Botany
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of over 134,000 botanical specimens. These date from the late 18th century to the present. The collection incorporates the original Glasgow Museums’ civic collection, of over 52,000 specimens, also known as ‘GLAM’; the University of Strathclyde (formerly Andersonian/Royal College) collection of 13,000 specimens, known as ‘GGO’; and the University of Glasgow’s Botany Department collection, of over 68,000 specimens, known as ‘GL’. It contains representative material from the plant and fungi kingdoms – algae, mosses and liverworts (bryophytes), flowering plants and ferns (vascular plants), and fungi including lichens. The collection is primarily from the British Isles, with a focus on Scotland, but there are over 17,000 specimens from Europe and the rest of the world, notably south Asia. Most of the collection is made up of dried plant specimens either pressed and mounted on large herbarium sheets or contained in small packets. There are also small collections of fruits and seeds (carpological specimens), timber and a few other morphological specimens, plus a few sets of microscopic slides. There are a number of known or possible type specimens in the collection. The most important are in J Stirton’s lichen and moss collections (exotic and UK), which contain more than 700 named type specimens. Other important collectors well represented in the collection include Prof. G Walker Arnott, Prof W H Harvey, E Fries, E M Holmes, W Mudd, R Spruce and A Lister.
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