About the Ornithology Department | Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
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Ornithology Contact Information
General Inquiries and Collection Information
Kimball L. Garrett
Collections Manager
(213) 763-3368
kgarrett@nhm.org
Dr. Kenneth Campbell
Curator
(213) 763-3425
kcampbell@nhm.org
Our mailing address:
Ornithology Department
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90007 USA
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About the Ornithology Department
Ornithology, the study of birds, is one of the founding disciplines of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. At the core of the program is a research collection of 115,000 bird specimens, representing over 5,400 species. Our collections are particularly strong for North America, Africa, South America, and the Pacific Ocean. The bird skeleton collection, representing over 14,000 individuals, is among the three largest in western North American and is an important resource for the Museum’s well-known studies of fossil birds.
Kenneth E. Campbell, Curator of Ornithology
Dr. Campbell has been a Curator at the Natural History Museum since 1977. His first duties were as Curator of the large collection of fossil birds from the Rancho La Brea tar pits at the newly opened George C. Page Museum, then as Curator of all fossil birds in the collections of the Natural History Museum. He has served as Curator of Birds, responsible for all collections of birds, both fossil and recent, since 1997. His research interests focus on the study of fossil birds and avian functional morphology. A critic of the hypothesis that birds are living dinosaurs, he has argued that all so-called “feathered dinosaurs” are, in fact, simply fascinating early members of the avian family tree unrelated to dinosaurs. Dr. Campbell also has led numerous geological and paleontological expeditions to the Amazon Basin of South America, and he has published extensively on the geologic history of the Amazon and its paleofaunas.
Kimball L. Garrett, Ornithology Collections Manager
Having served as Collections Manager since 1982, Kimball Garrett is responsible for the care, use, and growth of the ornithological collections as well as the databases associated with the collections. He is considered an authority on the field identification and status and distribution of the birds of California and particularly of the Los Angeles region. He is a past president of Western Field Ornithologists, a long-standing member of that organization’s California Bird Records Committee, and has served on the American Birding Association’s Checklist Committee.