The Department of Zoology at the Natural History Museum houses one of the largest zoological collections in the world, with around 29 million specimens from all continents and oceans. The collection includes vertebrates and non-insect invertebrates, covering groups such as fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, molluscs, echinoderms, cnidarians, crustaceans and other marine invertebrates. The collections are of great scientific and historical importance, containing material dating back to the seventeenth century, including numerous type specimens and material obtained during natural history expeditions and oceanographic research. Part of the collection has been digitised and made available online, with ongoing efforts to expand and improve data quality. Only records originating from South America are represented here.

Conditions for using the data

The Natural History Museum is committed to the principles of Open Access and Open Science, promoting open access to its research and data. To this end, it has launched the Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk), which makes its research and collections datasets available online, allowing anyone to explore, download and reuse the information for their own studies.

How to cite

Cite according to the guidelines of the Natural History Museum Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk/about/citation), including the dataset identifier and the date of access.

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