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Flipping butterfly collecting technology on its head, the Natural History Museum of Utah will turn fragile, sometime brittle, butterfly wings into technicolor images with a new grant.
For hundreds of years, butterfly study was an exercise in pins and cardboard. But NHMU has received a $24,993 grant from Museums for America to digitize specimen-quality photos of 36,000 pinned butterflies and moths to create an online database, the Southwest Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN).
For the first time, the museum's historic collection will be available in an electronic format, both for in-house use and for external researchers studying the impacts of climate and land use on arthropods.
Two years ago, the museum's collection nearly doubled with a donation of 16,000 specimens collected over five decades by Salt Lake City doctor James Pearce, who died in 2009. Many of the butterflies and moths Pearce pinned were found in the Salt Lake valley in the 1950s, but his collection also included a Blue Morpho from South America.
All 250 of the butterflies fluttering up the wall of the museum canyon came from Pearce's collection.
The Utah museum's grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services was one of 263 awards totalling $30 million.