The NHMO bird collection contains about 100 000 objects preserved for scientific use. Objects include whole skins, skeletons and bones, eggs, sperm cells, or samples of tissue, blood and DNA for molecular analyses.
A brief summary of object types and their taxonomical and geographical distribution is presented in
Overview.
Around 4000 species are represented, covering about one third of the global avifauna.
The taxonomy follows
IOC World Bird List version 11.2.