I love going to museums, but sometimes you get there
and there's an animal.
This lion looks like it might have walked out
of Africa recently.
They've actually been in this museum for a while,
like longer than I've been alive.
Museums have been educating humans with stories of nature
forever, and what better way to tell
a story than with the real thing, right,
a real lion or a real elephant?
But in the 1700s, if you wanted to study animals
from history or from another continent,
you had to go out and get one.
But that wasn't always easy, right?
You couldn't just fund an expedition to grab an animal.
So commonly, you would use sculptures or paintings
or drawings or whatever.
Not the best.
Real is better.
So scientists need to figure out how
they could save real animals and bring them home with them.
They just preserved their skin.
Historians borrowed tanning from the fashion industry
and from indigenous cultures, and they created tanned hides.
Tanning is how we turn furs into hats and water skins
and coats and pelts and things.
It's thousands of years old, but museums only
started using this technology a few hundred years ago.
That means that this lion is actually really old.
These cubs are from the 1930s.
I can't even keep food fresh in my house for more than a week,
and somehow that century old animal, I mean, look at it.
It looks amazing.
So this question put me on a long journey
to find out how do we keep these stuffed animals looking
so fresh?
Why don't they decay?
Hey everybody.
Welcome back to Uno Dos of Trace.
This is the very first segment.
Hello science, I am super, super excited.
I really hope you are too.
It's finally happening, oh my god.
OK, so when you see an animal in an exhibit, at one point
it was out in the wild.
So to understand this whole journey,
first we need an animal.
Often, they're donated or it's killed by a car
or a scientist is collecting it for a specimen.
Whatever happened, it's dead now,
and we want to freeze it in time.
And for that we need a taxidermist.
So I went to Brooklyn, and I met Divya.
I got into taxidermy because I was always
fascinated with biology and natural history and art too,
and I feel like taxidermy combines
the best of both worlds.
So it has all of the curiosity and wonder
of the sciences but the joy of creation that art has.
Taxidermy, it means moving skin or arranging skin,
so the only thing real in taxidermy is the skin.
Everything else like the eyes, the whole inner structure,
all of the anatomy, all of that is rebuilt,
all that is made by the taxidermist.
Divya's job is to take raw animals
with the bones and the guts and everything in there
and just turn that into either a study skin or a mount.
I'll explain the differences later.
She's the first person that I have ever
met who gets roadkill in the mail and is cool with it.
When I receive a specimen, it's usually whole and frozen.
If it's not frozen, I'll freeze it just for like a week or two.
Let's really just to kill any bugs that
might be on it, any kind of parasites
and little creepy crawly things that could be on it.
Freezing doesn't kill everything,
but it gets it safe.
So that skin, once a taxidermist removes it from the specimen,
it's cleaned, all the material that could decay
is removed, so all the fat, all that visceral,
all that gooey stuff, all that is removed from the skin.
So the only layer of the skin left is in leather work,
they call it the corneum layer, but it's like the lowest layer,
like the only layer of the skin that will absorb the tan
and that won't decay.
And the tan is basically the chemical
that you put on the skin to keep it from decaying.
Oh my god.
I had no idea.
I mean, from the Midwest, right?
I've been around deer heads and bears that
are mountain and whatever in restaurants my whole life,
and I had no idea that that was just
skin mounted on wood or wire or paper mache or foam.
That's like a work of art.
And from there, we bring in the science
and get to the battle against decay.
Tanning has been around for thousands of years.
You need lots of water, and you need something
to scrape the skin with to get the inner layers off.
You also need to replace the globular fats in the skin.
You can do that with ethyl alcohol or alum
or acetone or formalin, which is a diluted
formaldehyde or Borax, which is a preservative and also
an insecticide an anti fungal compound.
There are lots of different ways to do it.
Once the skin is preserved, though, Divya
can take it and stretch it around the form
she built, like you're seeing with this California quail.
I'm basically having a very clean skin
and using the proper tanning method or proper preservation
method is what keeps it from decaying.
I'm going to ask a silly question.
That's OK.
I like to break it up.
Aren't these things gross?
Like, isn't it kind of gross?
I guess a part of it is a little gross,
but I don't know if I like--
I guess to me, I kind of think of that part
as like it's just another part of it.
It's one step in the process.
So thanks to tanning, we've now frozen the animal in time.
But at this point, Divya hands it off to somebody at a museum,
and they have to take over the battle against decay.
Once I prepare the specimen, it's ready
and it's handed off, the biggest fear is that they maintain,
because taxidermy isn't maintenance free.
So to that end, I drove down to the Natural History Museum
of Los Angeles County to find out
what team is taking over next?
I am the luckiest person you're going to meet today.
I'm a taxidermist working in a museum that's still active,
still doing diorama work.
We've continued to do diorama work from the '20s all
the way through to the present, so we're almost up
to 100 years of diorama work with all kinds
of different very talented people.
Hopefully in 100 years from now, they're going to be there.
I love this guy and his love of dioramas.
Which, by the way, are the name for these things which
I have now just learned do not have to be in a shoe box.
Although they can be.
As soon as I put a skin over a sculpture,
it becomes a stuffed animal.
But it's not.
It's a sculpted animal that the skin is then glued to.
I actually knew that one now, and it's
Tim's job to take over from Divya to make sure
that the animals last as long as possible, because that does not
happen naturally.
It takes a lot of work.
Even if there's not a taxidermist on staff,
there's somebody, often on a conservator type person,
who's trying to make things last.
Number one is probably why things last is care.
I'm weekly multiple times I'm doing a walk through
and I'm checking how are we doing?
Sometimes I'm carrying binoculars.
We've got moth traps out so that if we get moths, which
is one of the invertebrate pests,
we've got climate control, and we also
have sort of an integrated pest management.
We're keeping our eyes out for invertebrate pests,
vertebrate pests, things that might do damage.
They're also often in a protected environment,
so it might be in a diorama, or they
might be in a case or something where they're rarely
going to be touched.
And if they are going to be touched,
hopefully they're going to be touched
by somebody who's knowledgeable about how to touch that animal
or clean it.
OK, so Tim doesn't want you to touch
his things because of arsenic.
Arsenic used to be dusted into the skins or on the feathers
to keep insects away, because you know, arsenic.
The thing is, that makes them super
dangerous for the average person to just go in and touch,
which is why conservators and taxidermists sometimes
wear gloves when they do it.
Also why night at the museum is not a fun,
fanciful childhood tale but like the prequel to a horror film.
There's arsenic on those animals.
What are you guys doing, Ben Stiller?
A lot of our older mounts here are treated with arsenic,
so something goes to eat it, it's going to get killed.
It's interesting and sometimes in old bird mouths,
you see they've been chewed right down to the skin,
because they painted the arsenic soap
on the inside and the outside.
It's just the feathers.
Oh my god, I love this guy.
So they clean, they tan, they keep watch,
they use insecticides and they trap,
they also want these things to look good,
which is where the art comes back in.
Hands and faces, for example.
They aren't real.
They're made of injectable resins of molds, commonly,
but because of how skin dries out over time,
it doesn't look right.
Which is why Tim has all of these animal death
masks behind him.
Have you noticed that?
Holy crap, that's so cool and weird and gross and awesome.
So taxidermists clean things, they vacuum things,
they soap them up and they wash them off, they degrease them,
and they paint them, they add makeup
and whatever they need to do so specimens
don't attract bugs, and that way they can fight decay.
But cleaning a specimen, like an actual scientific specimen,
that's actually bad.
Remember a little bit ago when I mentioned
mounts versus study skins?
Mounts are for the public.
That's what you see when you go look at the exhibits.
The study skins are for the scientists.
They are behind the scenes.
The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, for example,
has over 35 million specimens.
And when you go there, you only get to see just a few.
It's the tip of the iceberg.
So if these are all mounts, these are study skins.
They almost don't even look real, right?
They're protected in a completely different way, too.
So here in San Francisco, I went to the California Academy
of Sciences to talk to Moe Flannery to learn more.
So study skins and mounts differ
in a couple of different ways.
So a study skin is prepared for scientific study, primarily,
and they're prepared in a way that optimizes storage.
So a live mount is prepared to display the animal
as it would be seen in life, which often means wings
flapping or standing upright, but a steady skin is
a bird laying on a tray with its wings folded
and its legs crossed, and that minimizes the amount of space
that that specimen requires for storage.
So this is what a typical tray of in this case finches
from the Galapagos look like.
So these also were collected in 1905 and 1906,
so back then they would collect a large series of individuals
for the museum, prepare them on site at the island,
and then bring them back here.
So study skins, they aren't cleaned, they aren't painted,
they aren't tanned, they aren't mounted in a way that
makes them look alive.
They're just stuffed with cotton and left in a drawer
to give them a bit of shape.
Because these things have been prepared and stored
the same way for hundreds of years,
you can learn so much from these.
You can learn about changes to species, changes to foods
and forest, changes to diseases that
attacked those species, even changes to the environment.
For example, since they're not cleaned,
the bird feathers were analyzed in some species,
and it was revealed that air pollution got worse and worse
and worse from coal until the impact of legislation
made the air literally cleaner, and you can see it
in the bird feathers.
And we are just seeing a peak of all of the different specimens
available.
Every door in this room has dozens of trays,
and every tray has dozens of specimens.
All of these need to be checked and protected and preserved,
but they also have lots and lots of data.
And often, we have no idea how they're going to be used.
So back in 1905 and 1906 when Rollo Beck and his team
were collecting these specimens, they
had no idea that in 2004 almost 100 years later,
a scientist, a female scientist would
be cutting into the feet of the birds they
were collecting to study DNA of a virus
in the foot of the bird.
It's my job to make sure that these specimens are still
here 100 years from now or 200 years from now or 500 years
from now so that researchers can do whatever studies
they come up with at that time.
OK, but it's not all sunshine and coal soot, y'all.
They're still fighting decay and pests back here, too.
So we check our specimens regularly,
and you're looking for basically insect poop,
so if an insect is chewing on a bird maybe from the inside,
they would be inside the bird, you
would see a little droppings so like a little pile of what
looks like dust under the bird.
Or if it's a really bad infestation,
you would see damage to the specimen.
So we have to be very diligent and make sure
that that doesn't happen.
If we do find insects in the specimens,
then we will freeze the specimens for a period of time
to kill all the insects and hopefully
to keep any eggs from hatching.
Funny thing, though, Moe is not
a fan of mounting specimens.
Generally, we do not put data specimens on display
unless they are in climate controlled cases
with strict humidity controls and very low light levels.
That's why museums are sometimes so dim.
They're protecting the feathers and the furs
from fading under the lights.
OK, check out this cormorant that was left in a window.
It's so faded.
OK, one more time, Campbell Kimball.
That's Kimball.
He does collections at the Natural History Museum
down in LA.
For museum collections, a specimen
is not valuable to science unless you
know where it was collected and when,
and then that puts that animal at that
place at that period of time in history.
One of the problems with mounted specimens
that have been on display, traditionally people
did not put tags on them.
Every one of our specimens has a data tag
that's always associated with it, sometimes two
or three or four tags.
OK, so the list is getting really long here, y'all.
We've got decay, we've got light, we've got humidity,
we've got pests, we've got climate control,
we've got all sorts of different things.
We've got even just being handled and being touched
contribute to decay.
There are so many different little things
that need to happen to make sure that these specimens are here
for you and for me and for the future.
So to answer my own question, lots of different people
do lots of different things to make
sure these specimens look fresh and clean
and are ready to go for whatever we need them for.
In this whole battle against decay,
it's sort of like, it's a battle against decay
but it's a battle for keeping these historic pieces alive.
Someone can say, oh yeah, that's a 100 year old head.
And you're like, wow, that's cool.
When you see the materials, it's so nice to see,
and it becomes so much more real.
It's like, these are the stories, like it really,
really tells a story when you see it like that.
Just thinking about it now, if you love animals,
this could be a career for you.
Zoos are one arm of animal preservation
and museums are another.
It's really everything here still
is a custom mount for a particular story we're
trying to tell.
People when you say, well, it's a replica, they're like oh.
But when you see a lot of musculature and stuff,
things popping, I can point at those and say,
those aren't stuffed animals.
These people fight off the decay
so they can tell you a story about a species
or a specimen or a whole evolutionary path,
whether that story is in the front of the house
and it's how lions are socializing
or if it's in the back of the house
and it's how environments have changed
over hundreds or millions of years, both of those stories
take a lot of effort, even if it's
just to inspire people to make science videos
when they grow up.
Whatever.
Who knows what people are going to study in 500 years.
Yeah, and that's what you're trying to do
with all of these specimens.
We're just making sure they're here
for whatever ideas, whatever research ideas people come up
with in the future beyond our imagination.
Next time you're at a museum and you're
looking at all the different species and specimens
on display, take a second and think
about all the different people that it took to get it there.
The person who decided to arrange it
in that way, the person who tanned
the hide, the person who captured the specimen
in the wild.
That animal didn't just happen to be there.
Some amazing and passionate humans
made sure that it was there for you.
And now you know.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
I hope it made you feel something.
If it did, consider subscribing and joining us
here on Uno dos of Trace.
I'll be back with more videos next week,
so I'll see you in the future.
Should be a list which we have to redo,
because I had some work study students--
Pelicans, cricket birds, look like it, so a bunch
of sea birds, mostly.