In 1926 - the year of my late mother's birth - the South African Museum conducted a collecting trip to South West Africa (now Namibia). The participants went by train to Windhoek, where they hired ox wagons, in which they spent three months travelling to the Kunene River and back. The staff walked beside the wagon train each day, collecting specimens as they walked to supplement the museum's collection. Over eighty years later, is there much that biological collections such as these can tell us about climate change?