Museums

Museums often celebrate new acquisitions, especially something rare or historic. In April 2024, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Jamaica and The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus accepted a very rare and historic specimen: a 16-inch lizard called the Jamaican giant galliwasp (Celestus occiduus). It had previously been stored in the Hunterian museum at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. “‘Celeste’ is home!” announced one Jamaican news outlet, invoking the nickname scientists had given the reptile, which they believed was a female. A close-up of ‘Celeste,’ the Jamaican giant galliwasp specimen repatriated to Jamaica. Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images Why would a preserved lizard, some 170 years old, evoke such excitement? Celeste was collected in the 1850s and represents a species that was endemic to Jamaica but is now classified as cri...

Some of the world’s most popular museums are natural history collections: Think of dinosaur fossils, gemstones and preserved animals. Herbaria – collections of pressed, dried plant specimens – are a less-known but important type of natural history collection. There are some 400 million botanical specimens stored across over 3,500 herbaria around the world, but most are not widely publicized and rarely host public exhibits. I study biodiversity and global change, and these collections have fueled my work. My collaborators and I have used herbarium collections to study how flowering times respond to changes in climate, how dispersal traits and environmental preferences affect the likelihood that plants will become invasive, and how fires affect tropical biodiversity. I have had easy access to specimens from every corner of the world, but most researchers are not as lucky. This is partly because herbaria as we know them today are largely a European creation. And...

Henry David Thoreau, the environmental philosopher and author of “Walden”, was a keen observer of seasonal change. In 1862, for example, he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: “October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.” Over the past 20 years, researchers have used Thoreau’s observations of plant flowering, leaf emergence on trees and shrubs, bird migration and spring ice melt on Walden Pond to study how these events have changed since the 1850s, largely in response to climate change. Ecologists have also pulled data for modern-day research from museum specimens, journals of hunting guides and bird and butterfly club reports. Comparisons with historical records have provided insights into shifts in the natural world caused by climate chang...