The R. Glenn Northcutt Collection - General Information

MCZBase - Database search at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (type "north" in the Named Group field to select the R. Glenn Northcutt collection)
In 2019, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology acquired The R. Glenn Northcutt Collection of Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy and Embryology. The collection consists of about 500,000 histological sections across 270 species, and was assembled by Dr. Northcutt over a career that spanned a half a century (1963-2014). The collection is invaluable for comparative cytoarchitectonic studies due to its taxonomic breadth.

To avoid the loss of this landmark data, the Museum of Comparative Zoology embarked on an effort to digitize the entire collection in order to preserve it in perpetuity. We have partnered with the Museum of Comparative Zoology to provide a selected subset of Northcutt Collection slides on the BrainMaps platform. Each section has been individually cropped and rotated and can be viewed on the BrainMaps website, with a full-zoom resolution of up to 0.33 microns/pixel. Please note that due to age of the slides, a small number of sections have suffered some deterioration, but we have not excluded any sections in interest of providing the entire collection intact.

A handful of sections (5-10) from each series will be selected for annotation, and will be labeled with principal brain regions, prominent nuclei, and other landmarks. Sections with annotation will be marked with a "labeled" indicator on the section thumbnail page for easy reference.

For more information on The R. Glenn Northcutt Collection, please refer to this article published in the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology [pdf].

We extend our most grateful thanks to Dr. James Hanken, Paul Cervantes, and the remainder of the MCZ team for their efforts in providing us access to this wonderful resource, and to Heidi Spence for her tireless efforts in cropping and rotating the slice sections. 		R. Glenn Northcutt