There's a king snake with part of a whole garter snake shoved down its throat, found in 1958.
"They were found this way - they were both dead," said Cindy Ramotnik, a federal worker for the U.S. Geological Survey who helps run the Museum of Southwestern Biology in UNM's Ceria building. "Actually, the guy who collected it currently works for our agency in Fort Collins (Colorado). He was 10 years old when he collected this. He thought he was going to be a herpetologist when he was a kid, so he actually collected reptiles and amphibians and put them in jars of alcohol. He's older than me now, but he was a cool kid. A lot of us get started out that way. We get intrigued by things we find outside; nature. And you want to pick it up."
The museum collects mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, skeletons and plants. The mammal/bird room has about 200,000 specimens, curator emeritus Mike Bogan said.
"Taxidermy is an art form," he said. "We don't prepare these kinds of things; they're donated. They try to make them look like they're leaping out of a tree or whatever, running across the Savannah."
The museum doesn't give public tours, but it's open to people with a reason to do research.
"The 'ology' classes, like ornithology, mammalogy, ichthyology, herpetology - they'll come out and use the collection so they learn how to identify animals, and they learn comparative anatomy or convergent evolution," Ramotnik said.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Students working on science projects sometimes come in independently, or art classes take students there to draw and learn anatomy. The herpetology room is full of specimens that can be dissected.
"The specimens exist primarily for scientific research," Bogan said. "So the audience that we're interested in is fellow scientists who are interested in any of the species. Collections have been around a long time, and they've provided lots of answers."
The museum houses a wide scope of specimens including turtles, fish, snakes, a moose from Alaska, a whale vertebra, skulls, kudus, leopards, eagles, gulls and bats.
Ramotnik said some animal-rights groups don't understand why scientists need such collections.
"It's an issue natural history collections have to deal with around the country," she said. "We're sensitive because nowadays, even if you're a biology major at UNM, it used to be if you were taking intro-level zoology, you had to dissect a cat or a frog. Now it's optional because students are concerned and they refuse to cut open an animal for scientific purposes to learn something about it. I think teachers have changed the courses so they don't have to. Even at a vet school - would you want your own doctor to have learned about the human body from watching it on a video or something? I'd want them to have some hands-on experience."
Some of the collection's specimens are more than 100 years old, and some are rare, like the black-footed ferret, or extinct, like the passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers.
"They're here to outlive us," she said. "Some of these animals may go extinct one day, and the fact we collected them when they were common - we can still extract DNA from those specimens.. Students, researchers, anybody who has a valid need to use the collection for education or research - they can certainly contact any of the staff here."
