I love cats.
Everybody asks me if I have a cat and I say no
but I do have a fluffy orange boyfriend named Mr. Howell.
My name is Emily Graslie and I am the volunteer curatorial assistant
here at the University of Montana Zoological Museum
In this room alone we have about 21,000 specimens.
Mammals are in the middle, the birds are around the perimeter.
This is what we refer to as our "comparative collection."
In fact the entire collection can be used for comparative reasons.
We work with the forensic anthropologists and with the Montana State Crime Lab
to help them identify random bones
and faunal remains from sites all across the state.
We have archeologists, who will go out on an archeological dig
and find random bones and then bring them here
and definitively say like 600 years ago somebody made an arrow
sharpening shaft tool out of a white-tailed deer metapodial.
And that's awesome.
So, where I'm standing right now is what we refer to as the "sheep room"
because the majority of the things in here are sheep
and their skulls.
We also refer to it as the "overflow skull storage room",
which is kind of redundant 'cause the whole museum is basically
overflow skull storage.
In this room it's pretty much floor to ceiling
of what I estimate to be a couple hundred bighorn sheep.
We also have an entire moose
and we have a horse in here and probably about two bison.
And it's also where we keep our filing cabinet. So it's the office.
This is the cold room
and this is where we store the majority of our pelts that aren't in cabinets
and it cuts down on bug infestations.
You'll get things like dermestid beetles and carpet beetles
that will eat these sort of things,
so by keeping it refrigerated
it cuts down on a lot of those problems.
We have a ton of stuff in here, too.
This is probably one of the most eclectic rooms of our collection,
we have everything from these gigantic wolf pelts right here
hanging from the ceiling,
we have river otters and leopard seals
and warthogs and primates, and gibbons
and spider monkeys and anteaters and prehensile-tailed porcupines
and a zebra.
And a peacock.
And leopard rugs.
And a lot of really cool stuff that you will probably get to see sometime soon.
It's not really ideal to have these kind of things stored in a cold room
because it has to be refrigerated
and if you can imagine things in your refrigerator going bad if you have a leak,
animal pelts also go bad if you have a leak.
So you can get moldy monkeys.
That happened.
Once.
This is probably arguably my favorite room in the entire collection
if not the whole universe of the world.
This is what we call our "bird room".
I think it's kind of obvious
but in case you haven't noticed,
it's a room full of live-mounted, taxidermied birds.
And a racoon back here.
Why is there a racoon in the bird room?
Because I found that guy behind a cabinet a couple of months ago,
so I took him out to take some pictures
and then I didn't feel like putting him back in the dark depths of oblivion.
We also have a bunny on the floor, but he's only got one ear.
Gotta clean that up later.
And this is our preparation lab.
This is where all of the magic happens.
Any kind of dry preparation like study skins
happens on that table, brain removal happens in the sink,
this right here is a freezer that is literally full of dead birds
of all kinds of shapes and sizes and assortments.
This is a refrigerator,
which sometimes people forget, it's just a refrigerator,
so stuff gets stinky in here.
Back there is the mammal freezer.
Right now there's a patagonian mara,
which is the fourth largest rodent in the world,
a bunch of bats and shrews and mice
and the occasional wolf or coyote or fox,
there're guinea pigs in there, too.
I don't know. We just got those.
This is where we put stuff when we want to get it clean,
quickly. It is a colony full of flesh eating beetles.
They will eat the flesh. Not off of living things.
People ask me if I'm afraid I'm going to be eaten alive
by a bunch of beetles, and that's not gonna happen.
Before a skeleton can safely go into our collection,
it has to first be run through the beetles to get all of the muscle tissue off of it.
Because despite how good we might be with cleaning a skull,
we can't do the work of a tiny, very itty bitty beetle,
that will eat all of the little detail-y bits off of the bone.
So these guys eat muscle tissue.
And it's normally the larva that will eat all of it.
The adults really don't eat anything,
they basically just have sex and party in here all the time.
Seriously, if you want to watch an orgy on campus, it is in here.
Once again, my name is Emily,
please subscribe to the channel
and this is a brain scoop.
It still has brains on it.