NSF Museums Project

A project funded by the National Science Foundation to digitize over 60,000 specimens from participating University of Michigan museums. Three collection efforts dating from the early 1800s to the mid-1900s were chosen for their historical significance and multidisciplinary nature.

The Geological Surveys of Michigan

Beginning in 1837, the year Michigan gained statehood, the Geological Surveys produced some of the earliest geological, zoological, and botanical collections from the state.

Photo: Populus tremuloides

Joseph Beal Steere

An Ann Arbor native, Steere traveled through the Amazon, Philippines, China, and Taiwan in 1870-1875; the specimens he sent back to the University of Michigan formed the nucleus for the Museum of Natural History.

Photo: Babyrousa Babyrussa

Walter Koelz

With his collecting partner Rup Chand, Koelz traveled extensively in India, Iran, and the Himalayas on the first University-sponsored expedition to South Asia from 1930-1953.

Photo: Lophophorus

Collection Highlights

154 years of collection history (1805 - 1959)
Over 70,000 photos
Specimen types include: birds, herbs, insects and mammals

EXPLORE SPECIMENS

Uncaught exception thrown in shutdown function.

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2014 Cannot execute queries while other unbuffered queries are active. Consider using PDOStatement::fetchAll(). Alternatively, if your code is only ever going to run against mysql, you may enable query buffering by setting the PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY attribute.: DELETE FROM {semaphore} WHERE (value = :db_condition_placeholder_0) ; Array ( [:db_condition_placeholder_0] => 1521554116672c06d6ab62d3.87778632 ) in lock_release_all() (line 269 of /home/nsfbiomu/public_html/drupal/includes/lock.inc).