have been catalogued on paper in the past 40 years, but a much larger part was stored away in drawers and boxes, with some unopened for decades…

Over the past ten years, the majority of these extra collections have been sorted into family level; that is, grouped by family classification but not further divided into genus and species.

To take this organisation further, the entire mollusc collection is now being properly curated and the details recorded on an electronic database so that researchers can find and access the material more easily.

Over the past three months, ten hard-working volunteers have given up their time every Monday to help with the current (very
time consuming) stage in the process. Working mainly on marine gastropods, the volunteers first remove the shells from their original boxes or bags and re-package them using modern museum storage materials.

The species names are checked against an online database and updated where necessary. The volunteers then organise each family alphabetically by genus and within genus by species. The final stage in the process is to record the details of each specimen onto an online database and to label the newly-packaged shells. That’s a lot of work.

Thanks to their enthusiasm and great team work, our volunteers have sorted, checked and curated over 8,000 lots of shells and reorganised them into more than 250 drawers. Around 3,500 specimens have been added to the database since March, taking the total number of lots in the mollusc database to nearly 20,000.

Only another 80,000 to go!

Carolyn Lewis, Palaeobiology Technician