Abstract

The ~1.97 million egg sets (~5 million eggs) housed in museums have not been used in proportion to their availability. We highlight the wide variety of scientific disciplines that have used egg collections and the geographic locations and sizes of these collections, to increase awareness of the importance of egg collections, improve their visibility to the scientific community, and suggest that they offer a wealth of data covering large spatial scales and long time series for broad investigations into avian biology. We provide a brief history of egg collections and an updated list of museums/institutions with egg collections worldwide. We also review the limitations, challenges, and management of egg collections, and summarize recent literature based on historical and recent museum egg materials.

中文翻译：

---

世界博物馆收藏品中的五百万个鸡蛋是宝贵而未充分利用的资源

摘要

博物馆容纳的约197万个鸡蛋（约500万个鸡蛋）并未按可获得的比例使用。我们着重介绍了使用蛋类收藏以及这些蛋收藏的地理位置和大小的各种科学学科，以提高人们对蛋收藏重要性的认识，提高它们在科学界的知名度，并建议它们提供大量数据涵盖大空间尺度和长时间序列，可广泛用于禽类生物学研究。我们提供鸡蛋收集的简要历史记录，以及提供全球鸡蛋收集的博物馆/机构的最新列表。我们还将回顾鸡蛋收集的局限性，挑战和管理，并根据历史和博物馆鸡蛋的历史资料总结最近的文献。