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All Arthropod Collections
The Field Museum's Division of Insects houses worldwide collections of Arthropoda (excluding Crustacea) that rank fifth in overall size among North American collections. At present, the collection includes approximately 4.1 million pinned insects and 8 million specimens or lots of insects and other arthropods in alcohol or on microscope slides. The collection receives heavy use by US and international visitors and borrowers.
Learn moreThe Field Museum's Division of Insects houses worldwide collections of Arthropoda (excluding Crustacea) that rank fifth in overall size among North American collections. At present, the collection includes approximately 4.1 million pinned insects and 8 million specimens or lots of insects and other arthropods in alcohol or on microscope slides. The collection receives heavy use by US and international visitors and borrowers. Collection data are now available online in KE EMu for many parts of the collection:
- Specimen catalogs of ants, bat flies, lice, millipedes, scorpions, and types of other non-mite arachnids, Lepidoptera from Strecker Collection;
- Species-level inventories (with specimen counts) of our holdings for the beetle families Staphylinidae, Silphidae, Histeridae, Sphaeritidae, Synteliidae, Carabidae (ongoing), and for Lepidoptera and Diptera;
- Species-level inventories (usually with unit tray counts) for the other insect orders.
We claim copyright to our data. The information is available ONLY for not-for-profit scientific use with the stipulation that FMNH be clearly identified as the source of the data. We request copies or reprints of publications that are based on our collections.
Citing this database: If you wish to refer to this database in a publication, use the following attribution: "Field Museum of Natural History (2006-2011): The Arthropod Collections Database, Division of Insects, Zoology Department, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. http://emuweb.fieldmuseum.org/arthropod/Query.php" with your access date.
Please see Insects' loan policies on the Policies tab of our divisional home page.
Creation of the original databases was heavily supported by National Science Foundation grants, some of which are continuing to support data entry and/or database development:
- DEB-8814449, A. F. Newton & J. B. Kethley;
- DEB-8906825, A. F. Newton;
- DEB-9527968, A. F. Newton & M. K. Thayer;
- DEB-9712438, P. Sierwald & W. A. Shear;
- DEB-9702824, J. W. O. Ballard;
- DEB-0118749, M. K. Thayer & A. F. Newton;
- DEB-0529715, P. Sierwald et al.;
- DBI-0545051, C. W. Dick et al.;
- DEB-0515672 & DEB-0618503, J. D. Weckstein & J. M. Bates.
Conversion of Insects' legacy collection data to KE EMu was partially funded by NSF DBI-0545051 and by the Institute of Museum and Library Services' support for Common Ground, IMLS CM-00-05-0050-05.
Please see Insects' loan policies on the Loans/Visitors tab of our divisional home page.
The data available here (some also through their own sectional web pages) are:
- Specimen catalogs of ants, bat flies, lice, millipedes, scorpions, and types of other non-mite arachnids, Lepidoptera from Strecker Collection;
- Species-level inventories (with specimen counts) of our holdings for the beetle families Staphylinidae, Silphidae, Histeridae, Sphaeritidae, Synteliidae, Carabidae (ongoing), and for Lepidoptera, Trichoptera (pinned collection only), and Diptera;
- Species-level inventories (usually with unit tray counts) for the other insect orders.
This search form does NOT include our bulk samples, which have their own page. Searches are automatically performed as whole-word wildcard searches, i.e., entering Chyromya in the Scientific Name field will find all species (and undetermined material) of that genus. The scientific name of partly-identified material is the lowest taxon to which it is identified. Entering a subgeneric name alone will find all taxa in that subgenus if the subgeneric name has been entered in our database; if you don't find something that way, try using the appropriate generic name.
Searches will take more time with wildcards (*) in conjunction with partial words. Results are sorted by Scientific Name, but if there are more than 5000 records in the result set, they will be unsorted. If you choose to enter more than one term in a field, only records with both terms will be returned. The vast majority of records will not have images.
