Feature Article: A Drawer Full of Penguins

“A Drawer Full of Penguins” article intended for Pittsburgh Magazine

Purpose

This is a feature article focused on an extended interview with the collection manager of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Steve Rogers. This article was written as part of a science writing class and was not published, but was written in the style of Pittsburgh Magazine.

Audience

Readers of the Pittsburgh Magazine, those with an interest in science but a layperson’s understanding.

Process

In the process of writing this article, I:

·      Interviewed Steve Rogers.

·      Conducted further research as necessary.

·      Wrote and edited the article.

A Drawer Full of Penguins: Taking a Tour Through the Natural History Museum’s Animal Library

Steve Rogers leans halfway off the metal stepladder and pulls open a drawer of goldfinches. He leafs through the tiny yellow-bellied birds stuffed fat with cotton, searching for the best-preserved one like a shopper looking over tomatoes. Picking out the best-looking bird, he holds it up. “This one’s mine,” he says. “At least, it should be.”

Hidden behind unobtrusive doors marked “Unauthorized entry prohibited,” the Carnegie Museum of Natural History houses a vast library of preserved animals, floating in jars, nestled in drawers, or mounted behind glass. As collection manager for the museum’s Birds and Herpetology (reptiles and amphibians) sections, Rogers oversees this library. The trip through Rogers’ world is sometimes morbid, often eerie, and always fascinating; it is bound to convince anyone who perceives taxidermy as a slightly creepy hunters’ pastime of the craft’s important role in science.

Rogers grew up in rural northern Pennsylvania, where hunting is popular—his grandfather had mounted deer heads (taxidermists hate the term “stuffing” and refer to their work as “mounting”) and a bear rug. His interest in taxidermy began young. “A lot of kids see dinosaurs in museums and want to be paleontologists,” he said. “I was more interested in skeletons.” He started collecting skulls at 12 and did his first mount at 14. “We didn’t have video games back then,” he explained. After studying microbiology at

Slippery Rock University, he worked in an abattoir (a research slaughterhouse) skinning and putting down animals. He then studied physiological zoology at Michigan State and spent a few years working in natural parks before ending up at the Natural History museum as a preparator, where he’s been for twenty-six years. Many of the preserved birds, amphibians, and reptiles in the museum are his work — preserved as skeletons, skins, whole in an alcohol solution, or display-ready mounts. Birdwatchers, Rogers explains, keep “life lists,” lists of the birds they’ve spotted. “Me—I have death lists,” he says.

Holding up a dripping preserved turtle from Tennessee, Rogers introduces a pack of teenage docents to the Alcohol House, a three-story building packed chock full of frogs, snakes, newts and turtles floating in alcohol-filled jars. The effect is something like a huge pantry, shelves packed with glass jars bursting with dark scales, claws, shells, and eyes staring eerily out through the pale yellow ethanol solution. Blue bands mark holotypes, the first or most important specimens of any given species, and some jars hold multiple specimens floating together. The teen docents race up the spiral staircases, peering at snakes coiled like nests of angel hair pasta, spiky horned toads, and the football-sized head of an anaconda that Rogers displays proudly. It’s a little much for some of them—“I hope there aren’t any spiders,” one girl whispers urgently. The museum has over 205,000 specimens of amphibians and reptiles, ninety percent of them in the Alcohol House.

The docents continue their tour in the Section of Birds. Although there are some bird specimens in the Alcohol House, most of the museum’s birds are preserved as “study skins,” which are essentially taxidermied specimens before they are mounted. The birds are kept in a compressor, which looks like the stacks at big academic libraries, tall metal shelves packed in tight into a solid block with room to view only a single row at a time. The shelves can be moved back and forth by spinning a metal wheel. Careless teen docents, caught between two shelves, might end up specimens themselves.

It smells like a library, too—a musty odor hangs heavy in the air. Rogers spins the wheels and opens up a few cupboards to show off his birds. He holds up a toucan, straight and stiff as the flamingoes used as croquet mallets in Alice in Wonderland. Another drawer holds an entire ostrich, folded up neatly to fit. A drawer stuffed with penguins sends gasps through the crowd. “That’s what happens to the birds in Happy Feet who don’t know their lines,” one teen jokes.

Why does the museum keep preserved specimens of so many animals? First of all, Rogers explains, collecting specimens and marking their locations helps scientists map animals’ geographic ranges. The range maps in field guides are based on work done by people like Rogers. Scientists from around the world also study the specimens. Right now, researchers are studying the museum’s collection of hatchling turtles (the largest such collection in the world) to learn why incubation temperature can affect new turtles’ sex. Two thousand specimens are currently on loan throughout the world, Rogers says. He spends most of his time nowadays dealing with loans and data requests and keeping the various catalogs up to date.

Preserving animals serves another important purpose. In the Section of Birds office, Rogers pulls open a drawer where cotton-stuffed passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets sit neatly in a row, like rolled-up sorted socks. “This is the extinct drawer,” he says. “I hope we won’t have to add any more.” He describes the days when the pigeons were so common, hunters would shoot a ton of them, load them in a railroad car, send them up to New York and sell them for food, a dozen for a dollar. Without preserved specimens like the ones Rogers looks after, we’d have no idea what lost animals like the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the dodo looked like.

Many of these birds were collected in the 1920s, and Rogers says that they will last forever as long as they are kept dry and away from bugs. The fluid specimens will also last forever as long as the jars don’t leak. Rogers explains how the animals achieve this level of immortality.

To make a fluid specimen (like those in the Alcohol House), a specimen will be washed with soap to remove any oil, then injected with formaldehyde. Next, the specimen is placed in a bath of formaldehyde for a couple weeks, then rinsed and transferred to an ethanol solution, weak at first, and slowly working up to 70% alcohol. The resulting specimens “could be dissected 50 years from now,” Rogers says.

Some specimens in the Alcohol House are also cleared and stained, a method that leaves specimens transparent, with bones and cartilage dyed fluorescent purple—a floating purple ghost. The clearing and staining process is different from regular fluid preservation in that the animal is not only preserved with formaldehyde and ethanol, but also dyed red, placed in an enzyme solution to flush out soft tissue, dyed blue, and then placed in a glycerin solution.

Making a study skin, which is the first step in taxidermy, is a very different process. As Rogers puts it, “you skin ‘em, cut ‘em, dry ‘em, feed ‘em to the bugs.” In other words, the animal is skinned, then the meat cut off. The skin is tanned and saved for later. The skinless specimen is then dried in front of a fan to the consistency of jerky and dropped in a fish tank containing a colony of dermestid beetles, half-inch-long meat- chomping creatures that look like the roly-poly bugs common in basements. The colony feasts on the leftover flesh. To keep the bugs satiated, Rogers brought some dried, meat- covered bones from a deer he’d shot to the outbuilding in the courtyard where the beetles live. The bugs swarmed over their meal, sending up waves of heat and a smell of old meat. An active colony, Rogers said, would reduce an animal to a perfectly clean skeleton in two days.

Sometimes, the skeleton is preserved whole at this point. To make a study skin, however, only the shell of the skull, each ulna (arm bone) hand, tibia (leg bone), and foot are saved. Then the tanned hide is fitted over the bones, filled with cotton, and sewn back up. To make a taxidermied mount, the hide and bones are fitted over a foam or plastic form, purchased through a catalog, and glass or plastic eyes, tongue, teeth, beaks etc. are added. The taxidermist then arranges the animal into a realistic, aesthetically pleasing position. The resulting mount is museum-worthy.

When Rogers first came to the museum, he spent most of his time preparing specimens—cleaning skeletons, preparing fluid specimens and study skins, and mounting the occasional animal. Nowadays, he rarely has time to prepare specimens—the museum’s staff, once three full-time people in Herpetology and six in Birds; now Rogers shares the office with only one other full-time scientist—the curator of Birds—and a few part-time workers. The museum can’t afford to spend any more money on taxidermy, Rogers explains. He taps the hole where a mounted oppossum’s nose used to be, worn away by visitors’ fingers. “We can’t even afford to fix what we have,” he said.

The field of taxidermy has changed greatly since Rogers started out. The best taxidermists used to be associated with natural history museums—they would learn their craft by studying animals and consulting experts in biology and anatomy. Nowadays, anyone can become a skilled taxidermist by subscribing to one of the dozens of taxidermy magazines or even by browsing the Web. Modern taxidermy publications, Rogers explains, go through the taxidermy process step-by-step. Aspiring taxidermists can simply order animal forms, or false eyes, tongues, and teeth through mail-order, and then “all you have to do is tan it and slap it on.” These days, the best taxidermists are part of commercial outfits, not museums.

This shift has led to slipping standards, Rogers continues. He taps a photograph of a reassembled dodo. With no living sample to base the recreation on, the taxidermist had, to Rogers’ disbelief, used a gull wing and an emu foot. “It’s like recreating a lion and using an elephant’s nose,” he exclaims. Eventually, commercial taxidermists will be as knowledgeable as museum workers, but they’ve got a long way to go.

As crucial as it is for mounted animals to be scientifically accurate, they are also works of art, Rogers says, especially when they are part of dioramas like those in the museum’s Halls of African and North American Wildlife. Those dioramas are the highest form of taxidermy, “3-dimensional Renoirs,” Rogers says, combining the work of taxidermists, botanists, and background painters to recreate a moment in an animal’s life. These dioramas, Rogers explained, are “art pieces that tell a science story.” Compared to them, Rogers says, the work done by commercial taxidermists these days looks like work done “by a kid with a crayon.”

Despite recent trends, taxidermy will always have a place in science museums. Many animals are difficult or impossible to see in the wild or in zoos, Rogers says, and videos or computer simulations could never replace the thrill of seeing a real animal up close. Taxidermy and other methods of preservation play a crucial role both as a research tool and as a memorable work of art.