Dr Alex Ball - Natural History Museum

Imaging and Analysis at the Natural History Museum: From 3D scanning whales and dinosaurs, reconstructing the earliest terrestrial ecosystems, to predicting damage to satellites. A challenging, but fun working environment.

My background is in zoology, looking at embryological development of neogastropod snails using a combination of light and scanning and transmission electron microscopy and computer-aided 3D reconstruction from serial sections. How did I get from there, to where I am now and what skill sets have I acquired along the way?

The NHM has truly enormous collections, over 80 million specimens are stored across three sites and range in size from water samples containing diatoms, ocean bottom deposits containing single-celled organisms to complete whale and dinosaur skeletons. The fish collection contains over 15km of shelving and the mammal collection requires two complete multi-storey buildings for storage.

Our collections include samples described by Linnaeus, rocks collected in Antarctica during the ill-fated Scott Expedition, samples collected by James Cook during his voyages to the Indian Ocean and more recently, samples collected from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS Rex mission.

Our analytical facilities date back to about 175 years ago, with light microscopy likely having started long before that. As new imaging or analytical techniques have evolved and been proven effective with natural science research, they have quickly been adopted by the Museum. For example, we started using X-ray Diffraction to study minerals about 95 years ago and the electron microscopy labs were founded in the mid-1960s. Such foundation techniques have been quickly joined by Mass Spectrometry, FTIR, micro-CT scanning, 3D surface scanning etc. with ever more focus on automation of tasks to allow for data collection to continue overnight and through the weekends.

As a lab manager, keeping track of the research being carried out across the Museum and by our peers elsewhere, ensuring that the NHM labs are kept up to date, but don’t become overwhelmingly bloated, is a real challenge.

This talk will give you some examples of some of the research carried out in the Museum and how our team contributes not only to research, but to public outreach at the NHM.