Science Talk! Marshall Boyd, VMNH: What’s in a Name? How Taxonomy Fuels Museums

We’re kicking off the series on Tuesday, September 16th with Marshall Boyd, Research & Collections Technician at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.

His talk is titled What’s in a Name? How Taxonomy Fuels the World of Museums.

Topic: Taxonomy (the science of naming, describing, and classifying organisms into
groups based on shared characteristics) plays a key role helping scientists in museums
to categorize specimens in order to study the relationship between each described
group. Many names within taxonomy come from describing the specimen itself using
physical attributes, the habitat in which it lives, etc. It could even be named after the
people who discovered it! This presentation will give just a small step into the world of
natural history museums, the collections from behind the scenes, and the work that
goes into describing a new species.

Speaker: Marshall Boyd is a Research and Collections Technician at the Virginia
Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, VA. He has a long background in biology
starting from an early age, always having a passion for the outside world and a
constant curiosity about everything concerning zoology (the scientific study of animals).
Marshall studied forest birds as a master’s student at Salisbury University earning his
degree in 2015. Later he was an adjunct faculty member for local Maryland community
colleges before discovering his passion for natural history museum work at the
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Marshall worked within the
Invertebrate Zoology department for several years where he fueled his interests in
zoology, eventually leading him to his current position at the Virginia Museum of Natural
History. Marshall has become a part of the team at VMNH working alongside the
curators and other technicians for education and outreach, assisting in the constant
care for museum collections, and working with the executive staff to help shape the
future of VMNH.

If you missed our last Science Talk of the Spring 2025 season, Revitalizing an EPA Brownfield: South River Preserve and Rockfish Run with Stormwater Engineer Jessica Slagle of the Timmons Group, you can find the video and all our past Science Talks on the Virginia Museum of Natural History YouTube Channel.