Description
The San Diego Natural History Museum Department of Herpetology focuses on the study of amphibians and reptiles. Resources are available to scientists to help better understand amphibian and reptile biology and conserve species when their existence is threatened. The great diversity of amphibian and reptile species is preserved for scientific research in the form of alcohol-preserved and skeletal specimens. The herpetology collection holds over 76,000 catalogued specimens (73,300 fluid-preserved specimens and 3,100 skeletons with 212 primary and 500 secondary types) dating back to the 1890s. The collection has been built over the past century and is actively being added to today. All cataloged specimens are computer databased which allows for any combination of taxonomic and geographic records to be searched.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 76,325 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Downloads
Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
San Diego Natural History Museum Herpetology Collection
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is San Diego Natural History Museum. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 84b4d6e4-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a. San Diego Natural History Museum publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by U.S. Geological Survey.
Keywords
Occurrence; Specimen
Contacts
Who created the resource:
Who can answer questions about the resource:
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Geographic Coverage
Over 57% of the collection comes from California and Baja California, making it one of the largest resources for this area. The collection is well represented with specimens from throughout the southwest United States, northwest Mexico, and islands worldwide.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
Of particular importance is the Laurence M. Klauber collection containing over 43,000 specimens he personally cataloged. This includes his rattlesnake collection, containing over 8,600 specimens, and representing nearly every known species.
| Class | Amphibia (amphibians), Reptilia (reptiles) |
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Additional Metadata
http://vertnet.org/resources/norms.html
| Alternative Identifiers | 84b4d6e4-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a |
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| http://ipt.vertnet.org:8080/ipt/resource?r=sdnhm_herps |