The Natural History Museum, located in South Kensington, London, is one of the most renowned scientific institutions in the world, with national and international responsibilities for taxonomic, systematic and biodiversity conservation research. Its origins date back to 1753, when the British government acquired the collections of physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, which formed the basis of the Natural History collections of the then British Museum. Under the superintendence of Richard Owen, the collections were moved to the current building, which opened to the public in 1881. The Museum also maintains an important branch in Tring, Hertfordshire—the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum—which was incorporated into the national collections in the early twentieth century.
Today, the Museum houses more than 80 million specimens, documenting around 4.5 billion years of the history of life, the Earth and the solar system. Its collections encompass nearly all major groups of animals, plants, fungi and minerals, including the fields of Zoology, Entomology, Botany, Palaeontology and Mineralogy, and serve as the foundation for research conducted by hundreds of scientists, curators and collaborators. Through an ambitious digital collections programme, the Museum aims to make 20 million specimens digitally available in the coming years, promoting the principles of Open Science and Open Access via its Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk). 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.

Subcollections

• NHMUK-BOT - Botanical Collections
• NHMUK-ENT - Entomological collections
• NHMUK-PAL - Palaeontological collections
• NHMUK-ZOO - Zoological collection

Contacts