The 3rd and final batch of Forams has launched

We’re thrilled to let you know that the Natural History Museum London launched the third and final batch of the Miniature Fossils Magnified expedition on Notes from Nature last week, although many of you have already discovered it, and the intrepid @PVerbeeck has already done one full sweep of the entire subject set!

At our annual European Researcher’s Night, which we dub Science Uncovered, we showcased the work of the Digital Collections Programme at one of the many tables showing off research that happens at the Museum, which you can see in this image to the left.

We had out our scanning equipment which we’ve been using to digitise our entire louse collection, which you can read about in more detail in this blog post on our Museum website.

As the theme for the night was Oceans, in keeping with our new blue whale display in the main hall and exhibition on wales, we also had a number of marine louse slides for folks to take a closer look at under the microscope.

We also invited folks to help us to process this newly digitised collection by typing in the collection date for each of the marine louse specimen records, using an interface that we developed especially for the night. They did a great job, and processed 129 classifications for us – a great result for a fun night out!

We may be asking for more help with this collection soon, so do keep your eyes peeled.

But in the meantime, a huge thank-you to all of you who are helping us to set our Foraminifera data free, the microscopic single-celled organisms that can tell us so much about the history of our oceans, going back 150 million years!