Natural Science Collections Facility - NSCF

24/08/2026

Our very own Shanelle Ribeiro is in the Sunday World, and there is a plant named after her.

In its Heroic Women feature this weekend, Sunday World honoured Shanelle, Project Manager right here at the Natural Science Collections Facility (NSCF).

The honour recognises her work securing South Africa's biodiversity history collections, and her role overseeing a national network of 19 herbaria, museums and universities that care for millions of preserved plants, animals and fossils. Even a plant found only in the Eastern Cape, Crassula shanelleae, has been named in her honour.

Perhaps the best part? "I didn't plan to go into science," she says. She studied international relations and started at South African National Biodiversity Institute in a project coordination role. Proof that the path into science can start anywhere.

Congratulations, Shanelle Scheun Ribeiro we are proud to have you guarding South Africa's natural heritage.

Join us in congratulating her in the comments.

Clipping: Sunday World, 23 August 2026.

20/08/2026

Every museum label tells a story. Most visitors read the species name, the collector, the date. They rarely see the names of the people who made the science possible.

Nosiphiwo Goci worked as a research assistant in the Natural History Department of the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town for over 17 years. She processed bulk insect samples, sometimes thousands from a single collecting event, and separated them into distinct taxonomic groups. She helped digitise the museum's entomology collection, securing baseline biodiversity data for future research.

Ten years ago, following her passing, a newly described parasitoid wasp species; Lissonota goci, was named in her memory. In taxonomy, a species name is permanent: peer-reviewed, published, and written into the scientific record.

The NSCF coordinates over 18 million specimens across 19 partner institutions. The people who make that science possible are rarely the ones whose names appear in journal bylines.

Her name is on the label. It should be in the story too.

Read the full article: https://nscf.org.za/2026/08/20/her-name-on-the-label-nosiphiwo-goci/

19/08/2026

On 21 December 1938, a young museum curator in East London saved a fish that had no name.

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was 31 years old and running the East London Museum at a time when the natural sciences were still overwhelmingly a man's world. While sorting through the catch of a fishing trawler working the Chalumna River mouth, she noticed a fin unlike anything in her collection.

Steel-blue. Heavy-scaled. Fins on fleschy stalks.

She saved it from being discarded. Had it transported to the museum. Alerted ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith.

Smith's identification in 1939 stunned the scientific world. This wasn't a new species of an old kind. It was a coelacanth — a group of fish whose fossil record ended around 65 million years ago, thought to have died out with the dinosaurs.

One of the most significant zoological discoveries of the 20th century. A living fossil, swimming off South Africa's coast.

Smith named the species Latimeria chalumnae — for the woman who saved it, and the river where it was caught.

The specimen still lives at the East London Museum today. But its real legacy is the label: one of the most famous specimen labels in the world, carrying a woman's name.

This Women's Month, the NSCF is running — a campaign to recognise the women whose names appear on specimen labels across South Africa's natural science collections.

A label is only a label because someone noticed, saved, and named.

👉 When you find a specimen collected by a woman, photograph the label and post it with .

🔗 Read the full story: https://nscf.org.za/2026/08/19/a-fish-from-65-million-years-ago-found-by-a-woman-in-east-london/

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18/08/2026

A praying mantis eating a snail sounds like something from a nature documentary that got the footage wrong. But it's real — and until now, it had never been documented in the wild, anywhere in the world.

A team of researchers, including three scientists affiliated with the Natural Science Collections Facility (NSCF), have just published the first confirmed observations of mantises feeding on shelled snails. Riaan Stals (Agricultural Research Council), Terence Bellingan (Albany Museum), and John Midgley (KwaZulu-Natal Museum) all independently discovered this behaviour through fieldwork and the citizen science platform iNaturalist - southern Africa — and then found each other.

What's particularly striking: every single recorded observation involved the genus Polyspilota. No other mantis genus has been caught doing this.

The paper is open access — read it here: https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.35.187916

Have you ever seen something in nature that made you question what you thought you knew? Tell us below.

Mantises predominantly prey on invertebrates but occasionally also on small vertebrates. We describe the distributions of the three Polyspilota species (Mantodea: Mantidae) that occur in South Africa, based on 466 specimen records from local and international museum collections as well as citizen sc...

30/07/2026

For the first time in 40 years, SPNHC comes to Africa 🌍

The 41st Annual Meeting of the The Society for The Preservation of Natural History Collections lands at the Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town — 7–11 September 2026.

The NSCF will be there with 13 presenters from 7 partner institutions, showcasing South Africa's collections digitisation work, AI tools, and ethical frameworks.

Follow and for full coverage.

25/07/2026

Science doesn't speak one language.

Indigenous knowledge systems and natural science collections share something important: both are ways of understanding the natural world. When they work together, the solutions are stronger — for conservation, for medicine, for food security.

The NSM 2026 framework calls for integrating indigenous and scientific knowledge. At NSCF, we're listening.

24/07/2026

Specimens don't lie.

A butterfly collected in 1920. The same species, same location, collected in 2020. Two specimens, 100 years apart — and what they reveal about climate change is written in their wings, their size, their distribution.

Natural science collections are climate archives. This is the power of keeping records.

16/07/2026

From collection drawer to classroom.

Every specimen in the NSCF network is a teaching tool. A pinned insect helps a learner understand taxonomy. A pressed plant shows adaptation. A fossil sparks curiosity about deep time.

Educators: want to bring collections into your classroom? Visit nscf.org.za to explore our resources.