ECRR > Member organisations > National Museums of Scotland

National Museums of Scotland

Research at the NMS aims to build and communicate knowledge of the Museums' collections. There are two broads strands:

• work which illuminates human history, culture and ingenuity in Scotland and worldwide;
• investigations which assists the wider understanding of our environment and its preservation for a sustainable future.

Specimens collected on Skye help to illustrate the geological origins of Scotland

Research programmes

Research is frequently collaborative, with a range of outside organisations both in Britain and overseas. Examples of research include:

• Occurrence and distribution of Scottish minerals;
• IR spectra of phosphate minerals;
• Plesiosaurs;
• Scottish dinosaurs and early tetrapods;
• Jurassic plants in Scotland;
• Scottish fossil fish (Old Red Sandstone);
• Geographical variation in sea birds;
• Introgressive hybridization in carnivores;
• Geographical variation in carnivores;
• Diet of British mustelids;
• Geographical variation and demography of British cetaceans;
• Taxonomy and ecology of mid-water Atlantic fish;
• Systematics of Diptera based on larval characters;
• Insects associated with dead wood in Scottish habitats;
• Taxonomy and host associations of W. Palaearctic parasitic Hymenoptera;
• Taxonomy of British polychaete worms;
• Taxonomy of cephalopods;

Facilities and staff

The natural history activity is centred on two sites, the Royal Museum in Chambers Street, and the West Granton Centre, both in Edinburgh.

The NMS has a staff of around 300, of which about 20 are directly deployed in research, curation and preparing exhibitions based on the natural history collections.

The collections, numbering several million specimens, are world-wide in scope though with a strong leaning towards Scottish material or the N.E. Atlantic/N.W. European area.

Edinburgh University's natural history collections were a founding component of the public museum in Chambers Street when the latter was first established in 1854.

For further information, please contact: