Description
The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences houses a precious collection of zoological, anthropological, paleontological, mineralogical and geological materials and data. The renowned Iguanodons from Bernissart, ambassadors of the Belgian science institute in Brussels, represent a natural history collection currently estimated to hold over 37 million specimens. The roots of the present day collection reach far back in history. It evolved from the Natural History collection of Karel of Lotharingen, governor of The Netherlands (1712-1780) and was part of didactic materials owned by the Central School of the City of Brussels. After the independence of Belgium, the City of Brussels donated the collection to the Belgian Government and became part of the autonomous Royal Natural History Museum in 1846, known as the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences since 1948. Fieldwork by researchers and collaborators, in Belgium and abroad, donations and purchases have been expanding the assets ever since. The data presented in this dataset are coming from the DaRWIN database, the collection management tool of the RBINS. Today, DaRWIN manages information on about 550.000 specimens stored in the institute's repositories. This number rises on a daily basis thanks to the continued efforts of curators and their adjuncts that are responsible for maintaining the stored specimens and information. The dataset is made available on GBIF and covers the complete collection, as well as subcollections within Vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish), Invertebrates (acarines, arachnids, Belgian marine invertebrates, brachiopods, bryozoans, marine chelicerates, cnidarians, crustaceans, echinoderms, molluscs and rotifers) and Entomology (beetles, dipterans, heterocerans, hymenopterans, orthopterans and rhopalocerans).
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 636,115 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
- Occurrence (core)
- ExtendedMeasurementOrFact
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Downloads
Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 8138eb72-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a. Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Belgian Biodiversity Platform.
Keywords
natural history collection; RBINS; DaRWIN; Biodiversity; Occurrence; Specimen
Contacts
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Geographic Coverage
Worldwide
Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
No Description available
Kingdom | Animalia |
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Temporal Coverage
Start Date / End Date | 1814-09-01 / 2019-01-09 |
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Additional Metadata
Alternative Identifiers | 8138eb72-f762-11e1-a439-00145eb45e9a |
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http://ipt.naturalsciences.be/ipt/resource?r=be_rbins_darwin |