Hi, my name is Alyana Lalani and I am a work-learn student in the Marine Invertebrates Collection at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. I mainly worked in the collections with two specific collections the fossilized marine invertebrates that are less than 10,000 years old and a new collection that we recently received called the Henson Collection with specimens from Haida Gwaii. So with the fossil collection, I was basically picking through the fossils and choosing the best preserved ones, and the rest of them went into boxes. We didn't record any of the data because most of the specimens didn't have any data with them. With the Henson Collection, they all had dates, location, areas and information about the specimens.

When I received the collection, it was basically in cardboard boxes and Ziploc bags, and so I had to take everything out of the Ziploc bags and the cardboard boxes and put them into P.E.T. boxes, which is a specific type of plastic that is the best way to protect the specimens from any moisture or bugs or anything that might ruin them in the future. So the majority of the Hanson collection was actually collected around the 1960s, so of course everything was recorded in a notebook. So part of my job has been transcribing the data from the notebook into an Excel sheet so that we can integrate the data with the rest of the marine invertebrate collection.

Because the specimens are from the 1960s a lot of them have new scientific names, so I've been using WoRMS, which is the World Register of Marine Species, to update the scientific names for the specimens. So the Marine Invertebrates Collection encompasses a wide variety of specimens, from gastropods to bivalves to echinoderms like this fossilized sand dollar seen here. Not all of the specimens we receive come with data. That's why we consult the experts like Francisco to help with the identification.

Hello, my name is Francisco Solis. I am a taxonomist of echinoderms. I work in Mexico City at the Autonomous University of Mexico. I've been working for almost one year now, probably almost a year, looking at the taxonomy of echinoderms here at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. So far we identified, almost 210 lots of the specimens containing 1000 of them in probably now 79 species. They came from many places around the planet like Alaska, B.C., US, Mexico, Hawaii, Argentina, Antarctica, UK and actually when we were working with specimens from Hawaii, It was a surprise that we found a new species here in the collection and we name it after the mythology of the Hawaiian people.

So on the other hand, there are some specimens that are really well labeled and have a lot of data with them. For example, there is a jar of nematodes or parasitic worms from 1964, and they were collected from the body of a killer whale. And this killer whale or orca was most likely Moby Doll who was captured in Vancouver in 1964, and he was the second whale ever to be kept in captivity. The Marine Invertebrate Collection and the Beaty Biodiversity Museum as a whole are really living and growing collections, and that's why it's so important that we preserve these specimens and we preserve the data so that we can maintain a record of the specimens, evolutionary history, their relationship to other organisms and in general, just a link to the past.