Author: Helen Thompson / Source: Science News
A natural history museum isn’t just a place to take visiting relatives or for entertaining kids on the weekends. These museums’ collections also play a vital, but under-celebrated, role in scientific research.
That’s why, when Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro caught fire on September 2, more than just a catalog of natural and human history was lost. The museum was full of valued datasets that could have driven research to come, raised new scientific questions and answered old ones.
“You never know what you don’t know if you don’t have a collection,” says Kelly Zamudio, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University.
At least once a month, Science News reports on new species discovered in museum cupboards, what an ancient animal ate and cases of mistaken fossil identity — all based on museum specimens.
Beyond undiscovered species, these collections contain a wealth of environmental and ecological information. Museum specimens have helped researchers figure out if the 1918 pandemic flu virus jumped from birds to humans (it didn’t), track the spread of West Nile virus, figure out how Argentine ants invaded the United States and reveal shifts in butterfly ranges due to climate change. In February, sprouting seeds found in the cheeks of rodents consumed by rattlesnakes from a museum collection revealed the serpents as unlikely seed dispersal agents — talk about research that’s a mouthful.
Brazil’s National Museum was no exception. It was “a powerhouse both in research and in the collections,” says Michael Heckenberger, an archaeologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
What the museum’s treasures have taught us
Back in the late 1990s, paleontologist Alexander Kellner, who now leads the museum, discovered a carnivorous dinosaur (Santanaraptor placidus) that jaunted around on two legs 110 million years ago. “It’s unique because it has beautifully preserved soft tissue,” says Taissa Rodrigues, a paleontologist at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo in Vitoria, Brazil. And in the anthropology department, an 11,000-year-old human skull dubbed Luzia raised questions about the peopling of the Americas.
FEATURED FOSSILS
The museum’s paleontology collection gathered a catalog of the region’s biodiversity going back hundreds of millions of years — dinosaurs, flying reptiles, ancient lizards, crocodiles, mammoths, saber-toothed cats and more. It’s introduced a bevy of ancient species over the years. More recently, in 2014, Tiago Simões of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and colleagues found a previously unknown ancient lizard (Calanguban alamoi) from the early Cretaceous Period.
Researchers have also used the museum’s samples to put modern plants and animals in context. In 2016, museum specimens helped to confirm that two types of longhorn beetles discovered in a national park represented new species. Last year, ant specimens collected in the 1800s helped researchers come up with new standards for telling two easily…
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