Meet Brittany and Richard – undergraduate student volunteers

By Brittany Mitchell and Richard Dimon – 5 April 2016

Our roles as part of Project Haswell to date have included summarising information about the major phyla and families found within the collection, and revising the taxonomic names and ranks of all catalogued specimens. We have spent many hours trawling through various databases and literature to find the most up to date taxonomic revisions, and occasionally Britt has gone insane.

Though after lunch, she normally calms back down again.

Some of the highlights while working on this project have been discovering some of the exquisite and wondrous specimens (including Richard). Some of these are below:

Though in the last couple of weeks, we’ve been helping out on the photography side of the digitisation process. This has included finding, preparing and photographing all of the samples. It’s been a fantastic excuse to use the photography studio and all the fancy camera equipment available. In the process we’ve had the opportunity to take some really great snaps of the specimens.

Overall, we’ve had a lot of fun and it’s been a really fantastic experience. We look forward to photographing the wet specimens in the near future! We will keep you posted.