Inside the Room Housing 46 Million Museum Specimen

[Moe] I never really know what the

day to day of my job will entail.

I might come in with the idea that I'm gonna catalog

all of these specimens into the collection and we get

a phone call that there's a dead whale on the beach.

[Narrator] When you go to a museum like the

California Academy of Sciences, you see marine animals,

terrestrial animals, and many specimens in between.

Behind each display is a painstaking process to preserve

as much of the animal as possible, not just for the

visitors' enjoyment, but for future scientific research.

I oversee collecting specimens from the field,

all the way into the collection room itself.

The ornithology and mammalogy collection

is made up of 100,000 bird specimens,

32,000 mammal specimens, and 11,000 eggs and nests.

Generally, our collection is

a scientific research collection.

So we need to preserve the specimens for perpetuity.

We don't know what researchers will be looking at

or studying 100 years from now, or 200 years from now,

or 500 years from now, so it's important to keep

those specimens well prepared and well curated,

so that they are available for that historical record.

[Narrator] The O and M department has finches dating back

to 1905 and 1906 expeditions to the Galapagos Islands.

A century later, a researcher used DNA sequencing

to identify and characterize two avian pox strains,

that manifested as lesions on the feet of those finches.

Those researchers had no idea about DNA.

They had no idea that a female researcher 100 years later

would be looking at the lesions in the feet of these birds.

They were just collecting to build the collection

of the museum, and making sure that they have

the material to ask those questions.

[Narrator] The academy rarely

launches such expeditions these days.

Most of the specimens they receive come from salvage,

so birds that hit windows, animals found dead on roads

or beaches, and sometimes even animals

from rehab centers or the zoo.

[Moe] I would say 98% of the collection is behind

the scenes in environmentally-controlled storage.

[Narrator] The first step to preserving specimen

is removing anything that would rot or attract pests,

basically everything that isn't bone.

For the marine specimen that the academy receives,

this is where the bone lab comes in.

[Moe] Sue Pemberton is our

marine mammal curatorial assistant.

In the bone lab, we prepare

all of our really stinky specimens.

We have maceration, which is taking all of the muscle

and tissue and skin and feathers

off of an animal and then putting the bones into water.

The bacteria in the water degrade all the remaining tissue,

and you end up with a nice clean skeleton or skull.

[Sue] Anything that we can use, we do.

These are emergency blankets, these are seedling mats.

So we were able to put together this nice little hot house

effect, which hastens the whole decomposition process.

[Narrator] And for animals that need to be prepared

more delicately, there's a swarm of

flesh-devouring dermestid beetles.

Many of the department's bird specimen are preserved

as study skins, and yes, it's just

the skin and feathers that will remain.

[Laura] Not too different than it's been since

the 1800s when this process first started.

Laura Wilkinson works with birds and terrestrial mammals.

Once we receive a bird, they go into our freezer

for storage until we have time to work on them.

I won't tell you how many things are in the freezer.

We have a lot of work ahead of us.

When we make a study skin, we make an incision down

the breast of the bird, turn it inside out,

so that we can get to the parts inside.

We take out all of the soft parts, including part

of the skeleton, because that material

will rot and attract pests over time.

Then we turn the skin right side out, stuff it with cotton,

and position it so that it dries.

Once it's dry, it can go into the research collection

because now it's a clean, dry specimen.

We also collect several tissue samples.

We store one frozen and one in alcohol.

If the freezer breaks, it's still

in a medium that will protect it.

We do try to keep a separate display collection

from the scientific research collection.

[Narrator] The academy is preparing for a

California wildlife exhibit, opening in June 2018,

called Giants of Land and Sea.

It's really a way to educate the public

about marine mammals off of the California coast.

And to realize, oh, they have hundreds of specimens,

thousands of specimens, millions of specimens,

46 million in the entire academy collection.

We chose specimens from the research collection

that were complete skeletons with

as many of the bones present as possible.

In this case, Pete Gibbons and Liza Yee

put the bones together to match the design.

[Narrator] One of the designs for the 2018 exhibit

is a 14-foot elephant seal, that will appear

as if swimming in the final display.

[Moe] After laying out all the bones, and figuring out

which one goes where, they drill holes through the

vertebrae, which are the backbones, in order to put them

together on a pipe, and then replacing the areas that would

be cartilage with silicone so that it looks like

the natural skeleton with the cartilage attachments.

[Liza] So to maintain the distance and the curvature,

we set up this little rig, but now that the cartilage

is in place, hopefully, the ribs'll be pretty stable.

[Moe] When you're articulating a skeleton,

you use a whole variety of different tools.

Some of them things that you just have in your garage.

[Narrator] Once the exhibit comes to an end,

this articulation process can be reversed, and the specimen

will be returned to the research collection.

[Moe] I like to think of myself as a librarian,

but instead of taking care of books,

I take care of scientific specimens.