Millions of Animals Preserved at U.K. Museum

Bijal P. Trivedi
National Geographic Today

February 19, 2003

London's other collection of crown jewels resides in the recently opened Darwin Center of the Natural History Museum.

This biodiversity treasure vault contains more than 22 million creatures—the kind that can be preserved in alcohol, including fish, plankton, seaweed, corals, giant squid, frogs, and sharks. The so-called Spirit Collection houses samples of all these creatures so that scientists can classify them and understand the evolutionary relationships among them—a science called systematics.

Tall cylindrical jars hold a moray eel from the Galapagos Archipelago, a parrotfish from Tahiti and a South American swift lizard, all collected by Charles Darwin on his voyage of the HMS Beagle.

A more recent contribution is a deep-sea oarfish—it can grow up to 24 feet (7 meters) in length, the longest bony fish in the world—that washed up on a beach in England. A man walking his dog discovered the oarfish, cut it up with a saw, and delivered it to the center.

"It's so rare—he did the right thing cutting it up and bringing it right to us," said Oliver Crimmen, the curator of fishes.

"The job of finding new things is far from done," said Crimmen. "There is a misconception that we know what's out there, but the more we look, the more we find. For that reason we need to keep looking."

Pickled Creatures

The 22 million specimens in the Spirit Collection are stored at 13° Centigrade (55° Fahrenheit) in 3,500 steel gray cabinets on seven dim fluorescent-lit floors. The 25,000 shelves in these cabinets stretch more then 17 miles (27 kilometers). "You have to like walking to be a curator here," said Crimmen. Crimmen has held his position for 29 years.

The core of the Spirit Collection is the Tank Room. Here the shelves hold glass jars of every shape and size—one containing three pickled heads of orange roughy; another, the head of a porbeagle shark; and another, a pygmy hippo.

Huge stainless steel tanks hold larger species: a swordfish, a loggerhead turtle, a massive arapaima originally from the Amazon, and a Komodo dragon.

Among the center's prizes are what the researchers call "type" specimens, the first samples of a species to be named and described. The Spirit Collection contains 170,000 type specimens. Often the original notes and manuscripts of the discoverer accompany the donations.

"If you think you have discovered a new species, then you come here to compare it to other related specimens," Crimmen said. "That way, all (scientists) are referred to a single standard. Through these comparisons, scientists discover new species all the time."

The center joins other world-class repositories like the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

"This place is a hub for scientists," said Clare Valentine, formerly curator of the sponge collection and now head of zoology collections. "You have to see the original specimen to work on it (a particular species) yourself. Sometimes there is much more information—color, texture and even smell—that can be gleaned from examining a specimen face to face."

Collections Dating Back 500 Years

Visitors can take behind-the-scenes tours of the center's collections and attend the frequent scientific presentations about research.

The Darwin Center opened last September as part of a long-term plan to make the Natural History Museum's entire collection—70 million specimens—accessible to the public.

Phase two, scheduled for 2007, will provide space for the museum's entomology and botanical collections—28 million insects and 6 million plants respectively.

The Darwin Center is rich in historical material. Although the bulk of the collection was acquired during the past 200 years, some samples date back to the 15th century. The collection originated with the eminent 18th-century physician Sir Hans Sloane, who had amassed 3,500 fish, amphibians and crustaceans.

Along with Darwin's collection, the center also includes those of other scientific legends like Carl Linnaeus, Sir Charles Lyell, and Alfred Russel Wallace. The center houses sea bass from the Marquesas Islands and unicorn fish from Tahiti along with 500 other fish that Captain James Cook collected on the HMS Endeavour.

Museum scientists continue to gather specimens from around the world and fill gaps in the collections. Even in this age of molecular analyses and huge genetic databases, the creatures themselves still provide a benchmark.

"We need the physical specimens because the form, the morphology, is the basis of our understanding," Crimmen said. "Having the actual bodies means that you will always have samples available for new analytical techniques. Part of the curator's job is to defend the long-term view and ensure that there are specimens for scientists to use well into the future."

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