i have a lot of little things in my office that have sentimental value
this uh nasty hand towel is my fish rag and it's been to at least 30 countries with me
and that stays in my my personal winderkammer which is uh just beside my desk and that
cabinet of curiosities holds my collection of fishes that are types i'm dr presenta
chuker bharti i'm curator of fishes at lsu's museum of natural science
and here i am in my office and i'd like to share some of the little knick-knacks and
and uh things i've collected along the way from my travels and some things that i've
just happened upon or that were donated to us that have ended up in my little cozy little office here
so type specimens are the most important museum specimens they are what was used to
describe species and i've described 15 species new to science and they stay in that cabinet
and they're part of the larger collections which are which is just down the hall here with 350
000 specimens but i keep some some oddities in my office these are cipronella venustra
which is probably the most common fish in louisiana freshwater fish not very
interesting on its own but they were collected by albert doucet in 1974 and he was the first
african-american um graduate student at the museum i didn't know anything about him until a few weeks
ago when we had a black and natural history museum week uh dedicated to you know looking
back and and forward towards um who's who have been the african-americans and black naturalists
that have been important to natural history museums and now you know i keep this jar to
remind me that he's collected 60 000 plus specimens that now are held at the uh in
my collections and so i should definitely know about him and his penance i keep this around so i
every time my eyes fall upon this jar this lot of specimens i think about him and his role here
then there are things that i have just like sentimental value some of it's not so
interesting to most people but it is to me i guess i should start by the first thing that
usually people notice now lsu folks love tigers we have a live tiger on campus part of the vet
school but we also have a number of uh taxidermy tigers and this is the worst of them no muscle
tone losing his hair it is actually a wild bengal tiger so this is a specimen that was collected in
the 1960s early 1960s from from bengal which is where i'm my family is originally from west bengal
it was donated to the museum back when there were many tens of thousands of tigers now there are
fewer than 5 000 but this specimen was just stuck in our taxidermy room and i thought i'd entertain
myself by by just moving it to a safer drier space which is my office i have a whole row of
tins and tins of tea from different parts of the world that i love to collect tins i don't know why
bones this is a tooth from megalodon that's a t-rex tooth a 3d printed t-rex tooth and i just
like to show how similar they are in size so i like to keep little things around just to sort of
make me change focus from maybe the computer and they give me joy i'm not sure why
then there are things that i have just like sentimental value and i didn't
realize how many of them are sort of related to religion and i i'm not a very religious person
but i i do think of these pieces as a sort of um keeping me uh at rest or at peace or something
i'm not sure exactly what so i have this spinning buddha head that i like to keep and sort of twirl
around every once in a while when i'm thinking and rubbing my chin behind my desk i have a bunch
of little things from everywhere from a godzilla holding king cake babies which is a tradition of
hiding these king cake babies in in mardi gras king cakes i have um this ganesh statue that i
send up once in singapore it was uh just on the beach i have um this beautifully sculpted cow bone
i don't know if you tell how detailed that is from uh indonesia from bali indonesia lots of little
little things that i've picked up here and there people like to look around my office as well
in my little cabinet of curiosities so i hope you get to come and visit me one day and and learn
more about what i have in here some of the things that i forgotten myself i love to see people's
thunder commerce and uh come see mine one day
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