Nearly 25 years ago, Allan Wilson and colleagues isolated DNA sequences from museum specimens of kangaroo rats (Dipodomys panamintinus) and compared these sequences with those from freshly collected animals (Thomas et al. 1990). The museum specimens had been collected up to 78 years earlier, so the two samples provided a direct temporal comparison of patterns of genetic variation. This was not ...

1 National Museum of Natural History, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Pensoft Publishers, 12, Prof. Georgi Zlatarski St., 1700 Sofia, Bulgaria 2 Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Pensoft Publishers, 12, Prof. Georgi Zlatarski St., 1700 Sofia, Bulgaria 3 Natural History Museum of Denmark (Zoological Museum), University of Copenhagen, Universite...

Current museum metadata tends to be focused around the properties of the heritage object such as the artist, style and date of creation. This form of metadata can index a museum’s collection but cannot express the relations between heritage objects and related concepts found in contemporary museum exhibitions. A modern museum exhibition, rather than providing a taxonomic classification of herit...

Memory can be modified when reactivated, but little is known about how the properties and extent of reactivation can selectively affect subsequent memory. We developed a novel museum paradigm to directly investigate reactivation-induced plasticity for personal memories. Participants reactivated memories triggered by photos taken from a camera they wore during a museum tour and made relatedness ...

If we consider most museums applications accessible through the Web, we can notice a lack of support able to adapt to the different information needs that different users may have regarding a certain topic. Adaptive support, by which an application provides different information taking into account the users’ interactions, can give useful assistance. In particular, we focus our attention on how...

otters at the top of the food chain and feeding largely on fish are likely to be especially vulnerable to the effects of bioaccumulating pollutants. this research reports the first data on mercury levels found in hairs of river otters (lutra lutra) from iran. between june and december 2007, we collected museum and recent collections of river otter hair. these samples were collected from several...

The Museum Documentation Centre MDC of Zagreb was founded in 1955, and by widening the scope of its programs and activities has grown to be a modem information, documentation and communication (INDOK) Centre for the museum sector in Croatia. Its initial purpose and the basis of its activities is collecting documentation on museums, keeping records on their activities, forwarding and promoting m...

The distribution and biology of the beaver beetle, Platypsyllus castoris Ritsema, are summarized for North America. In light of the fact that the beetle uses two beaver species as hosts which have seemingly been separated for some five million years on two continents, it is asked if the Nearctic and Palearctic beetle populations are really the same species. 86 Volume 20, No. 1-2, March-June, 20...

seals and clay sealings are the most important cultural material of sasanian period. there have been a few seals and bullas of various periods retained in the moghadam museum of tehran. these materials have not been introduced so far. authors of the present paper aim at to study and introduce the sasanian seals and bullas of this museum especially those bearing animal symbolic motifs. we do thi...

Department of Anthropology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208277, New Haven, CT 06520, USA (EJS) Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208106, New Haven, CT 06520, USA (EJS, ATR) Division of Vertebrate Zoology, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, CT 06520, USA (EJS, ATR) United States Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, National M...