Channel-billed toucan Ramphastos vitellinus from
South America
The National Museum of Ireland � Natural History on Merrion Street, Dublin, is familiar to many as a Victorian 'museum of a museum' which has changed little in a century. The museum behind the scenes is very different, but only the staff and researchers working on the extensive collections get to see what goes on. With over two million specimens in storage, the preparation of catalogues is a critical part of museum curation. The latest catalogue to be completed covers the non-passerine birds
(www.ucd.ie/zoology/museum/index.html).
This includes most bird species apart from the perching birds familiar from your bird feeder. In addition to the two thousand mounted birds on display in the public gallery, there are about 15,000 study skins in the research collections. This catalogue covers about half of the total collection. A number of rare and extinct species have been uncovered during the project, including an Indian forest owlet
Athene blewitti,
which was last confirmed in the wild in the 1880s. The specimen in The National Museum of Ireland � Natural History in Dublin is significant because some of the other five specimens surviving in museum collections had their locality data faked in the 1940s and the Dublin specimen reveals the true location where the species was last seen.
The bird catalogue is part of a project on museum collections in collaboration with the Department of Zoology in University College Dublin. This CoBiD partnership (Collections-based Biology in Dublin) aims to increase awareness of the museum's collections among students, staff and researchers in the university. One of the features of this partnership has been an innovative course module for final year students in museum methods, which received a President's Teaching Grant in March 2004. The museum and university were housed side by side for sixty years but, since the move to Belfield in the 1970s, the links between the university science departments and museum have weakened. The CoBiD projects aim to strengthen those links through sourcing specimens relevant to current research in the Department of Zoology and identifying potential research projects using museum collections.
Contact: Nigel Monaghan,
Keeper, Natural History Division, National Museum of Ireland,
Merrion St., Dublin 2.
Tel: +353-1-6777444;
E-mail:
[email protected]
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