Shelf Life 01: 33 Million Things

MIKE NOVACEK (Senior Vice Present and Provost of Science): When I was seven years old, my hero was Roy Chapman Andrews. He wrote all these kids’ books—All About Dinosaurs, All About Strange Beasts of the Past, which included fossil mammals.

In those books there were images of the Museum—the allosaurus and the mammoth. I never saw that as a kid because I grew up in LA, but I came here as a graduate student to work in the collections and the first thing I had to do was see those specimens on display and they were just the way they were in Roy Chapman Andrews’ books.

I’m Mike Novacek, Senior Vice Present and Provost of Science and I’m also a curator of Paleontology.

PRODUCER: Give me one example of something in the collection.

NANCY SIMMONS (Curator-in-Charge, Department of Mammalogy): 131 frog-eating bats.

PAUL SWEET (Collection Manager, Department of Ornithology): 3 great auks.

BUSHRA HUSSAINI (Senior Museum Specialist, Division of Paleontology): 34,140 specimen lots of Cretaceous mollusks.

MIKE SHARA (Curator, Department of Astrophysics): 40 terabytes of data, representing images of stars, planets, and galaxies, and simulations of star clusters.

JULIE FEINSTEIN (Collection Manager, Ambrose Monell Collection for Molecular and Microbial Research): 86,881 samples of frozen tissue and DNA.

RADFORD ARRINDELL (Senior Museum Specialist, Department of Ichthyology): We have five coelacanths in the collection.

DENTON EBEL (Curator, Division of Earth & Planetary Sciences): We have 12 meteorites from Mars.

EUNSOO KIM (Associate Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): We have about 70 live microbial cultures.

PETER WHITELEY (Curator, Division of Anthropology): 1,235 moccasins from all parts of native North America.  

NOVACEK: There are about 200 scientists working here and there are about 33 million things in the collection. Included in that are Anthropology, Paleontology, Vertebrate, and Invertebrate collections, a rock and gem collection, and the digital collection that’s being amassed by our astrophysicists. We also have our new frozen tissue collection, used not only by our scientists for DNA sequencing, but also scientists from all over the world. It’s the 21^st century museum collection.

SCOTT SCHAEFER (Dean of Science and Curator, Department of Ichthyology): I guess I’ve always been a collector from the early days. I had baseball cards.  I had stamps, coins, model cars.  But interestingly even though I had fish and aquaria it didn’t evolve into, “Well, let’s preserve these things and keep them in the basement forever.” 

My name is Scott Schaefer. I’m Curator of Ichthyology and the Associate Dean of Science for Collections.

It wasn’t until I became interested in ichthyology that I found out,  yeah, folks spend a lot of time and a lot of effort to build and maintain zoological collections in this way. 

Collections are important because they often represent the structure and the fabric of the science that exists out in the real world.

We go to a lot of trouble and a lot of expense to acquire collections, but we also have to spend equal if not greater effort and expense to keep them in pristine condition. We have collections in this museum that are pushing 200 years old and in many cases, they maintain their research value throughout that period of time.

So, it still is today just as essential to collect and acquire specimens as it was 145 years ago when the Museum began building collections.

NOVACEK: You can make new discoveries in collections just like you can out in the field. You can walk around the corner and see something that no one’s quite observed that way before—describe a new species or a new feature that’s important to science. 

I never think of these things as dead. I mean, they seem to be vividly living with us. I just think of them as kind of old. Like hundreds of millions of years old, in some cases. But there’s still a liveliness and a connection that’s extremely, extremely powerful.