NHMO Mammal collection

The NHMO Mammal collection at the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway comprises around 680 species, of which about 100 have been collected in Norway. Although the collections holds several thousand objects from the last half of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century, most objects are from the 1970s and around the turn of the millennium. Objects in the collection are preserved as mounted specimens, hides, skeletons or in ethanol (mainly rodents). During the later decades, a new sub-collection has been built up, consisting of mammalian tissue and extracted DNA samples. This is also part of the NHMO DNA Bank. The samples have partly been taken from existing objects in the Mammal collection, partly from newly arrived mammals, e.g. road kills and other salvage. The collection contains considerable sub-collections of polar bear skulls, mainly from the Norwegian parts of the species’ distribution range, Scandinavian wolves, and European otters and rodents from Norway. The collection is databased in Corema, a software that has been developed in close cooperation between the NHMO and the developer, Compositae AS (https://www.coremadb.com/). An accession generally refers to a given individual at a specific place and time; for each accession, one or more items may exist. Examples of item types include preserved skins, mounted specimens, osteological specimens, horns or antlers, blood, tissue and extracted DNA.

Objects in the collection are generally available for scientific use, subject to an individual evaluation of the intended use. Samples in the NHMO DNA Bank are also available for loans to the general scientific community, on the conditions set out in the Grant policy (see DNA Bank web page http://www.nhm.uio.no/english/research/infrastructure/dna-bank/). However, juridical or other limitations may apply to samples, which will have to be clarified before such samples can be loaned.