[BOLD OLD HOLLYWOOD MUSIC BLARES]
>>MIKE NOVACEK: When I was seven years old, my hero
was Roy Chapman Andrews.
He wrote all these kids' books—
All About Dinosaurs, All About Strange Beasts of the Past, which included fossil mammals.
And in those books there were images of the Museum—the Allosaurus and the mammoth.
I never saw that as a kid because I grew up in LA, but I came here as a graduate student to work
in the collections and the first thing I had to do was see those specimens on display and
they were just the way they were in Roy Chapman Andrews' books.
I'm Mike Novacek, Senior Vice President and Provost of Science and I'm also a curator
of Paleontology.
[TINKLING MUSIC]
>>DIRECTOR: Give me one example of something in the collection.
>>NANCY SIMMONS: 131 frog-eating bats.
>>PAUL SWEET: 3 great auks.
>>BUSHRA HUSSAINI: 34,140 specimen lots of Cretaceous mollusks.
>>MICHAEL SHARA: 40 terabytes of data, representing images of stars, planets, and galaxies, and simulations
of star clusters.
>>JULIE FEINSTEIN: 86,881 samples of frozen tissue and DNA.
>>RADFORD ARRINDELL: We have five coelacanths in the collection.
>>DENTON EBEL: We have 12 meteorites from Mars.
>>EUNSOO KIM: We have about 70 live microbial cultures.
>>PETER WHITELEY: 1,235 moccasins from all parts of Native North America.
>>NOVACEK: There are about 200 scientists working here and there are about 33 million things in the
collection. Included in that are Anthropology, Paleontology, Vertebrate, and Invertebrate
collections, a rock and gem collection, and the digital collection that's being amassed
by our astrophysicists. We also have our new frozen tissue collection, used not only by
our scientists for DNA sequencing, but also scientists from all over the world.
It's the 21st century museum collection.
>>SCOTT SCHAEFER: I guess I've always been a collector from the early days.
I had baseball cards. I had stamps,
coins, model cars. But interestingly even though I had fish and aquaria it didn't
evolve into, "Well, let's preserve these things and keep them in the basement forever."
My name is Scott Schaefer. I'm Curator of Ichthyology and the Associate Dean of Science
for Collections.
It wasn't until I became interested in ichthyology that I found out, yeah, folks spend a lot
of time and a lot of effort to build and maintain zoological collections in this way.
Collections are important because they often represent the structure and the fabric of
the science that exists out in the real world.
[BOLD HOLLYWOOD SOUNDTRACK STRINGS AND HORNS]
>>SCHAEFER: We go to a lot of trouble and a lot of expense to acquire collections,
but we also have to spend equal, if not greater effort and expense,
to keep them in pristine condition.
We have collections in this museum that are pushing 200 years old and in many cases, they maintain
their research value throughout that period of time.
So, it still is today just as essential to collect and acquire specimens as it was
145 years ago when the Museum began building collections.
>>NOVACEK: You can make new discoveries in collections just like you can out in the field. You can
walk around the corner and see something that no one's quite observed that way before—
describe a new species or a new feature that's important to science.
I never think of these things as dead. I mean, they seem to be vividly living with us.
I just think of them as kind of old. Like hundreds of millions of years old, in some cases. But
there's still a liveliness and a connection that's extremely, extremely powerful.