Documenting 150 years of invertebrate studies

Specimens of more than 10.000 animal species are kept in the Invertebrate collections. 'Invertebrates' in classical zoology are animals without backbones (vertebrae). Historical division of labour in invertebrate studies assigned insects and similar invertebrates to the field of entomology. Hence 'invertebrates', in a stricter sense, are simply those animals remaining when vertebrates and entomology have been accounted for.

Invertebrate zoologists engage in research efforts to discover, describe, and understand the diversity of animal life forms, asking questions concerning their origins and way of life, their distributions, their evolutionary and ecological relationships to other organisms, and their responses to environmental change. Scientific collections are generated from such activities and are kept for the purpose of various scientific needs. The international community of researchers engaged in such efforts rely on museum collections as repositories of scientific material.

It is fair to say that pioneering studies of marine life were the seedlings to an expanding scientific enterprize that finally established the the University of Bergen. Johan Koren was hired in 1846 as the first permanent member of Bergens Museum staff. His curatorial responsibility was the zoological collections. The famous Bergen zoologist Michael Sars was appointed honorary professor at the University of Zurich that same year.