Lost, stolen or strayed: the fate of missing natural history collections

Naturalis Museum, Leiden, The Netherlands

10th-11th May 2001

Abstracts for most of the papers given at this conference are available on-line: please click on the relevant link below:

D. Allen : Missing collections of British and Irish vascular plants.
E. Borgo, Mauro Brunetti and Carlo Violani : Recovery from damages due to the 1992 flood of a natural history collection.
P. J. Boylan : International cultural property law and the protection of natural history collections.
S. Chaplin : Museums of The Royal College of Surgeons of England – recovering John Hunter's missing museum.J. Edwards : The Jardin d’Acclimatisation, Paris.F. Egmond : Collecting natural history on paper: some little known sixteenth-century Dutch manuscripts depicting and describing marine life.
C. Fisher : Headless thickheads and wandering weebongs : the limbo birds
P. Foster : Gilbert White (1720–1793) and the lost Gibraltar collection of John White (1727–1780).
J. P. Hume : The dodo and other Mauritian fauna, found and lost again.

J. Kiser : Hamilton L. Smith's Diatomacearum Species Typicae and his lost microscopical library.
V. Kisling : Extinct zoos: what happened to the animal collections?
S. Knell: Collection loss, cultural change and the second law of thermodynamics.
H. W. Lack : The Dahlem catastrophe.
J. van der Land and J. Krikken : Writing and rewriting the history of natural history in Leiden. [no abstract available]
A. MacGregor : Natural history collections in the Ashmolean, seventeenth to nineteenth century.M. Masseti : A lost collection of bird and mammals from northern Syria (1989-1994).
Marco Masseti : Homeless carnivores (Mammalia: Canidae, Mustelidae, Felidae) from the Aegean islands in the Greek museums.
Marco Masseti: The lost cranes of the island of Lampedusa, in the Sicilian Channel, Italy.
P. Morris : Lost, found and still looking – tracing some examples of early taxidermy.

R. Prys-Jones : The bird collections of Richard Meinertzhagen: fraud, its detection and some happy endings.
H. Reichenbach : Lost zoos: the decline and disappearance of zoological gardens.
C. Riedl-Dorn : Displaced documents (treasures) – the strange fate of archive materials (collections) and drawings of the Vienna Natural History Museum.
C. Rovati, F. Barbagli, S. Maretti, S. Santamaria, T. Viezzoli and C. Violani : The Natural History Museum of Pavia University: salvaging and studying of historical collections after years of neglect.
W. Conner Sorensen : Nineteenth century American entomological collections: a success story with exceptions.
V. Stagl : The unknown manuscript of Polydore Roux (1732-1833) in the Crustacean collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna
C. Violani : The lost bird collection of C. S. Rafinesque: sunk in the Atlantic Ocean.
C. Violani and E. Borgo : Pitta bertae, Salvadori 1868, an enigmatic unique bird type lost in the mail.
S. Walker :The Indian Natural History Project and the menagerie at Barrackpore (1803-1878).
S. Walker : Description and drawings of selected quadrupeds of the Indian Natural History Project, Barrackpore.