Funding our projects have local and global impact on science and society

Funding a Vertebrate Zoology Curator at Evolutionmuseet will support research, teaching, and the care of the museum’s vertebrate collections. The position will help digitize and maintain approximately 20,000+ valuable specimens, which are regularly used by researchers, teachers and students. These are not only skeletons and stuffed animals, but also, eggs, nests and a unique historical collection of dry organs from the early 20th century.

We have a very large collection of marine invertebrates in desperate need of taxonomic update and digitization. Specifically, the shell collections will benefit from the expertise of a mollusc specialist. Your support will notably help maintain 1,251 shells from the Linnaean collection along with more than 200,000 marine invertebrate specimens, including corals, jellyfishs, anemones, seastars, clams and snails. Only 5% are currently registered and accessible online.

To honor the legacy of Professor Thomas Jaenson, a leading expert in medical entomology, we are seeking funding for a curator to care for his invaluable collections of disease vectors. These include over 10,000 ticks and possibly more than 10,000 mosquitoes collected during his decades of research on tick-borne diseases in Sweden and malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in Africa. These unique specimens and archives contain important data which are critical to understanding how vector-borne diseases are influenced by climate change, wildlife, and human activity, both nationally and globally. A dedicated curator will ensure these collections remain accessible for future research and public health preparedness, supporting Sweden’s capacity to monitor, prevent, and respond to emerging infectious threats.

Insects are the little things that run the world, delivering vital ecosystem services from pollination to decomposition and carbon sequestration. The entomological collection at Evolutionsmuseet comprises approximately 1.5 million specimens from around the globe, with particular strength in Nordic material. Major holdings include 138,000 Hemiptera (true bugs), 276,000 Coleoptera (beetles), 360,000 Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps), 157,500 Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), and 324,000 Diptera (true flies), stored across thousands of drawers. Much of this material requires systematic organising and updating according to standard European labeling systems. We are seeking funding for a curator to lead this essential work, including databasing and digitisation, ensuring that biodiversity data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) by both science and society.

To support the long-term stewardship of our entomological collections, we are also seeking support for an Entomology Curatorial Assistant. One of our key objectives is ensuring the collection continues to be a centre for research and information about Nordic and world insects. Training curators is essential to pass on knowledge to future generations, ensuring continued stewardship of important insect biodiversity, and ensuring that specimens are available to science and society. The assistant will learn specialist methods and techniques from both the Insect Biodiversity Curator and the Medical Entomology Curator, gaining valuable skills across a wide range of insect groups and collection types. This role will provide hands-on training in collection management, taxonomy, and digitisation, contributing to the effective care of these important collections.

It is our responsibility to pass specimens on to the future generations. This requires expert knowledge of specimen treatment, labelling, preservation, repair and care. Help us continue our legacy and pass on the specimens in good condtion for the coming centuries. This person will have the highly sensitive task of restoring the Linnaean specimens, some of which are in poor state, after more than 250 years in our collections.

Lichens, the symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, have been in the focus at Uppsala University since the early 19th century, inspired by the last pupil of Linnaeus, Erik Acharius, and continued by the Father of Mycology, Elias Fries. Nowadays, biodiversity research at the university is carried out at Evolutionsmuseet, which is in possession of one of the top three most important lichen collections in the world. One would think that after more than two centuries of research there would not be much more to discover. Not so. We continuously detect and publish new species to science and new to Sweden, using advanced methods including chemical analysis and DNA sequencing. Your support will help maintain Evolutionsmuseet as a centre for lichen research, improving our global understanding of lichen biodiversity and species distributions.

Evolutionsmuseet is home to two large and internationally important collections, the bryophytes and the algae, including 275,000 and 60,000 specimens, respectively. We continuously receive requests to study the material. Yet, these collections have seen very little care and attention for at least the past five decades, with no dedicated curator. Your support will help us care for the material, improve accessibility, and make it available to the international scientific community.

Evolutionsmuseet is home to a collection of vascular plants from all over the world and includes nearly 2 million specimens, the museum’s single largest collection. For practical reasons, it is subdivided into plants from the Nordic countries and plants from the rest of the world. At the moment, we have one single curator to oversee the entire vascular plant collection, a monumental – and unrealistic – task. Two thirds of the vascular plant collections remain undigitized, rendering it difficult to overview and manage. With a dedicated curator for the Nordic vascular plants, we would be able to improve care and accessibility for all the vascular plants. Digitisation rates and services to the international scientific community would be vastly improved, speeding up access to urgently needed biodiversity data.

An assistant curator is responsible for many of the daily, seemingly ‘simple’ yet important tasks, which are crucial for the long-term maintenance and availability of the collections. The assistant curator contributes to the management of the collections, supporting the curators focus on taxonomic issues, digitizing demanding subcollections, and handling requests from the international scientific community. An assistant curator is an essential complement to the curators of a major herbarium, Evolutionsmuseet being in possession of one of the largest herbaria in the world, yet there has been none hired by university funds for several decades. Your support would ensure that plant specimens are properly preserved and accessible, and that digitization rates improve, thereby increasing availability of biodiversity data.

In our magazines we have an enormous collection of now extinct species of elephants, rhinoceroses, gazelles, giraffes, predators, ostriches and so on, excavated in China in the 1920’s through the Sino-Swedish collaboration. These beasts roamed a vast area of Eurasia ~20 – to 1 million years ago, in an environment resembling the Serengeti today. This material is the heart of our fossil vertebrate collection and it is extensively researched foremost by Chinese colleagues. But we need to bring the collection up to date with our modern catalogue system and need a specialist vertebrate curator to do the job.

We have the only known Swedish dinosaur! It is a large predatory beast, about 200 million years old, and was dug out in Skåne by a team of Uppsala palaeontologists. It is yet to be named. However, it is not an isolated find, but part of a unique ongoing project to document the entire ecosystem where it lived. More than 4000 specimens of fossil plants and animals have been collected. The curatorial aspects of this project are demanding and therefore we need a curatorial assistant to work with the lead researcher to organize, catalogue, conserved and (to some extend) digitized the material.

During the last five years the museum has acquired the largest private fossil collection in Sweden, a staggering amount of mostly Swedish fossils from the older fossil bearing strata, amassed through almost 40 years by private collector Jan Johansson in Närke. The size of the collection is remarkable, with several thousands of specimens, but more importantly the fossils are carefully collected and labelled. Many are from now inaccessible sites. Its value lies in the scientific and educational potential that such a collection present. But to make it available, organized and catalogued we need curatorial assistant.

Collections are in constant need of maintenance. As objects, they are endangered by the deteriorating effects of time, poor inhouse climate conditions, light, handling and so on. We are fortunate to have a conservator and a conservation lab, but the work load is demanding and the many tasks challenging. Ideally, we would therefore like to have an apprentice that can help with the many tasks and at the same time be groomed for a future in our conservation unit. This will ensure continuity and quality in our work with preserving the collections.

Tanius sinensis is a ~70 million year old dinosaur from China, brought back to Uppsala 1923 through the Sino-Swedish collaboration. It is one of two Chinese dinosaur that were the first in the world to be scientifically described. But Tanius is extremely fragile and cannot be exhibited or handled much by scientists. With the help of an assistant curator, we aim to digitize Tanius.  A 3D-scan will give us a detailed digital model and reproduction of the skeleton that can be used by researchers and we can mount and exhibit this magnificent Uppsala dinosaur. It also spares the real bones from handling and preserve it for posterity.

Our mineral collection contains a wealth of data both about each object and about the people who have collected and worked with the collections over the past 300 years. It is important that both written and orally transmitted information is not lost. Support a junior museum curator who can groomed into be the future bearer of knowledge about our mineral collections