Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston

Author:Douglas J. Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466871878
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

GETTING BONES

It is one thing to study bones, but quite another to get them. Paleontologists (as we have seen in several of the expeditions described earlier in this book) find their bones as ready-made fossils. In this respect, mammalogists are not so fortunate. They must collect from the living—and this means finding bones that are inconveniently encased in flesh and skin. At one time, before 1930, it was an easy matter for the Museum to send scientists out to Kenya or Tibet to shoot mammals for study. Today, with many animals becoming endangered, and amid a growing awareness of conservation, many of the Museum’s specimens come from carefully monitored and licensed collecting forays—as well as from zoos.

Four flights down from McKenna’s office, and at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Museum’s African Hall, we come to a locked door with no knob. Through this door, down a twisting corridor, up one flight in a freight elevator, and down a quick right and a left, there is a locked steel door with a tiny window. This door is outside the mammalogy preparation area. Next to the door hangs a heavy coat, which one must put on before entering the room. The room’s interior looks like nothing else on earth; it is like an exotic meat locker filled with rare animals. This room—the Museum’s “freezer”—is often the first stop a dead animal makes upon entering the Museum. Lying on the floor at the time of our visit, arms outstretched, is the body of a female gorilla—frozen solid. Stretched alongside her, also frozen, rests a male leopard. On the far side of the room, a number of shelves hold stacks of elephant hides and other skins; some of these hides are from elephants shot by Teddy and Kermit Roosevelt. Assorted animal remains and skinned carcasses in plastic bags are stored about the room, and in a far corner, two mounted Siberian tigers stare at the scene with fierce but sightless eyes.

Most large natural history museums require a freezer to store perishable remains. Here animals are stored until preparators are ready to turn them into skeletons and skins for study or exhibition. Today the animals that end up in the American Museum’s freezer almost always come from zoos with which the Museum has made special arrangements. (The gorilla, for example, lived at the Bronx Zoo until her death.) By the time you read these pages, the gorilla will probably be a numbered skeleton resting in a drawer in the collection.

It is here that we are very likely to run into Steve Medina, the man in charge of reducing animal carcasses to skin and bones. There are few people in the country in his line of work—perhaps no more than a dozen or two.

“There are,” Medina explains, “two methods of preparing a carcass: bacterial maceration … and ‘the bugs.’” Maceration is the preferred method for large animals whose bones will be disarticulated, while “the bugs” work best for smaller animals and for delicate parts of larger animals where curators want the skeleton to remain articulated.

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