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Sharing space with 34 million dead insects

Museum entomologist Erica McAlister finds joy in the huge and growing diversity of her collections while extracting DNA from century-old specimens.
  1. Amber Dance

    1. Amber Dance is a freelance writer in Los Angeles, California.

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Erica McAlister photographed among specimens and models of flies at the Natural History Museum, London.

Erica McAlister is a senior curator at the Natural History Museum in London, UK, and author of The Secret Life of Flies (Firefly Books, 2017). Credit: Leonora Saunders for Nature

We don’t know the exact number of dead insects in the entomology collection at the Natural History Museum in London, but it’s more than 34 million.

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Nature 577, 590 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00115-3

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