Collections Managed by the DMRC
The Alabama Museum of Natural History Collections are managed by the Department of Museum Research & Collections. We keep track of publications using our specimens here. You can access our Collections Policy on this page.
A major goal for our collections is to catalogue all of our artifacts online. We have already digitized thousands of artifacts and specimens! You can browse these specimens and artifacts via our new Collections Portal here or by using the online database Arctos.
If you are interested in seeing a tour of one of our collections facilities, click here.
More information on our individual collections can be found below
The Archaeological Collection holds over one million artifacts, associated writings, and photographic images documenting the history of human occupation in the southeastern United States and beyond.
The ethnology and history collections consist of over 15,000 items, including bottles, stoneware jugs, hand tools, and telegraph insulators. It also contains objects related to the Gorgas House.
The UA Museums’ Vertebrate Zoology Collection consists predominantly of Alabama mammal and bird specimens, as well as a comparative skeletal collection.
Archival objects include ephemera such as historical records, correspondence, photos, microscope slides, catalogues, field notes, video/audio recordings, manuscripts, scrapbooks and journals.
The Ancillary Collection supports or enhances the display and storage of the University of Alabama Museums’ collections, but does not meet the historical, scientific, or pedagogical criteria to be fully accessioned.
The Entomology Collection contains approximately 500K specimens, including two historical pinned collections of Lepidoptera and Coleoptera and a large collection of aquatic insects.
The Geology Collection consists of thousands of mineral and rock specimens. The geology specimens are mostly used for educational and outreach purposes, but they are also used for research.
The Paleontology Collection is made up of hundreds of thousands of vertebrate, invertebrate, plant, and trace fossils, mostly originating from Alabama. The majority of the fossils are invertebrates.
This collection contains 20,081 catalogued lots of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial invertebrates and an estimated 10,000 additional lots of uncatalogued specimens.
Collections Managed by Biological Sciences
The UA Herbarium houses about 64,000 specimens of vascular plants, about 6,000 specimens of mosses, and a few liverworts, lichens, algae, and fungi. Learn more about the herbarium at herbarium.as.ua.edu.
The Reptile and Amphibian Collection is comprised of specimens largely collected prior to 1990 from around the state of Alabama.
The University of Alabama Ichthyological Collection is one of the largest educational and research collections of fishes in the southeastern United States.