Stuffed full of treasures

The Natural History Museum is opening up its collection, which includes 600-million-year-old fossils, dinosaurs and crocodiles, writes Dick Ahlstrom

There is an Aladdin's Cave in Dublin full of treasures that would make any zoologist or palaeontologist drool. It contains the 90 per cent of the Natural History Museum's huge collection never seen by the public but which represents pure gold for researchers.

The Natural History Museum, adjacent to the Dáil off Merrion Square, is known to generations of children as the bug museum or the "dead zoo". Its glass cases display a wonderland of bears and birds, bugs and other beasties. While the public enjoys these displays, the working researcher would get more value out of the extensive collections never on display, explains Julia Sigwart, museum collections researcher. "Nobody thinks about the Natural History Museum but it is a really great collection," she says."The reason this is really important is because a museum isn't just about what is on display."

The museum's collection is comparable in size to those held in Edinburgh, Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen, she says. Yet because of long-term under-staffing at the museum, the Dublin collection has never been fully made accessible to scientists who might be able to use its resources.

Sigwart arrived in Dublin from the American Museum of Natural History in April to help change all this. University College Dublin zoologist Dr Gareth Dyke knew of her work there and recommended her appointment after the college formed a joint initiative with Dublin's Natural History Museum to open up the collection.

Dr Dyke at UCD, and Nigel Monaghan at the museum, worked out a programme including special courses that involve the use of the museum's extensive zoological and fossil collections. Sigwart was the person who knew how to make it all work in practice.

"The new programme facilitates bringing researchers from UCD to the museum," she says.

"I am trained as a collections manager and know how to organise things so they are more accessible to scientists. What we want to do is combine the resources of the museum with the teaching resources at UCD."

The collections held by the museum are also of interest to international researchers, provided they can be accessed. Sigwart's work should help make this possible, to the further benefit of the students. "This gives more opportunities for networking for UCD students. We want to raise the research profile of the museum and of UCD."

She has begun cataloguing the collection with research student Ronan Hickey and discoveries are already starting to be made. "We find something every week that is exciting and new," she says. A few weeks ago, they discovered an example of the now extinct Indian forest owlet, Athene blewetti. It is one of only six or seven known in the world.

The collection includes thousands of birds and tonnes of dinosaur fossils, including one of Europe's best collections of Jurassic-age marine reptiles, dating back 200 million years.

Some of the oldest fossils are 500 to 600-million-year-old sponges and there are 180 million-year-old fossil crocodiles and a complete five-metre-long cast from an original fossil of a Jurassic meat eater, Megalosaurus, standing fully assembled in a corner. The museum holds Europe's largest collection of giant Irish elk bones, and modern collections of coastal fauna such as marine molluscs, crustaceans and invertebrates that provide a 200-year-old catalogue of local biodiversity.

"The main strength of the collection from a scientific perspective is the specimens in spirit," says Sigwart. These are the animals, birds and other forms preserved in alcohol or formaldehyde and held in 10,000-15,000 jars, each of which can contain one to 100 organisms.

"Old collections in spirit are very, very rare. If you keep them in spirit you are collecting them specifically for scientists," she says.

While catalogues of the collection have been prepared in the past, these are of little help in modern research methods. The whole was made more complex because, from time to time, material has been stored in a variety of places. The large fossil collection sat in the basement of a building adjacent to Dáil Éireann for years. Material has been held by the universities, the Royal Dublin Society and in the museum's own stores.

Sigwart hopes to sort the collection and produce a rich resource of value to the next generation of scientists. "I left my post [in the US\] for this because I thought it could be really exciting," she says. "We see the museum as fundamental to research into all living things."