Over 500,000 specimens

From snails to whales, algae to mahogany, our collections preserve an astonishing range of species illustrating the breadth and complexity of our Earth's biodiversity.

New Research

"A new study led by researchers from the UMass Comparative Primatology Lab details how hair microbiome – the collection of microbes, such as bacteria, fungi, viruses and their genes that naturally live on and inside our bodies – differs between human and nonhuman primates. The findings, they say, have important implications for understanding the biology and conservation of wild and captive primates and the uniqueness of the human microbiome" (Inside UMass Weekly, August 11, 2022).

This research was funded in part by the UMNHC Summer Graduate Research Scholarship program. The full paper can be found here.