The UCMP Invertebrates Collection includes over 31,000 catalogued specimens! Corals, crabs, bivalves, snails, ammonites… both fossil and recent — if it doesn’t have a backbone, it’s in this collection. I am a UCMP and Integrative Biology graduate student and have been assisting with curation of the Invertebrate Collection. I catalogue and label specimens, process loan requests, manage the Invertebrates Collection database, curate private collections that are donated to the UCMP, and do numerous other small tasks. This might sound tedious, but I really enjoy the process of curation and am constantly exposed to exciting and unique inverts. Why am I interested in animals without backbones? Well, I was hooked after my first introduction to them during an Invertebrate Zoology course, while I was an undergraduate at Rutgers University. Since taking that class, I have traveled all around the world working on projects that focus on invertebrates, including crustaceans and mollusks in the kelp forests off of Alaska; gastropods, cephalopods, and corals in Bermuda; and bivalves in Thailand. My current research takes me to the islands in the Caribbean Sea and Western Atlantic. (Read more about my research on Caribbean inverts in my previous UCMP blog post!)
The UCMP Invertebrates Collection’s 31,000 cataloged specimens may sound like a lot, but the collection contains far more than 31,000 individual invertebrates. The actual holdings are nearly impossible to accurately estimate because a single specimen number could be associated with 100 individuals. Why do we keep so many individuals of the same species from a single locality? Well, having more than one individual is extremely useful to researchers, especially when they are investigating the morphological variation of a species, because the quality of the preservation can vary from specimen to specimen.
The collection consists of specimens that were collected by museum scientists, faculty curators, and graduate students in the course of their research, as well as specimens that were donated to the museum. Some of the major holdings within the UCMP Invertebrates collection include the USGS fossil invertebrate collection, the Crawfordsville crinoid collection, the Geological Survey of California fossil invertebrate collection, the Lambert modern coral collection. For more information about the special collections within the UCMP, please check out this article written by Jere Lipps, one of our Faculty Curators.
Working as Graduate Student Researcher in the UCMP has allowed me to experience what it is like to be a museum scientist, which is something that I may want to do after I finish my PhD. Also, working in the collections has exposed me to all sorts of amazing fossils that I never would have seen otherwise, including Tessarolax sp. (marine gastropods of the Cretaceous), the strange organisms of the Vendian, and rugose corals of the Permian, to name a few.
Check back to the UCMP blog later this fall and spring for more posts about my work with the Invertebrates Collection!
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