Through collaborative efforts of researchers involved in the OpenWings Project, we have begun sampling voucher specimens at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), one of the largest collections of avian specimens in the world. The collection’s extensive coverage across species and geography will serve as one of the primary resources for completing an all bird species evolutionary tree. Approximately 3,000 plus bird species are lacking modern genetic material (i.e., frozen tissue samples). The species that do not have tissue samples include extinct and vulnerable species, as well as species found in areas that are geographically difficult to access. To fill in these sampling gaps across the avian tree of life, we are using historical museum specimens that are up to 100+ years old. To obtain historical genetic material, we cut small sections of skin from the toe pads of museum specimens, which contain DNA that will be isolated in a molecular laboratory. To encourage consistency and increase efficiency, we designed a mobile station for processing specimens that can readily move through the hundreds of rows and multiple floors of specimens at the AMNH. During specimen processing we image each bird and record metadata to have a connection between our […]
Organizing the sampling
Although it’s been a little over a year since our last post, we’ve been busy. As I noted in the introductory post, the goal of OpenWings is to generate a time-calibrated phylogeny for all bird species using vouchered museum specimens. The important word here being “vouchered”. A voucher or voucher specimen is a preserved organism that represents the animal used in a study (or studies). The voucher can be a source of phenotypic or genetic data (or both). Because vouchers are housed in museums, they provide a resilient, tangible reference that can be used to confirm (or define) the identity of a species, subspecies, or population. Vouchered specimens are important because they allow researchers to deal with problems like misidentification, incorrect or changing taxonomy, and differences in species concepts. Vouchered specimens can also provide a temporal record of how species, subspecies, and populations have changed over time — provided sufficient specimens have been collected over the intervals of interest. Vouchered specimens can also be type specimens. One of the hurdles for a project like OpenWings is identifying vouchered specimens from which we can collect genetic data and doing that across a number of ornithological collections throughout the United States and the rest of […]