Eggs is eggs: A case study in destructive sampling and analysis of museum natural history specimens

Where destructive sampling of museum natural history collections is proposed, the needs of current research must be balanced against preservation for future use of a finite resource. This paper presents a case study of an interaction between researchers at the University of York and curators at York Museums Trust (YMT) regarding a request by the former for destructive sampling from YMT's historic bird egg collection. We draw attention to reasons for success and share an approach to managing a destructive sampling request in a regional museum useful to both researchers (in preparing requests) and curators (in assessing and acting upon these).