RB Herbarium celebrates the registration of exsiccate number 850,000

On Thursday, April 13, the team of the RB Herbarium/Scientific Research Directorate of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden celebrated the registration of exsiccate number 850,000 in its collection. The exsicata are samples of plants collected by the researchers, pressed, dehydrated and registered, which are deposited in herbaria for study.

The exsicata number 850,000 is from a specimen of Tabebuia aurea, from the Bignoniaceae family, and is a duplicate of an existing specimen from the Rioclarense Herbarium at Unesp. It was collected by P.H.A. Melo and G.M. Marcusso in Novo Jardim, Tocantins, in 2016.

The RB Herbarium, also called the Dimitri Sucre Herbarium, was created in 1890 by naturalist João Barbosa Rodrigues, then director of the Botanical Garden. Its first collection was the Fée herbarium donated by D. Pedro II, when he was already exiled in Paris. Currently, the RB is the largest herbarium in South America and is among the 100 largest in the world, gathering, besides the 850,000 exsiccata, other 35 thousand items in the collections of the Carpoteca, Xyloteca, Ethnobiological collection, liquid medium collection and Seed, Tissue and DNA Banks. Among the exsiccata, the collection of nomenclatural typus (specimens used in the description of species for science) stands out, with about 7,800 typus and 3,000 paratypus.

The RB collection can be consulted online through the Jabot and Virtual Herbarium-Reflora systems.