Using mitochondrial DNA to identify the provenance of 19th century Kākāpō skins held in Australia’s oldest natural history collection, the Macleay

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Caitlin Mudge ◽  
Lindsey J. Gray ◽  
Jeremy J. Austin
Keyword(s):  
Mitochondrial Dna ◽  
Natural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Natural History Collection

scholarly journals “Attractive to Strangers and Instructive to Students.” The McCullochs’ 19th Century Bird Collection in Dalhousie College

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Eric L. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Hybrid Origin ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Great Caution ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Thomas Mcculloch

Thomas McCulloch, Presbyterian minister and educator, founder of Pictou Academy, first President of Dalhousie College 1838-1843, established a museum in Pictou, NS, by 1828, including a bird collection. To McCulloch, the order of the natural world instilled in students principles of a liberal education and a model of society. His first collections were sold, but when McCulloch came to Dalhousie in 1838 he started a new collection, hoping to make it the basis of a provincial museum. In this he was aided by his son Thomas, who had been trained as a taxidermist. The younger McCulloch kept and expanded the collection until his death, after which it passed to Dalhousie College. The current McCulloch Collection, mainly the work of Thomas McCulloch junior, seems to exemplify purposes and practices of 19th century natural history. But research shows that the collection has a hybrid origin and must be viewed with great caution as an historical artifact. This is a case study in the difficulty of interpreting 19th century natural history collections without careful examination of their history.

scholarly journals Comparison of Automated Georeferencing Tools Using Insect Collection Data

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonor Venceslau ◽  
Luis Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Average Distance ◽  
Sampling Location ◽  
Reference Dataset ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Google Maps ◽  
Reference Location ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
Insect Collection

Major efforts are being made to digitize natural history collections to make these data available online for retrieval and analysis (Beaman and Cellinese 2012). Georeferencing, an important part of the digitization process, consists of obtaining geographic coordinates from a locality description. In many natural history collection specimens, the coordinates of the sampling location are not recorded, rather they contain a description of the site. Inaccurate georeferencing of sampling locations negatively impacts data quality and the accuracy of any geographic analysis on those data. In addition to latitude and longitude, it is important to define a degree of uncertainty of the coordinates, since in most cases it is impossible to pinpoint the exact location retrospectively. This is usually done by defining an uncertainty value represented as a radius around the center of the locality where the sampling took place. Georeferencing is a time-consuming process requiring manual validation; as such, a significant part of all natural history collection data available online are not georeferenced. Of the 161 million records of preserved specimens currently available in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), only 86 million (53.4%) include coordinates. It is therefore important to develop and optimize automatic tools that allow a fast and accurate georeferencing. The objective of this work was to test existing automatic georeferencing services and evaluate their potential to accelerate georeferencing of large collection datasets. For this end, several open-source georeferencing services are currently available, which provide an application programming interface (API) for batch georeferencing. We evaluated five programs: Google Maps, MapQuest, GeoNames, OpenStreetMap, and GEOLocate. A test dataset of 100 records (reference dataset), which had been previously individually georreferenced following Chapman and Wieczorek 2006, was randomly selected from the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, Universidade de Lisboa insect collection catalogue (Lopes et al. 2016). An R (R Core Team 2018) script was used to georeference these records using the five services. In cases where multiple results were returned, only the first one was considered and compared with the manually obtained coordinates of the reference dataset. Two factors were considered in evaluating accuracy: Total number of results obtained and Distance to the original location in the reference dataset. Total number of results obtained and Distance to the original location in the reference dataset. Of the five programs tested, Google Maps yielded the most results (99) and was the most accurate with 57 results < 1000 m from the reference location and 79 within the uncertainty radius. GEOLocate provided results for 87 locations, of which 47 were within 1000 m of the correct location, and 57 were within the uncertainty radius. The other 3 services tested all had less than 35 results within 1000 m from the reference location, and less than 50 results within the uncertainty radius. Google Maps and Open Street Map had the lowest average distance from the reference location, both around 5500 m. Google Maps has a usage limit of around 40000 free georeferencing requests per month, beyond which the service is paid, while GEOLocate is free with no usage limit. For large collections, this may be a factor to take into account. In the future, we hope to optimize these methods and test them with larger datasets.

scholarly journals Integrating natural history collections and comparative genomics to study the genetic architecture of convergent evolution

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1777) ◽  
pp. 20180248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sangeet Lamichhaney ◽  
Daren C. Card ◽  
Phil Grayson ◽  
João F. R. Tonini ◽  
Gustavo A. Bravo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Genomics ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Convergent Evolution ◽  
Phenotypic Diversity ◽  
Taxonomic Diversity ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Phenotypic Data ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Genomic Studies

Evolutionary convergence has been long considered primary evidence of adaptation driven by natural selection and provides opportunities to explore evolutionary repeatability and predictability. In recent years, there has been increased interest in exploring the genetic mechanisms underlying convergent evolution, in part, owing to the advent of genomic techniques. However, the current ‘genomics gold rush’ in studies of convergence has overshadowed the reality that most trait classifications are quite broadly defined, resulting in incomplete or potentially biased interpretations of results. Genomic studies of convergence would be greatly improved by integrating deep ‘vertical’, natural history knowledge with ‘horizontal’ knowledge focusing on the breadth of taxonomic diversity. Natural history collections have and continue to be best positioned for increasing our comprehensive understanding of phenotypic diversity, with modern practices of digitization and databasing of morphological traits providing exciting improvements in our ability to evaluate the degree of morphological convergence. Combining more detailed phenotypic data with the well-established field of genomics will enable scientists to make progress on an important goal in biology: to understand the degree to which genetic or molecular convergence is associated with phenotypic convergence. Although the fields of comparative biology or comparative genomics alone can separately reveal important insights into convergent evolution, here we suggest that the synergistic and complementary roles of natural history collection-derived phenomic data and comparative genomics methods can be particularly powerful in together elucidating the genomic basis of convergent evolution among higher taxa. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Convergent evolution in the genomics era: new insights and directions’.

scholarly journals The natural history of infantile mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome due to RRM2B deficiency

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nandaki Keshavan ◽  
Jose Abdenur ◽  
Glenn Anderson ◽  
Zahra Assouline ◽  
Giulia Barcia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Mitochondrial Dna ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Mitochondrial Dna Depletion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mitochondrial Dna Depletion Syndrome

Marble Busts and Fish Fossils

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-483
Author(s):  
Elena Canadelli
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
The Public ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
University Of Padua ◽  
The University

The historical catalogs of the museum collections contain a wealth of information for historians seeking to reconstruct their contents, how they were displayed and the ways in which they were used. This paper will present the complete transcription of a draft catalog that was prepared in 1797 for the Museum of Natural History and Antiquities of the University of Padua. Conserved in the university’s Museum of Geology and Paleontology, the catalog was the first to be compiled of the museum, which was established in 1733 thanks to the donation by Antonio Vallisneri Jr. of his father Antonio Vallisneri Sr.’s collection of antiquities and natural history. The catalog was compiled by the custodian of the museum, the herbalist and amateur naturalist Bartolomeo Fabris. It is of great interest because it provides a record of the number and nature of the pieces conserved in the museum at a time when natural history and archeology collections were still undivided. It also provides indications as to how such collections were arranged for display in the public halls of a university at the end of the eighteenth century. Based on this catalog, with additional information drawn from other manuscript and published sources and museum catalogs from the 1830s conserved in various institutes at the University of Padua, it is possible to reconstruct the contents and layout of a significant late 18th-century natural history collection.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document