The NSRL’s recent mammal collection houses more than 118,000 research specimens. Nearly 80% of these specimens are in the form of dried skin and/or skull and skeletal material preparations, while the rest are fluid-preserved specimens housed in a separate collection area. The dried skin and skeletal preparations are stored in 732 metal cabinets. These cabinets are specially designed to keep the specimens safe from UV light, dust, occasional insect pests, and other harmful agents. Every specimen is labeled with information concerning its species, sex, collector, preparator, collecting location, and other pieces of collecting data. Each specimen has also been given a catalog number and its data verified and entered into a searchable computer database. All specimens of the same species are stored together, organized by country, state, county, and finally catalog number. Groups of related species are housed in adjacent cases. As with the Genetic Resources Collection, the majority of these specimens in this collection are bar coded and a project is underway to bar code the rest to facilitate the retrieval of associated data and to reduce time and effort spent by the NSRL staff in maintaining an organized collection.
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Natural Science Research Laboratory, Museum of TTU
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