The Section of Mammals houses a research collection consisting of more than 117,153 specimens. Our main collection is housed at the Edward O’Neil Research Center, about two miles from the main Carnegie Museum of Natural History building.
Taxonomic coverage includes 24 of the 26 living orders of
mammals and 114 of the 136 Recent families. The collection
includes 40 holotypes. Geographic coverage is worldwide but
the collection’s strength is in North American material. The
collection from Pennsylvania and adjacent areas is the best in the
world, and the collections from the eastern Arctic are the best of
any U.S. museum. The collection also includes excellent holdings
from Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon,
and Utah.
Recent acquisitions from Belize, Bonaire, Curaçao, Costa Rica, Dominica, El Salvador, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago augment historical specimens from Central America. Outside of North America, our strengths are in Africa and South America. Mammals from Bolivia and Colombia were the earliest of our Neotropical acquisitions. Recent material includes specimens from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
The Section’s holdings from Cameroun are the best in the world. Collections made there over a 40-year period by Rev. A. I. Good were obtained before forests in the area were disturbed. As a result, the material is especially valuable in documenting the undisturbed distribution of primates and rodents in that region of Africa. The collection contains recent and historical collections from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. Important holdings also exist for the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, and Zaire.
Field work and exchanges with European collections have strengthened our holdings from Europe with material from Austria, Belgium, Finland, and Hungary. During the last two decades, field work in Australia, Japan, and Thailand have added our first major collections from that region.
The Section also holds an excellent osteological collection of
both articulated and disarticulated specimens. Represented in this
material are a number of unique forms which would be difficult if
not impossible to obtain today. Among these are specimens of
Alopex, Cercopithecus, Gorilla, Kobus, Lama, Odobenus, Pan, Papio,
Phoca, and Thalarctos (Ursus). About two-thirds of the osteological
material is stored off-site. However, all marine mammals,
primates, and large carnivores are housed with the main collection.
In the past two decades, there has been an effort to build the fluid-preserved collection. Today, we hold wet preservations of 286 genera or 44% of all genera in our collection.
The Section houses ancillary collections of slides of
karyotypes and sperm, and frozen tissues for biochemical studies.
The latter consists of tissues from over 12,000 specimens of
insectivores, bats, rodents, carnivores, and primates from North
America, Africa, and Asia.
The entire collection has been computerized since 1978 and follows the Documentation Standards developed by the American Society of Mammalogists’ Committee on Information Retrieval. The most recent update of that document can be viewed on this Website.
The research laboratory of the Section contains equipment necessary for studying differentially stained chromosomes, SDS-PAGE, and horizontal starch gel electrophoresis.
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