RAMHSS: Facilities Support for the Mammal Collection, Field Museum of Natural History

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Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago maintains one of the world's premier mammal collections. Since 1893, the Museum has assembled mammal specimens from nearly every country on earth, representing virtually all of the extant families and most genera. In terms of size and coverage, the mammal collection of Field Museum ranks third nationally and fourth in the world. This immense resource is used in a wide variety of scientific contexts. Preserved materials are used mainly in studies of mammalian evolution, but are also intensively used in studies of anatomy, archeology, paleontology, physical anthropology, veterinary medicine, ecology, biogeography, and wildlife management. The huge geographic and taxonomic range of the collections attracts use by scientists the world over. In order to aid the collection in providing services to the community of scientists, this project awards funds to (1) verify and expand an existing computerized catalogue database. Once verified, the database will permit faster, more accurate, and more comprehensive information retrieval for the collection's many users; (2) tan large skins and house already-cleaned skeletal material of African mammals collected in 1928-29. Collected for exhibits by the Milwaukee Public Museum and containing numerous endangered species that are poorly represented in collections, the materials remained uncleaned and untanned for 55 years, until they were adopted by Field Museum. The NSF support will make this collection fully available to the scientific community.