Description
Founded in 1869, the AMNH mammal collections are among the oldest in the museum. Today, the Department of Mammalogy houses over 275,000 specimens, making it the third largest collection of recent mammals in the world. The scientific mission of the Department of Mammalogy is to describe the diversity of living and recently extinct mammals and to explore the mechanisms responsible for their evolution and extinction. In fulfillment of this objective, the department collects, archives and studies specimens of recent mammals and the data associated with those specimens. We aim always to provide the highest standards of curatorial care and to promote access to the collections by other scholars. The collections are visited by an average of 130 researchers every year, and the Department loans over 500 specimens a year to researchers around the globe. The Recent Mammals Collection, together with the remarkable collection of books, journals, and manuscripts of the Department Library and Archives provides scholars with outstanding resources for research in mammalian systematics, biodiversity and evolutionary biology.
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 290,333 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.
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:
AMNH Mammal Collection
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is American Museum of Natural History. 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: 96ca66b4-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a. American Museum of Natural History publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.
Keywords
Occurrence; Specimen
Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- Point Of Contact
Geographic Coverage
The scope of the collections is worldwide, with areas of particular strength including Australia and New Guinea (30,000 specimens), Central Asia (12,000 specimens), Central Africa (30,000 specimens), and South America (50,000 specimens). Today, the Department draws on these collections to support active research programs on mammalian diversity and evolution in groups such as bats, marsupials, and rodents from a wide range of countries including the Central African Republic, French Guiana, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and Vietnam.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
Taxonomic coverage is particularly broad (100% of the 26 mammalian orders; 96% of the 136 families; about 50% of the 1,135 genera and about 60% of the 4,629 species), and the collection contains over 1,200 name-bearing type specimens. The collections of marsupials, insectivores, bats, primates, rodents, carnivores, whales and ungulates are recognized as being among the best in the world.
| Class | Mammalia (mammals) |
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Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | 96ca66b4-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a |
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| http://ipt.vertnet.org:8080/ipt/resource?r=amnh_mammals |