SMSC Diary (Week 10): Beyond the Display

When most people think of museum collections, they think of the iconic Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Natural History or the American Museum of Natural History made famous by the museum film trilogy Night at the Museum (2006), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014). Little do viewers know that if the museums were to actually come to life, millions of shelved specimen unknown to the general public would begin to roam the halls of the museums. Nearly every museum has specimen shelved away, off exhibit as a historic log of the natural life on earth. This week we delved into the many applications and uses of these specimen in research as well as everyday management decisions.

In order to explore the role of museums and exhibit designs in conservation, WEC received behind the scenes tours at the Museum Support Center (MSC) and the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). MSC serves as storage and processing facility for the various museum collections associated with the NMNH, which includes dry collections (bones, skins, books, etc. kept on shelves) and wet collections (whole organisms kept in preservative). This facility is primarily a resource for researchers, but offers tours to the general public by appointment. On the other hand, the NMNH acts as a publicly accessible front for spreading natural history knowledge via staged exhibits, and additionally stores off exhibit collections in the many halls branching from the central rotunda (ever wondered why the museum looked so large from the outside?).

While at MSC, we were given a glimpse into the marine mammal dry collection where we saw a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) skull the size of a small school bus, the only pygmy sperm whale (Kogia breviceps) in Smithsonian’s possession (once believed to be the same as the dwarf sperm whale, but later reclassified following morphological examination of the collected species), and two tusks from a double-tusked female narwhal (Monodon monoceros). On our tour, we learned that the bones in this collection could hold the key to unwrapping the evolutionary history of many marine mammals currently classified as one species, but could actually be separate species. Additionally, we toured the herpetology (amphibians and reptiles) collection that featured nearly every snake, turtle, and lizard imaginable. I enjoyed perusing the isles upon isles of jarred specimen in this collection far more than I had anticipated. An added benefit of wet collections is the preservation of DNA, organs, and other soft tissues that could be of use in future research.

At NMNH, we were given a tour of the bird collection featuring Martha the last passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migrators) a representative of the once most abundant bird species on earth (now extinct), an extinct ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), and an array of other beautiful birds and eggs from across the globe that I do not believe I will ever get the chance to see in the wild.

I thought the coolest part of this tour was hearing about our guide’s work in the Feather Lab. Each day, anywhere from 15 to 200 bird feathers are sent in from airports across the country to the Smithsonian Institute’s Feather Lab for identification. These feathers were retrieved from bird strike (airplane-bird collision) sites on airplanes, and their identification will be used by airports to make better management decisions to minimize these types of collisions. By knowing the type of bird involved in the strike, airports can identify nearby habitats that may pose a threat (such as ponds), elevation to avoid (or alternatively, to utilize), as well as flight paths to avoid (such as those that overlap with migratory bird routes).

After this week, I feel that I have a much more dynamic understanding of the role of museum collections in research, as well as everyday life, and I am excited to utilize these resources in my future academic endeavors.