Come One, Come All to See This Magnificent Specimen!

Coming into this week I had never thought about how researchers obtain specimen to conduct research on. I don’t know why this had never occurred to me, and know I know that the best place to retrieve this information is from museum collections. With this being said, I’m sure there are many other individuals out in the world who also don’t know how the process works. This is probably something worth advertising about to the public.

Before our bird tour at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History I couldn’t help but notice a T-rex skull hidden in the corner of the lobby. It was on display so that you could ‘feed’ it donations. No wonder why museums don’t receive enough funding! It’s because they poorly advertise that they are need of money in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, feeding a T-rex is a great idea, but why is it shamelessly tucked away next to a hidden staircase? If I were in charge of the placement of the skull I would place it right between the front doors of the museum in order that visitors would see it immediately upon arrival and just before they leave.

After our visit to the Natural History Museum we visited the annex in Maryland where they store the rest of the specimen. What a sight to see! There were dead animals in every direction, which was definitely of concern, but it is nice to know that they are contributing to science. The most exciting specimen that I saw was the coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish. I was dying to see a giant squid, but apparently I missed it because it was at the Natural History Museum. Since we were receiving a private tour of the annex I was also secretly hoping that they would show us any unidentified creatures such as mermaid-like specimen.

What do these museum collections mean to conservation? Well, as technology advances it makes it easier to identify species through DNA samples. The annex has preserved so many species that there is no counting how many have been misidentified based on physical appearance. It may take a while to go through and sample the whole collection, but in the end it will hopefully be able to provide more information on taxonomic relationships.