Southeastern Vertebrate Museum

The Southeastern Louisiana University Vertebrate Museum is a research facility for the study of ecology, evolution, and natural history of vertebrate animals. We possess an ever-growing collection of  fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal
specimens.  The Vertebrate Museum serves as a permanent repository for vertebrate specimens and acts as a library of biological information for use in current and future research projects.

We currently have on the order of 100,000 total vertebrate specimens!

One of the main goals of the Vertebrate Museum (as with other natural history collections) is to maintain collections for future researchers to look at specimens and patterns that we do not currently have the technology or knowledge for.

Thanks to a recent NSF Grant, we currently have several large projects ongoing in the museum, primarily revolving around the digitization of the collections. Specifically, we aim to:

1. focus on curation of existing museum specimens and tissue samples
2. digitize and georeference specimen data
3. accession, retag, and relabel Herpetology specimens donated from the Tulane University
   Museum (now the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute)
4. integrate the data with online repositories
5. make the data available to the general scientific community
6. collaborating with Turtle Cove Research Station to increase outreach and education

Funding obtained from this NSF grant has also allowed us to hire a science communication expert, Dr. Elizabeth A. Marchio, “Dr. Liz”, who is developing outreach and education materials for K-12 students and a traveling fish, reptile and amphibian program titled The Bone Sheaux. This outreach program will be used to stimulate interest in organismal biology to K-12 students in southeastern Louisiana, which includes some of the most impoverished parishes in Louisiana.

Dr. Liz is the museum liaison for outreach and education with the Vertebrate Museum. If you’re interested in learning more or in booking a campus tour or on-site program, please e-mail her at [email protected]. If you are interested in volunteering in the museum, see here for an application.