Expeditions play a formative role in natural science research. Data – in the guise of key specimens or crucial experiments – are collected on expeditions. Expeditionary science has long served to bolster the collections of natural history museums. The specimens collected, as well as the publications that derive from those specimens, bring increased prestige to the sponsoring institutions. The success for a museum of a scientific collecting expedition can be judged in the short term by the sheer size of the collection gathered. Museums of many types tout the size of their collections as a proxy for their importance amongst comparable institutions. Larger collections are often interpreted as better than smaller collections, and in this context quantity takes on a quality all its own. Long term success of an expedition and a collection can be judged on factors such as the number of new species described, or the theoretical breakthroughs made – or not made – by studying, analyzing, and interpreting specimens and data acquired. In this session, we present five views of expeditionary natural science and the results of those expeditions in terms of biological evolution and extinction.
