Bonnier de la Mosson’s famous cabinet of curiosities, purchased at auction by Buffon in 1774, was installed in the Muséum’s library and classified as a historical monument: a distant homage to the King’s cabinet that had occupied the same premises. We can thus see that this first movement consisted of a series of accumulations of objects and natural history collections.
The priority was then to organize and give them a scientific meaning to build the story of life on Earth. The classification of the collections is indeed at the heart of the scientific activity of the Muséum: describing species and establishing their relationship and evolution are approaches that can be found in the classification of specimen reserves as well as in the library collections. But the scientific links between the specimens and the works do not necessarily go well with the physical or climatic precautions that their conservation requires. Where one would like to arrange by species, by theme, by author or collector, one is often led to other options by the constraints of space, fragility, hygrometry, etc. They can be arranged according to format, age or nature of the material. The spatial arrangement of collections has always reflected this tension between scientific logic and very practical considerations.
The Muséum’s primary mission can be summarized as that of a vast conservatoire of nature in all its diversity: meteorites, fossils, plants, animals, witnesses to the evolution of humankind and human cultures, etc. These collections have been – and still are – amassed by researchers. They have changed our understanding of the world by shedding light, for example, on the origin of the solar system (meteorites), the major crises of biodiversity (fossils) and the impact of anthropization over the last 10,000 years (archaeo-fauna, flora).
This book recalls the crucial role of collections in the production of knowledge and their indispensable window to research. They are a memory of the materiality of the world and serve to verify the accuracy of the names we give to living beings and things. They constitute an immense source of data, the archived specimens being bearers of triple information: that of their individual nature, accessible by increasingly powerful analytical techniques (imaging, bio-geochemistry, genomics, etc.), that of the history of science, which is interested in the motivations as well as the methods of their collection and archiving, and finally, that of the evolution of the state of the planet, because the collections are a privileged tool for documenting the evolutions of biodiversity, the environment and the climate. This reverse flow, which turns old collections into sources of data for future research, reinforces their heritage value and demonstrates that their continued enrichment fulfills a duty to archive.
Finally, and this is one of the strong points of this book, this collective reflection offers a fascinating tribute to the “people of the collections”, these passionate men and women who bring the treasures of the Muséum to life on a daily basis and allow them to shine throughout the world by revealing their scientific interest. Behind each specimen and behind each article or book documenting the discovery of a taxon, there is an individual story, that of a person who made the decision to start a collection, who published the descriptions of objects, and who, sometimes, mixed their own name in with that of the object. Beyond this relationship established by the codes of taxonomic nomenclature, there is an intimacy between nature and humankind that animates the backstage and the professions of our museum.
The Muséum must be visionary in the enrichment and use of its collections, as well as in its public outreach activities. It must foster ethics of the planet oriented toward the preservation of its evolutionary potential and cultural diversity, while questioning the interactions between ecological and social vulnerability. It is this closeness and these strong links that are illustrated here.
August 2021
Acknowledgments
Roseli PELLENS
ISYEB – CNRS, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Sorbonne Université, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université des Antilles, Paris, France
A collective work cannot be achieved without a number of people embracing a common cause. I would therefore like to warmly thank each of the authors for the enthusiasm with which they have committed themselves to this project and for the rich ideas they have generously contributed. This project was a result of discussions during the module “Innovative uses of natural history collections in scientific research” that I organize for the École doctorale ED-227 “Sciences of nature and man: evolution and ecology” of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (French National Museum of Natural History) and Sorbonne Université in Paris. These discussions, always very enriching, showed me how important it is to make visible the richness and diversity of innovative research based on collections. They also showed me the extent of our collective responsibility in protecting and enriching this heritage in order to allow future generations of researchers to make the best use of it in their quest for knowledge. I am therefore very grateful to all those who contributed directly or indirectly to these public discussions. I would like to thank Bruno David, president of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, for agreeing to write the book’s foreword and for providing historical insight into our heritage, Marie-Christine Maurel for supporting this project and for her always kind and benevolent advice, and Philippe Grandcolas for supporting this project and for his many suggestions during our rich discussions on this topic. Finally, I would like to thank Bruno Dastillung for his help with the layout and formatting corrections.
1
Natural History Collections: An Essential Resource for Science in the 21st Century
Roseli PELLENS
ISYEB – CNRS, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Sorbonne Université, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université des Antilles, Paris, France
As we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century, we are in the midst of a major environmental crisis (Hoekstra et al. 2012; Hoekstra and Wiedmann 2014; Steffen et al. 2015). Climate disruption, colossal loss of biological (Barnosky et al. 2011, 2012; Ceballos et al. 2015) and cultural diversity (Amano et al. 2014), and the emergence and spread of new diseases (Carlson 2020) are some of the most visible facets of this crisis. Because of its global scale, it is generating new momentum in international negotiations (e.g. Convention on Biological Diversity, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), although it has not yet led to a significant shift toward a production and consumption model that can limit its effects.
This situation creates a significant demand for the scientific community to produce measurements and indicators to assess the causes, magnitude and the evolution trends of this crisis (IPCC 2018; IPBES 2019; Díaz et al. 2020; Rounsevell et al. 2020). It is in this context that bodies such as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) at the international level have been created. At the national level in France, numerous structures have also been created to analyze problems and implement appropriate solutions1. This context has led to the emergence of new scientific themes. For example, assessing the global state and trends of biological and cultural diversity and the environment requires a large amount of data and the organization of these data into temporal or geographical series. Natural history collections are an extraordinary resource in this context. In addition to their original function as repositories for systematics, they are now becoming a colossal source of information, contributing to the exploration of this problem. The economic benefits of their contribution, even if they are still little evaluated, could be of the order of several billion dollars (Suarez and Tsutsui 2004).
1.1. Collections in early 21st century science
Research on collections is gaining unprecedented scientific importance