The Museum of Zoology is embedded within the Department of Zoology in the University of Cambridge. Our curators are reseach scientists and lecturers, and the Museum’s collections are actively used for research, helping us to better understand the animal kingdom.

Dr Robert Asher, our Curator of Vertebrates, is an evolutionary biologist based in the Department of Zoology, and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. In this video he shares a recent scientific paper on temperature and skeletal variation in the nine-banded armadillo. This piece of research found substantial daily temperature changes within this mammal. It also found that even amongst genetically identical quadruplets show differences in the structure of their skeletons.

All this and more is described in this paper: Knight F, Connor C, Venkataramanan R, Asher RJ. 2020. Body temperatures, life history, and skeletal morphology in the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus). Peer Community In Ecology 10.17863/CAM.50971. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.50971

See also the editor summary by Mar Sobral and peer-review history here: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.ecology.100050