Meet our Curator of Benthic Molluscs

With so many fantastic team members across the Museum, we want to showcase some of them! In this series, find out more about work and life at the Museum.

Next up, we talk to our Curator of Benthic Molluscs, Katie Collins, about the collections she cares for, what she finds both interesting and unsettling, and her funny run in with a BBC producer.

1.??????What is the main purpose of your role?

I’m the Curator of Benthic Molluscs in Palaeontology, so my role is to take care of the fossil clams, snails, tusk shells, chitons, and their various relatives (every mollusc that isn’t ammonites, squids, octopus, and their kin). I am responsible for their safety and upkeep, making sure they’re stored safely, databased usefully, and that we have them identified correctly and organised according to the latest understanding of their relationships. I am also responsible for making sure that they’re available for researchers to visit and study. When people can’t visit, I supply information, measurements, and images.

2.??????What does a typical day look like?

When I’m onsite, a typical day might start with checking my email, and then going into the collection to find specimens for any enquiries that have come in – sometimes I need to check that we do actually have what they want, and sometimes I just need to drop the specimens off at the Photo Unit. I also need to catalogue the drawers as our collection is very large and considerably older than the advent of computerised cataloguing, so we’re still catching up with the backlog - I check the condition of the specimens while I do that. I may also have enquiries from the public wanting information on fossils they’ve found, which is sometimes nice and simple, and sometimes requires me to go into the collections for comparative material. At the moment, I’m also working on our sectional library, so I spend a lot of time sorting out reprints that have accumulated, and when I get the time, I also describe new species of fossil bivalve, or do micro-CT scanning for my own research into the geometry of shell coiling.

3.??????What are the most enjoyable and challenging parts of your role?

Working with specimens is the most enjoyable part of my role and the main reason I chose to pursue a career in museums rather than trying to go into a university or industry. I really love being able to take care of the collection and make it accessible for others and for researchers of the future. The most challenging part of the role is probably all the myriad forms required to complete in order to get things done - but documentation is vital to good collections practice, so I can’t be too sour about it!

4.??????What do you like about working for the Museum?

The fossil mollusc collection at the Museum is one of the best in the world, so with my researcher’s hat on, I really like having it at my fingertips! But really, I think my colleagues in fossil and living Mollusca are the best part – I love working with the other palaeontologists and malacologists here, and we get on so well. It’s really nice being part of a team!

5.??????What’s the most interesting/weird thing you have learned about the Museum?

That’s a hard question! There’s something interesting or weird round every corner, honestly. There’s something simultaneously fascinating and unsettling about the storeroom full of taxidermied fish though …

6.??????Do you have any fun or special memories you have made while working at the Museum?

I joined the Museum late in 2019, so actually most of the time I’ve worked here has been under COVID restrictions, so not a lot of special fun memories there. That said though, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in a quarry dig in Wiltshire looking for fossil crinoids with a lot of the palaeo team, and that was really wonderful. Maybe my favourite funny moment was heaving up a huge slab of rock with fellow fossil mollusc curator Zoe Hughes, feeling very accomplished because it was really heavy and it took a lot of effort to get it moved so we could see the fossils underneath - only for the BBC producer who’d been watching us to rush over and ask us to put it back and do it again so they could film it. You should have seen our faces!