THE VALUE OF

NATURAL HISTORYCOLLECTIONS
WarrenD. Allmon

ABSTRACT The value of museum natural history collections is commonly poorly explained to, and
therefore commonly misunderstood by, the general public. This is an increasingly dangerous
situation at a time of tight fiscal constraints; if natural history collectionsare to survive, those
charged with their care will have to do more to broadcast their value as both resources for
research and public education. Research values include documenting biotas no longer
available and present and past biogeographic distributions,housing type, voucher specimens,
and (perhaps most importantly) serving as fertile places for scientific discovery and inspira-
tion. Public values include serving as resources for identification of unknown specimens,
hands-on education and the support of systematics, and (perhaps most importantly) as the
depository for the final physical evidence for the history and diversity of life on Earth.

INTRODUCTION
Most major natural history museums, as Philip Humphrey has pointed out, are really two
museums: “an inner scholarly one where the collections are cared for and studied, and an outer
museum that makes the knowledge of the inner museum available to the lay public” (Humphrey,
1991:5). The relationship between these two roles within a given museum has preoccupied many
an administrator, who must worry about balancing an institution’s commitment to public
education vs. specialized research (e.g., Parr, 1963; American Association of Museums, 1984).
In these financially uncertain times, however, there is another aspect to the split personality of
natural history museums that has profound implications for their continued survival.
Most visitors to a large natural history museum have no idea that only a fraction of the
collections are on display; what they know of the museum is only what they see in the exhibition
halls. If they ever discover, or are told, about the enormity of collections not generally available
to the public, their reaction may be one of puzzlement, sometimes bordering on skepticism or
even hostility. Public exhibitions have obvious educational value, they say, but what, they are
asking with increasing frequency, is the purpose of all that stuff behind the locked doors?
This is not merely a matter of public education. The people who support museums, whether
they be taxpayers or private donors, increasingly want evidence that they are getting their money’s
worth. Governments, deans, the general public, and even some museum administrators are
decreasingly tolerant of the notion that rows of jars and drawers of boxes are useful merely for
their own sake and increasingly impatient to be told why they should continue to support their
maintenance. Many of the most successful new “museums” in the United States are actually not
museums at all, but science centers, containing no collections of actual specimens, on or off

Warren D. Allmon is Director of the Paleontological Research Institution, 1259 Trumansburg Road, Ithaca, NY
14850-1398.

Specimens offreshwater mussel (Lampsilis siliquoidea (Barnes))from Seneca J-uke, New 83

Yurk, showing variation within a single @pulation. Specimens in the cokctions of the Paleon-
tological Research Institution. (Photograph courtesy of the PaleontologicalResarch Institution.)
 CURATOR 3712 1994

exhibit. The situation is even more acute in institutions such as my own, in which there are
limited public programs, and collections curation and research form the bulk of the institutional
mission. Why support us? Why support collections that the public seldom, if ever, sees?
This is a difficult question for many museum scientists and curators because, as is true for
many academic scientists, museum researchers are often reluctant to “popularize”what they do.
But the evidence is everywhere that if the public does not understand the value of large natural
history collections, they will not support them. Efforts to educate people outside museums about
the importance of collections represent, furthermore, not only steps toward self-preservation,but
can be an important component of broader attempts to raise the prospects of systematic biology
generally (e.g., Wilson, 1985; Wheeler, 1989; Harvey, 1991).
Although the necessity of such efforts is increasingly acknowledged by many museum
scientists (e.g., Nevling, 1984; Arnold, 1991; Finley, 1987; Association of Systematics Collec-
tions, 1993), it has been my experience that many more museum workers (and even more museum
trustees and other nonscientific supporters) are ill-prepared when queried to provide a quick and
comprehensible justification for the nonpublic side of their mission. In the simplest of terms,
what good are natural history collections?

RESEARCH VALUE
For research, systematic collections are of great and unique importance for many reasons.
Documentution of the Past - Collections can document populations or locations no longer
available to science, including species recently extinct because of human influence. This is not
just the argument that we could not see dodos and Carolina parakeets were it not for museums.
This is the argument that, as habitat destruction continues to accelerate, we will never have
access to many species and the genetic, biochemical, and environmental information they contain
unless they are represented in museum collections. The Smithsonian’s collection of bird eggs,
for example, has been used to understand the impact of pesticides on bird populations, and its
fish collections have provided evidence of the increasing levels of mercury in aquatic environ-
ments. Although it is less widely realized, the same argument applies to fossils. Many unique
fossil localities and biotas are represented today only in museum collections because the original
sites have been destroyed.
Biogeography - Collections are crucial for documenting the past and present geographic
distributions of organisms. These are essential pieces of information not only for studies of ecology
and evolution, but also for resource management, conservation planning and monitoring, and
studies of global change. Studying collections in a museum is, furthermore, a cost-effective and
nondestructive way of obtaining such information. Rather than having to travel across oceans
and continents, often collecting (i.e., killing or excavating) additional specimens, a researcher
can pore over museum collections from around the world and throughout geological time for a
fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time. For endangered or threatened species, such
work often cannot be done in the wild in any case. Rates of extinction and range contraction in
American freshwater mussels, for example, are so great that the basic systematics of many major
living groups can be carried out only in museums.
Sources and Vouchers -Museum collections serve as source materials (and voucher specimens)
for a host of other nonsystematic studies. Geneticists, anatomists, biochemists, and demogra-
84
 CURATOR 3712 1994

phers can all use existing museum materials in their work and deposit representative specimens
in museum collections to allow future workers to assure themselves that bug “X” really was bug
“X.”
A specialized subset of such vouchers are type and figured specimens, those that represent
newly-described species in the scientific literature. Because future workers who wish to test,
refute, or expand upon original descriptions must usually start by examining these unique
specimens, they are of special importance; and making such specimens available to the specialists
around the world who need them is one of the chief functions of museum systematic collections.
Without such repositories, our systems of biological nomenclature would, arguably, collapse -
and with them much of whole-organism biology.
Undiscovered Treasures -Museums are places of genuine scientific discovery, not just storage.
For example, conodonts are tiny, tooth-shaped fossils that are abundant in rocks that are between
about 550 and 200 million years old. They are particularly noteworthy because they are among
the most useful fossils for determining the relative age of rocks in the 350 or so million year interval
in which they occur, and for this reason they have been studied in great detail by many
paleontologists for more than a century. Despite their great utility and the intensity with which
they were studied, however, no one knew what kind of animal conodonts came from - until
1983. In that year, an extraordinary fossil was found that preserved not only the hard, toothlike
conodonts, but also an impression of the soft parts of a slender, fishlike animal. The specimen
was found not in the field, but in a museum drawer, where it had sat since 1925. Similarly, of
the six known specimens of Archeopteyx, the oldest known bird, two were first recognized not in
quarries but in museum drawers, where they had been mislabeled. More recently, the birdlike
dinosaur Mononykus was described from four specimens. Three had been recently collected in
Mongolia by American and Russian expeditions. The fourth, however, had been collected in
1923 by the Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, in whose
drawers it had rested since, awaiting reinterpretation in the light of new knowledge.

Mononykus, a fossil
specimen found on the
1923 expedition led by
Roy Chapman Andrews.
Specimen from the
paleontological collection
at the American Museum
of Natural History.
(Photographcourtesy of
Murk NoreU.)

85
 CURATOR 3712 1994

Inspiration -These are only the more spectacular examples of events that happen almost every
day in museum collections: the discovery or rediscovery of objects unseen or forgotten or
misinterpreted by science, and the insight and connections that so often occur only when a
researcher handles, examines, and compares objects first hand and ponders their significance.
This sometimes vague notion has been articulated by others but continues to be poorly under-
stood by those who have never experienced it:

The specimens in museums contain information relevant to ecology, behavior, and physiology
that is available nowhere else. Perhaps more important, the perspective on diversity and
biogeographythat can be absorbed only by rummaging through drawer after drawer of skins should
not be lost to ecologists....Bey ond the value of museum collections as a resource for ecologists,
specimens remain a source of insight and inspiration. One has to be impressed by the examples
of taxonomic diversity and geographical variation in every cabinet, as they suggest either novel
research problems or add to the context within which one thinks about ecological and evolution-
ary issues (Ricklefs, 1980: 206-207).
This is the kernel of a collection’s worth: the scope it gives a biologist who would otherwise have
to travel widely to see a similar range of plant or animal life; the sense of history the student derives
from seeing vanished biota from long-despoiled habitats. The collection can provide a camera
obscura view of the living world as a whole that would otherwise be impossible (Bryant, 1983:
216).

In sum, museum collections are to systematists what libraries are to scholars of politics or
literature. They are repositories of the primary documents, the basic sources of information, and
so of comparison and insight. Like libraries, they signify and demonstrate what Archibald
MacLeish has referred to as “the mystery of things”; collections of both books and biological
specimens inspire in unanticipated ways, showing us “that they fall, when gathered together, into
a kind of relationship, a kind of wholeness” (MacLeish, 1991: 480).

PUBLIC VALUE
Even if it were widely accepted that all these points provide valid justification for the research
purpose of museum natural history collections, an important question still remains: W h y should
the public, most of whom seldom see research results first hand, agree to support the institutions
that house these collections?
Identification - Where would you go if you had an insect, bird, or fossil that you could not
identify? Collections in a natural history museum are not only the storehouse for the specimens
that eventually make it onto public exhibit, they form the basis for identification of unknown
specimens brought to it by nonscientist officials and the general public. Museum systematists
regularly identify exotic, pathogenic, pest, or simply unknown species for government agencies,
medical and agricultural personnel, field biologists and geologists, students, teachers, and
interested amateurs. For example, Natural Heritage inventory programs in every state rely on
systematics experts to provide information on the identity and status of North American plants
and animals (Hathway and Hoagland, 1993). More often than not, the mystery organisms are
forms not adequately illustrated in guidebooks or reference works; collections are the only source
for the identification.

86
Third grader from Watkins Glen Elementary School, Watkins Glen, Ny,participatingin a museum
field workshop on fossil collections and how they are used to answer questions about the historj of
life. (Photograph bj Mike Kapwta, courtesy of the Paleontological Research Institution.)

Hands-on Education - An object is worth a thousand pictures. Any student will attest to the
fact that seeing and touching a real natural history specimen is a completely different experience
from looking at a picture or reading a description. Museum collections, particularly those of
universities, are constantly used for teaching purposes, to show students first hand what organisms
past and present really look like instead of what their teachers tell them they look like. This is
true at all educational levels, from kindergarden to graduate school.

Support of Systematics - If collections are at the very heart of systematics and abandoning
collections would lead to a collapse of systematics, then a logical question for assessing the value
of collections is: Would the general public notice if there were no systematists? This subject has
been dealt with at length elsewhere (e.g.,Ricklefs,1980; Bryant, 1983,Humphrey, 1991; Wilson,
1985; Wheeler, 1989;Harvey, 1991); consider only the following: There would be no infrastruc-
ture behind biostratigraphy (the area of paleontology that identifies fossils and uses them to date
rocks, a crucial step in the search for petroleum). There would be no supporting collections to
allow for the identification of disease vectors (such as mosquitoes that carry malaria or ticks that
carry Lyme disease or snails that carry schistosomiasis), or agricultural pests (such as the
Mediterranean fruit fly or apple maggot), or venomous plants and animals that pose other threats
to the health of humans or livestock. There would also be no facilities for identifying, document-
ing, and keeping track of the vast and rapidly vanishing biological resources of the planet, from
rainforest plants and coral-reef animals that may contain disease-fighting biochemical com-

87
 CURATOR 3712 1994

pounds to pest- or disease-resistant wild relatives of domesticated crop plants. Systematics is the
foundation of almost all biology, and collections are the foundation of systematics.

The History of Life -As curious human beings, we constantly long to know whence we and all
around us came. Although it produces not a single new invention, directly improves our
economic competitivenessnot at all, and teaches few marketable skills, we all want to know about
the history of life. All organisms and their traces and pieces we preserve in our collections have
histories. The greatest value, to science and the public alike, of museum collections lies in their
power to illuminate those histories. “Natural history,” a term that dates at least to Pliny the Elder
(23-79 CE), is an especially appropriate description of biological collections and the institutions
in which they are housed, for such collections are the only witnesses we have to the history of
life on Earth.
Yet it is not enough simply to acknowledge that collections have public value. Museum
curators and scientists must sell the public on this idea, and do so through more than their
traditional permanent exhibits. Publications, exhibits, and other public programs must regularly
connect the inner to the outer museum, showing how the latter depends upon the former.
Touting the public identification value of research collections, furthermore, obligates a museum
to make its collections and staff available to such use. Many museums, unfortunately, do not.
We must all first be able to articulate why collections are important, and then take every
opportunity to tell everyone who will listen.

CONCLUSION
Most natural history museum scientists would probably agree with Jane Tompkins (1991: 203)
that:
The objects in museums preserve for us a source of life from which we need to nourish ourselves
when the resources that would normally supply us have run dry.

The challenge is, increasingly,to articulate this conviction to those whose support will be required
for natural history collections to persist into the next century. It is not always readily apparent
to those outside museums what good - scientific or social - is served by preservation of the
vast quantities of usually dingy-looking biological and geological specimens in our great natural
history collections. Even some scientists need convincing. I once overheard a biology professor
wonder out loud why one would want to save a specimen once one was done looking at it. A
colleague of mine (who ought to know better) recently quipped, only partly in jest, that most
museum fossil collections are, for most research purposes, “gravel.”
It is true that the public sees (and so may think it directly benefits from) only a tiny fraction
of most museum collections, and that all collections contain poor specimens or well-preserved
specimens with insufficient data. It is also possible that to a specialist on birds or mammals, all
fish collections may look like spoiled Chinese food and all fossils gravel. But none of these
objections changes the great intellectual value of collections to scientific research, service, and
education. Collections are libraries and more -investments in solutions to future problems, as
important as (even while they are very different from) the high-tech laboratories that donors and
deans often seem to prefer. They are the final repositories of the actual materials of natural
history, and so of our understanding of the past, present, and future state of the natural world.
They are amenable to extraction of vast amounts of information that can be (and is being)

88
 CURATOR 3712 1994

Specimens of trilobites (Phacops rana Green) from Devonian-aged rocks near Irhaca, showing variatton
within a single fossil population. Specimens in the collections of the Paleontological Research Institution.
(Photograph courtesy of the Pakontological Research Institution.)

standardized into powerful databases for use by scientists, farmers, the pharmaceutical industry,
and schoolchildren. Even, or perhaps especially, in this “age of information,’’ it is the physical
objects of the Earth and its life that must continue to hold a central place in our intellectual
universe.

REFERENCES
American Association of Museums. (1984). Museums for a New Century. Edited by Ellen Cochran Hirzy.
Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.
Arnold, N. (1991). “Biological Messages in a Bottle.” New Scientist 131: 25-27.
Association of Systematics Collections. (1993). “Twentieth Anniversary ASC Annual Meeting: National
Public Relations Campaign Charted.” ASC Newsletter 21/3: 29, 32-33.
Bryant, J.M. (1983). “Biological Collections - Legacy or Liability?” Curator 26/3: 203-218.
Finley, R.B., Jr. (1987). “The Value of Research Collections.” BioScience 37/2: 92.
Harvey, P.H. (19 91). “The State of Systematics.” Trends in Ecolog~and Evolution 6/1: 345-346.
Humphrey, P.S. (1991). “The Nature of University Natural History Museums.” In P.S. Cat0 and C. Jones
(Eds.),Natural History Museums: Directions fur Growth. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press. pp.
5-12.
MacLeish, A. (1991). “The Premise of Meaning.” In S.A. Toth and J. Coughlan (Eds.). Reading Rooms.
New York, NY: Doubleday. pp. 480-486.
Nevling, L.I., Jr. (1984). “On Public Understanding of Museum Research.” Curator 2713: 189-193.
Parr, A.E. (1963). “The Function of Museums: Research Centers or Show Places.” Curator 6/1: 20-31.
Ricklefs, R.F. (1980). “Old Specimens and New Directions: The Museum Tradition in Contemporary
Ornithology.” Auk 97: 206-208.
Tompkins,J. (1991). “At the Buffalo Bill Museum- June, 1988.” In J.C. Oates (Ed.), The Best American
Essays 1991. New York, NY: Ticknor and Fields. pp. 203-222.
Wheeler, Q.D. (1989). “Militant View of Needs and Priorities for Training Systematic Biologists.” ASC
Newsletter 17/4: 4546, 50-52.
Wilson, E.O. (1985). “Time to Revive Systematics.” Science 230: 1227.
89