← BACK TO HIS EXPEDITION MAP

MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY · HARVARD

The specimens E. O. Wilson collected

Over seventy years Edward Osborne Wilson (1929–2021) filled the collections at Harvard. With how many specimens, nobody can say: much of the material has never been databased, and the true total is certainly larger than any count. What can be counted is the digital catalogue, which as of July 2026 held 2,576 specimen records naming him as collector, among them 317 type specimens, the individual insects that permanently define what a species name means. This page follows that record through the decades of his life.

Nine in ten of the catalogued specimens are ants. The rest is what a person sweeps up while looking for ants (ground beetles, parasitic wasps, once a gecko), and several of those were later named after the man who happened to collect them.

Edward O. Wilson, photographed in 2007, seated and speaking with one hand raised
E. O. Wilson in 2007, aged 78. Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Who he was

Edward Osborne Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. A fishing accident took the sight of one eye when he was seven, and he turned to the things he could hold close to the other: insects, and then ants above all. He was still a teenager when he found the first colony of imported fire ants near the Mobile docks.

He spent his career at Harvard. In his twenties he crossed the Pacific island by island; in his forties he built, with Robert MacArthur, the theory of island biogeography that still governs how reserves are designed. He wrote that ants communicate by chemistry, that social behaviour has an evolutionary history, and, for the last thirty years of his life, that the variety of life on earth was collapsing and that half the planet should be set aside for the rest of it. He helped put the word biodiversity into ordinary use.

He died in 2021. What follows is not his writing but his residue: the animals themselves, pinned, labelled and catalogued, still in the drawers at the museum where he worked.

A LIFE, IN SPECIMENS PER DECADE

The shape here is the story. He collected furiously in his twenties, almost stopped while he was busy turning those island faunas into theory, and went back into the field in his eighties. Select a period to see its specimens.

Specimens

Showing 173 of 173. Two museums hold his ants: MCZ at Harvard has 2,576 of his records (1,130 photographed), and the California Academy of Sciences, through AntWeb, has 448 (105 photographed). About a quarter were collected alongside colleagues, who are named on the cards. Between them the two hold 419 type specimens, the physical objects that define a species name, of which 88 are holotypes. Periods with no photographed types are represented by ordinary specimens from the same years instead, and long series of one species are held back so the grid shows range rather than repetition.

These were photographed as whole drawers rather than as portraits, so they are shown cropped to the working part of the tray: the ruler, the pinned ants, and the label, several of them in his own handwriting.

He found them; others often named them

Of the 78 holotypes he collected, Wilson described 24 himself. The other 54 were named by colleagues he supplied: Brown(12), Darlington(5), Willey & Brown(5) among them. A career spent handing other people the material their own names now rest on.

What has been photographed, and what has not

Every specimen below is catalogued and findable. Only some have been photographed, and the gaps fall unevenly by expedition; whole countries of his fieldwork have no images at all.