The new National Research Collections Australia Facility isn’t open to the public, but the team is in the process of digitising each and every one of its 13 million specimens. Photo: CSIRO.
More than 13 million of Australia’s flora and fauna specimens have moved to their new purpose-built – and pest-resistant – home in Acton.
Named ‘Diversity’, the facility is effectively a vault, a time capsule, of the country’s birds, mammals, reptiles, insects and more – spanning specimens Charles Darwin collected during his visit to Australia in the 1830s – down to frozen penguins discovered by researchers in Antarctica in the 1980s.
About 20,000 are added to the National Research Collection every year – enough to outgrow CSIRO’s former facility in Crace.
The new building, jointly funded by CSIRO and the Department of Education to the tune of $90 million, has space for at least the next 20 years’ worth of collecting.
You can read our full story on Diversity in our previous story here. But research scientist Dr Keith Bayliss also showed us around …
