Cambridge University Museum of Zoology

The mobile digitalization team was in Cambridge on the 14th of November, visiting the Cambridge Zoological Museum. Only 11 types are held there, but some are very nice specimens: two of the most complete Lower Carboniferous reptiles and a Cretaceous turtle, with the skull completely and nicely preserved! Nothing the size of a dinosaur, but let’s say that we encountered some of its smaller ancestors!

Michela scanning a type in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

Time is always running fast when you have only a day in Cambridge, but we managed to have a quick look through the Sedgwick Museum which is always fascinating to see (it was our lunchtime Mike, don’t worry, we worked as much as we could!), and we met the Cambridge digitisation team. Like us, Hilary (scanning) and Lindsey (photographing) are digitising the type collections of the Sedgwick Museum, the they showed us hundreds of boxes with types: it can seem an easy and quick job, but it is never as you would expected it! We also exchanged some useful information about common problems we had and tricks to solve them, I won’t reveal you the latter, you know we still have to keep a little mystery around the final product you will see on the website! 

Simon at work with the Canon EOS5D

Michela Contessi

(GB3D - Mobile digitization team)