Plant and insects collection opened up

Several of Scotland’s most significant collections of insects and plants can now be viewed online after painstaking work by museum staff at the University of Aberdeen to catalogue more than 60,000 bugs and dried plants over the last year.

The University’s Zoology Museum is home to insect collections of national importance such as the James Duncan collection of c. 10,000 British moths and butterflies, representing around 750 different species and an almost complete array of macro-moths in Britain.

The Herbarium is one of just two major herbaria in Scotland; the other being the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. University staff have now completed cataloguing type specimens in the Thailand plant collection, polar plants and several thousand British mosses and lichens. The Thai collection is regarded as the second most important collection of its kind in the world.

The project to make the records available online was funded by the Museums Galleries Scotland Recognition Fund to increase public access to these important collections. Thousands of records can now be found and searched online at www.abdn.ac.uk/museums.