Hi everyone, welcome back to Curious By Nature.
I'm Nicole and this week, Dawn has been sharing with us all about the Museum's collection.
Today, she's going to tell us more about how the Museum preserves its collection.
Let's see what she has
Hi everybody, I'm Dawn.
I'm at the Collections Facility for the Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.
Today, I'm going to talk with you about how we prepare some of our specimens
and why good preparation leads into long-term preservation.
I've opened up a drawer of long-tailed weasels, which are adorbs.
Here we go, long-tailed weasel.
Now this is a species that's very common in Illinois,
in fact across North America, really.
This particular one, again, we've got our scientific labels
that tell us what it is where it was collected and when it was collected.
Those pieces of each specimen's story are vital for biodiversity studies.
Now this one was collected in 1901.
You also have to be very good at reading historic handwriting
because that can get a little, uh, tricky sometimes.
And it looks like DuPage county in Illinois.
Now for mammals, we also, in fact, here is its skull.
So, yes, DuPage County in Bloomingdale, December 26, 1901.
So now for mammals, we prepare a skin as well as a skull, typically.
Let me just show you the skull here.
There we go.
Now both of these are really important for scientific study
and understanding each species and how it differs from other species,
but in order to have specimens at all for study,
whether it's an artistic understanding or a scientific understanding,
we need to preserve the specimen.
How do we do that?
Well, when we have a brand new specimen,
we have to take everything out from the inside so we make an incision,
typically down its belly,
and we have to take out anything that's going to rot away.
Now, why do we do that?
That sounds kind of gross, right?
Well, let me ask you this.
Who here has ever left a banana out for way too long on their kitchen counter?
What happens to it?
It gets all gross and smelly, and black and kind of weepy,
and starts oozing all over your counter.
Now, parents out there, if you are game for a little scientific experiment,
you could set one in a container,
where it doesn't ooze all over your kitchen counter,
and see what happens.
This is why we do taxidermy.
We don't want anything like that in our collection.
We have to take out everything that would rot,
so that we can preserve the skin, the hide, and skeletal parts, forever, hopefully.
This one's been preserved since 1901.
We have some in our specimen collection from the 1830s, believe it or not,
and there are collections that house specimens from even farther back than that.
But good taxidermy, it takes practice.
Now this one, you can see even it has a little bit of white in there,
that's the cotton poking through.
Now this form is called a study skin.
This is how most of our bird and mammal scientific specimens are prepared, as a study skin.
In just a moment, I'll show you another preparation style.
But why do we prepare them like this?
So, you can see, they fit in a drawer.
It makes for much easier organization and storage of all of these specimens and their parts.
Alright, now, let's take a look at one of the other forms of taxidermy that we do.
This is called a display mount.
Now, display mounts look a lot different than a study skin, don't they?
Display mounts illustrate a behavior of that species.
Here we have a northern harrier, which is a member of the hawk family,
and display mounts are often used in exhibits.
You can see that this one was taxidermied and placed in a mount position
with what looks like a little vole that it had just caught.
It's illustrating a big behavior, or one of the main behaviors, of this species.
Creating an accurate looking representation of an animal in a display mount form
takes a lot of artistic talent as well as a comprehensive understanding of that particular species,
its musculature system, how it behaves in its natural environment.
You can see birds especially can be really tricky
because they're balancing on two legs rather than having four like mammals,
and it's really important to get their body balance correct on their legs.
And you can see a lot more behind me.
So thank you and I hope you'll join us again.
That's our episode for today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We really hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes peek at the collections with Dawn.
Be sure to leave any questions in the comments below
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See you next time on Curious By Nature.