It resembles a mad scientist’s lair.
The Museum of Southwestern Biology has wall-to-wall filing cabinets, each shelf containing rows upon rows of stuffed animals. In all, the museum houses more than 230,000 specimens from more than 68 countries, making it the fifth-largest mammal collection in the world.
Jon Dunnum, the museum’s collection manager, pulled open a shelf filled with moles from South Carolina’s Aiken County last week. The small mammals looked like something out of a child’s toy collection, but Dunnum said the drawer’s contents don’t faze him.
“The key is to preserve this stuff in perpetuity because we don’t know what questions we are going to want to answer or the tools we are going to have to answer them,” he said, brandishing a mole. “It’s our duty to preserve things for future generations of scientists.”
That’s why each specimen is tagged with information such as sex or geographical location. Next to some of the moles are tiny skeletons preserved in plastic vials.
He holds the mole as a person might hold a book in a library — with complete ease. He’s at home in the museum, talking about how specimens are entered into Arctos, a database that has a corresponding physical notation in one of the hundreds of notebooks stored in the CERIA building.
The museum houses mostly rodents and bats, the two most diverse animal groups in the world, Dunnum said, but also contains major selections from the Southwest, Beringia and Latin America. They even have a safe-sized whale vertebra, a platypus and specimens from 1890.
That still isn’t as interesting as the bottom floor of the Division of Mammals. Countless fish, snakes and lizards lie dead in jars, but further back is the unsettling mammal section. One jar is filled with bat fetuses. Another is home to a bat the size of a miniature Yorkshire terrier.
And in another jar with yellow fluid is a platypus complete with a bill, claws and beaver pelt.
Not everyone understands the museum’s value, Dunnum said.
“There are certainly people that if they don’t take the time to understand what goes on these places they’ll say, ‘Oh you have killed all these cute, little animals,’ he said. “You can conserve whole ecosystems, which is vastly more important than not sacrificing these 10 mice because they are cute. I understand how people can feel this way, but people doing this work are very concerned about the biodiversity on Earth.”
To the layperson, it’s hard to understand how 230,000 animals in filing cabinets help the scientific community.
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Consider the 1993 outbreak of the hantavirus, Dunnum said.
To understand the problem, the museum, together with the Center for Disease Control and New Mexico Department of Health, collected mammals.
Dunnum said they found that the virus came from deer mice with fleas carrying the disease, which was strange because hantavirus is an old-world disease. He said some people thought it was a government conspiracy, but that wasn’t true.
“We were able to go into our frozen tissue banks,” Dunnum said. “We had been saving tissues since the mid 1970s, and we were able to go into those banks and look at tissues for the deer mice that we had. We were able to get virus out of those tissues, 20 years back predating this outbreak. Right then we could say, ‘No this isn’t anything new. We just haven’t seen it yet.’”
Yet that’s only a small section of what the museum does, Dunnum said. He said 50 years ago scientists didn’t have access to DNA testing, but now they do, which makes the museum more valuable. Dunnum said these unexpected advances drive the collection’s expansion.
“Fifty years ago, we didn’t have the tools to extract DNA and do molecular work, so these were of limited value then,” he said. “In 50 years from now, who knows what we are going to be able to do? Who knows what tools are going to be there?”
To borrow the book metaphor again, the museum is an ever-growing library. Papers and research on specimens are added to the Arctos collection, Dunnum said.
“It’s a snapshot in time and space all the way through the history of these species,” he said. “We have a point in space and time where we can say undeniably this species occurred. So now we can go back, 50 years from now, go to that same place and ask questions: Has this place changed? How has it changed? Why has it changed?”
