In Review

Skull of a cod (Gadus morhua)

A food fish once common along the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

Mantis shrimp (order Stomatopoda)

In a hand-blown jar. Found in oceans worldwide.

A brown-backed parrotlet (Touit melanonotus)

From Brazil mounted on a black walnut perch.

Common or least weasel (Mustela nivalis)

In its white winter fur.

Predaceous diving beetles (family Dytiscidae)

Common in freshwater streams and ponds.

A fossil of a fish (Pholidophorus crenulatus)

Collected near Lyme Regis in West Dorset, Great Britain.

Close-up of a nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus)

Indigenous to the Americas.

Primate identified only as an Old World Monkey

Presented in a typical 1800s-style presentation.

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A new initiative is giving a digital life to a historic collection of scientific specimens housed at the University for nearly 150 years. Now located in several departments on campus, the specimens were originally brought together in the late 1800s through the work of Henry Ward, a Rochester professor who founded the science supply company Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. By about 1880, Rochester was home to the third-largest such collection in the United States.

Known as The Ward Project (online at Wardproject.org), the effort is a collaboration involving the Departments of Biology and Earth and Environmental Sciences and the River Campus Libraries. Led by Robert Minckley, senior lecturer in the Department of Biology, and Melissa Mead, the John M. and Barbara Keil University Archivist and Rochester Collections Librarian, the online resource features 2-D and 3-D images of specimens, 19th-century and modern taxonomies, catalogs, and correspondence.