London’s Natural History Museum has been called “Nature’s Treasurehouse”. Crammed with more than 80mn objects, the 272-year-old collection contains everything from a skeleton of Sophie the Stegosaurus to 12.5mn pinned specimens of butterflies and moths. But this rich trove is busy turning itself into a global digital resource that could open up new pathways for scientific research in our artificial intelligence age.
As he whizzes through the Jurassic gardens, the NHM’s director Doug Gurr enthuses about the possibilities of using the museum’s collections to deepen our understanding of the natural world and the effects of climate change. For example, researchers are currently studying specimens of Arctic krill, which probably constitute the world’s largest wild biomass, that were collected during the Scott and Shackleton expeditions more than a century ago. “We are now going back to the same locations and seeing how things are changing today,” he says.
As a former head of Amazon UK, Gurr is immersed in technology and is building a specialist AI team within the museum to act as a public good. The team is using pattern recognition software to help the UK Border Force identify endangered animal skins and translate museum texts into speech to assist visually impaired visitors.