Georeferencing the Natural History Museum's Chinese type collection: of plateaus, pagodas and plants.

The digitising efforts of herbaria aim to increase access to and impact of scientific collections, by making the data digitally accessible to the global community. Digitising the NHMUK's botanical collection of around 5.1 million specimens is an ongoing process, but the majority of the type collections have already been imaged.

methodology: workflow, results and lessons learned.

The Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collections. The first phase of this programme was to undertake a series of pilot projects to develop the workflows and infrastructure needed to support mass digitisation of very large scientific collections. This paper presents the results of one of the pilot projects - iCollections.

methodology: workflow, results and lessons learned.

The Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collections. The first phase of this programme was to undertake a series of pilot projects to develop the workflows and infrastructure needed to support mass digitisation of very large scientific collections. This paper presents the results of one of the pilot projects - iCollections.

iCollections - Digitising the British and Irish Butterflies in the Natural History Museum, London.

Background: The Natural History Museum, London (NHMUK) has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collections . The first phase of this programme has been to undertake a series of pilot projects that will develop the necessary workflows and infrastructure development needed to support mass digitisation of very large scientific collections. This paper presents the results of one of the pilot projects - iCollections.

Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species.

Discovering biological diversity is a fundamental goal--made urgent by the alarmingly high rate of extinction. We have compiled information from more than 100,000 type specimens to quantify the role of collectors in the discovery of plant diversity. Our results show that more than half of all type specimens were collected by less than 2 per cent of collectors.

Testing co-evolutionary hypotheses over geological timescales: interactions between Mesozoic non-avian dinosaurs and cycads.

The significance of co-evolution over ecological timescales is well established, yet it remains unclear to what extent co-evolutionary processes contribute to driving large-scale evolutionary and ecological changes over geological timescales. Some of the most intriguing and pervasive long-term co-evolutionary hypotheses relate to proposed interactions between herbivorous non-avian dinosaurs and Mesozoic plants, including cycads. Dinosaurs have been proposed as key dispersers of cycad seeds during the Mesozoic, and temporal variation in cycad diversity and abundance has been linked to dinosaur faunal changes.

Unlocking evidence of early diet from tooth enamel.

Recent developments in microspatial analysis of enamel chemistry provide the resolution needed to reconstruct detailed chronological records of an individual's early life history. Evidence of nutritional history, residential mobility, and exposure to heavy metals can potentially be retrieved from archaeological and even fossil teeth. Understanding the pattern and timing of incorporation of each trace element or stable isotope into enamel is crucial to the interpretation of the primary data.