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
Behind the scenes, natural history museums store biological samples from the field.Ryan Stephens, CC BY-NDImagine 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...