October 17, 2003

Web Portal Gives Researchers Access to 17 Collections of Animal Specimens

By BROCK READ

When museums acquire mammal specimens, they do more than stuff the creatures and arrange them in display cases. Mammalogists also record when and where the animals were found, what climates they inhabited, and how broadly their habitats were spread.

Now an online project headed by museum curators at the University of California at Berkeley aims to make such hard-to-find mammal-specimen data readily available to conservationists, climatologists, and city planners, who can use the