Canadian Museum of Nature General Invertebrate Collection

Occurrence Specimen
Latest version published by Canadian Museum of Nature on Jan 16, 2026 Canadian Museum of Nature

Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:

Data as a DwC-A file download 16,688 records in English (2 MB) - Update frequency: irregular
Metadata as an EML file download in English (9 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file download in English (7 KB)

Description

The Canadian Museum of Nature's General Invertebrate collection contains groups such as the cnidarians, various free-living helminths and non-segmented worms, and the echinoderms. Most of the museum's 47,000 lots of general invertebrates are from Canadian aquatic and terrestrial habitats, including the Canadian Arctic.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 16,688 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

Occurrence (core)
16688
Multimedia 
0

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Gagnon J, Blades R (2026). Canadian Museum of Nature General Invertebrate Collection. Version 1.75. Canadian Museum of Nature. Occurrence dataset. https://ipt.nature.ca/resource?r=cmn_general_invertebrate&v=1.75

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Canadian Museum of Nature. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: b50dfef4-3f34-4829-9d6e-edd5fcdb2b29.  Canadian Museum of Nature publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Canada Biodiversity Information Facility.

Keywords

Occurrence; Specimen; Occurrence

Contacts

Jean-Marc Gagnon
  • Curator
  • Originator
  • Point Of Contact
  • Curator, Invertebrate Zoology Collections
Canadian Museum of Nature
Ottawa
Ontario
CA
  • 1-613-364-4066
Rob Blades
  • Metadata Provider
  • Digital Collections Information Manager
Canadian Museum of Nature
Ottawa
Ontario
CA

Geographic Coverage

Mostly but not exclusively Canadian coverage, with surrounding waters.

Bounding Coordinates South West [2.811, -180], North East [90, -22.5]

Taxonomic Coverage

Protista, Porifera, Cnidaria, Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Echinodermata, and other small taxonomic groups.

Domain Protista
Phylum Porifera (Sponges), Cnidaria, Brachiopoda (Lampshells), Bryozoa, Echinodermata

Temporal Coverage

Formation Period late 1800's to present

Additional Metadata

Alternative Identifiers b50dfef4-3f34-4829-9d6e-edd5fcdb2b29
https://ipt.nature.ca/resource?r=cmn_general_invertebrate