UCM Bird Eggs/Nests Collection (Arctos)

Project name: Global Biodiversity Information Facility datasets

Dataset summary : Vertebrate Zoology in the CU Museum of Natural History is a biodiversity repository of more than 120,000 specimens from five taxa: Fishes, Amphibians and Reptiles (Herpetology), Birds, and Mammals. With the exception of birds, our collections are the largest collections of their kind in Colorado. Specimens from Colorado and the surrounding plains, plateaus, and basins are the strength of our collection. The UCM Egg & Nest Collection contains over 2,250 egg sets and nests. Nearly three-quarters of this collection was assembled by distinguished naturalists Denis Gale and G. Morrison in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. These historic specimens represent much of the avifauna found in Colorado and several Midwestern states, and are accompanied by detailed field notes. An additional 600 egg sets collected in the US and Peru in the late 1970s-1990s are preserved as broken fragments, historically used to examine variation in eggshell gas exchange in montane and lowland habitats.