Lyle Therriault wrote:

> Personally I do not mark my specimens with a numerical number.

* there's a lot of good ideas in this post, but I'll comment on
labelling the shells with their number or data. Cultural museums insist
that their cataloguing methods not mark or deface the specimens in any
way, and I once was seriously flamed on a museum list for suggesting
writing a catalogue number on a kind of cultural specimen, in the same
way one writes numbers on shells.

On the other hand, a biological specimen is an artifact created, from
the body of an organism, to document the occurrence and characterisitics
of a species at a site & time (this is more obvious in the case of a
mammal skin or an herbariuum specimen than it is in the case of a shell
picked up on a beach), so it's not inapporpriate to mark it in a way
that will facilitate its association with its data.

In Strayner & Jirka's Pearly Mussels of New York, it's striking how
important they found it to be to have the location written on Unionid
shells of species not previously regarded as occurring in the State or
in particular regions, showing that whatever has happened between the
specimen and its data over the decades, at least the original collectior
believed that the shell came from "Sodus Bay."

fred.
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