facilities
The ornithology collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology (UMZC) include world-class holdings of skins (~30,000), skeletons (>1,000), eggs (~50,000), fossils, and taxidermy. Daniel is in charge of this collection as the Strickland Curator of Ornithology, and it features heavily in our lab's research. The museum also houses the wet lab facilities and freezers that we use.
our research is divided between the earth sciences department at cambridge (dry lab, computing, fossil preparation), and the university museum of zoology (ornithology collections, wet lab, CT scanning). click on the links below to learn more about the great resources cambridge has for supporting vertebrate specimen-based research.
The Sedgwick Museum is based within the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge, and is arguably the oldest Earth Sciences museum in the world. The collection contains over two million objects (rocks, minerals, and fossils), as well as two thousand specimens from Charles Darwin's Beagle voyage. The museum has excellent facilities for fossil preparation and imaging, as well as holdings of many important vertebrate fossils including Enaliornis from the Cambridge Greensand.
Our research relies on high-resolution three-dimensional imaging of vertebrate anatomy. We help administer the Cambridge Biotomography Centre at the University Museum of Zoology, which houses a Nikon XTEK H 225 ST MicroCT scanner. The scanner can achieve a resolution of up to 3 microns and is a cornerstone of our research endeavours.
