In the early days of March this year, TEE Lab project officer Marx Yim travelled to Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) in the UK for a week to examine their dung beetle collections and to determine the efforts necessary to integrate their collections into our GBIF project "Mobilising data on ecologically important insects in Malaysia and Singapore".
Over the course of the visit, dung beetle collections from Singapore and Sabah were examined to understand what is required prior to integrating them into our work. This included close examination of the data available on labels on specimens, cataloguing key specimens and also preliminary imaging of specimens. Several interesting type specimens and morphospecies were observed and this will be useful in determining accurate species IDs for future additions and revisions to our checklist of dung beetles of Sabah (link) and Singapore (link).
Apart from work, I had the pleasure of occasionally encountering dung beetles from other parts of the world that I have never seen before. This trip is important as it lays the foundation for the next step which is digitisation and imaging of the key specimens that were located and marked from this visit.