Things I’ve Learned While Working In A Museum Collection

Things I’ve learned while working in a museum collection

-The best way to learn is on the job

-Snakes kept in ethanol for 50 years have a very specific smell

-it’s like greasy vodka

-I’ve found where all the queers go in science and it’s museums, I’ve found my people

-A right of passage includes getting a tattoo of your preferred genus 

-The 60 year old entomologist who is apparently a celebrity in the beetle circles has a huge back-spanning tattoo of a scarab, and my co-worker only discovered this when she saw said entomologist at a rock concert

-You have to keep those stained skeleton specimens in jars of glycerin because it’s only in glycerin that light goes through the specimens tissue to reveal the blue/red/green skeleton otherwise they’re an opaque white

-Glycerin leeches through glass

-You will be skinning an animal for a few hours and be staring at the bare flesh and viscera and be suddenly intensely hungry. That’s normal.

-You’ll find a “problem specimen” in a jar with no number tag and you’ll ask the collection manager what to do about it, she’ll turn around pick a book from a huge shelf of identical books and ask for the place and date on the jar and then she’ll flip to a page, check that, and then check the online database before saying “it’s this one, make a new tag”. And you’ll spend the rest of the day mystified at the incredible record-keeping that’s been happening for 130 years.

-Vegans haven’t discovered museum collections yet and everyone hopes it stays that way lest we have to constantly defend another vital aspect of scientific progress

- “Our collection isn’t haunted because animals don’t hold that kind of grudge, everything in the herpetology section murdered for their dinner everyday, but the anthropology collection on the other hand…”

-Everyone in the vertebrate collection has a furious and never-ending hatred of fly fishing (never forgive, never forget)