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The Conversation USA

Museum specimens could help fight the next pandemic – why preserving collections is crucial to future scientific discoveries

  • Written by Jocelyn P. Colella, Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Assistant Curator of Mammals, University of Kansas
imageBehind the scenes, natural history museums store biological samples from the field.Ryan Stephens, CC BY-ND

Imagine yourself as the first naturalist to stand in a place where little recorded scientific knowledge exists, like Alfred Russel Wallace in the Malay Archipelago or Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas in the early 1800s. The notes you...

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