9UNP0141SD_Laura Halverson_WordPress

- Good afternoon. Welcome to our third in a series of Frontiers of Life Science, and Plato class offered on Wednesday afternoons here at Space Place. Today, we have Laura Halverson with us from the Department of Zoology and the Registrar for the Zoological Museum on campus. I've asked Laura to give us her own details of her past, so with that, welcome, Laura. 
- Thank you. 
(applause)
 I actually was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin a couple of years ago. And I got my undergraduate degree in anthropology. And then I went to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where I completed a Master's degree in anthropology with a focus on museum studies. 

Then I went out to San Diego for a short time, and I worked at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and then I came back here. Now I've been working at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum for the last two years. So that's my background. And now, I'll tell you a little bit about the museum. And I should mention that I did bring some of the experts from the museum along with me today, so if there's questions that I can't answer, they should be able to. And they're right around here. This is just a little overview of what we're going to cover today. I put this picture in because I'm trying to do kind of a virtual tour of our museum. And this is the first thing that you see when you come into the museum. And that's our sign-in book right here on the corner that you would sign in if you were actually at the museum, but I won't make anybody do that today. 

But we're going to talk about our mission and our goals. What we do at the museum, the history of the museum. I'm going to talk a little bit about the collections and the special parts of the different collections that we have. We're going to talk about the specimen preparation, and then special projects that we're working on for the future. So most of the slides have pictures, these do not. But this is, I cut and pasted a little bit from our mission statement, because it's kind of long. But this really kind of gets to the heart of what we do at the museum. And I'm just going to read it. "The University of Wisconsin Madison Zoological Museum was established to be a center for research and educational support for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is dedicated to the preservation, study and understanding of the vertebrate and aquatic fauna of the Wisconsin, the Midwest and other parts of the world. 

The collections provide a library of primary information basic to studies of animal and human ecology, systematics and genetics, and morphology." And we have three main goals at the museum, and those are teaching, research and outreach. I'm going to talk a little bit about those. UWZM personnel, the curators, myself, the preparator, and the collections instructor aid in teaching nearly 3,500 students each year, just on the UW Madison campus. We teach or provide specimens for 12 major courses in seven different departments and three different colleges on campus. So we provide specimens for a number of different disciplines and in a number of different forms. The lab up on the far corner up there is a skeletology lab for one of the early-on courses, 101, 102, for the science majors and non-science majors. And it's one of the first science courses they'll take. And we set up a room full of almost 100 skeletons for them, all articulated. They walk around, they do measurements. 

The picture on the bottom over there is the mammals of Wisconsin lab, where students learn, actually, I think it's vertebrates of Wisconsin now. And the students learn to key out different mammals and birds from Wisconsin. So the microscopes are set up to look at the skulls. And there are some skins there, too, so they can learn how to identify specimens. And this picture is actually a workshop. In addition to all of the courses that we provide specimens for, and we teach, we have a number of independent study students every semester. This year, I think we have about ten. They come in during the week for about six hours, and they learn museum techniques. They learn everything that we do from when a specimen enters a museum until it gets put into a collection, and everything in between, and everything after that. And they help out a lot. 

This is actually Angela, who is our preparator and also our resident herpetologist. She is teaching a group of students how to skin and stuff a bird. We did this workshop on Saturday and they all did a bird. Everyone finished their bird. In addition to teaching, we do do a lot of research and offer a lot of loans. We process loans, send out loans to other institutions all over the world. We also accept loans for UW professors and students, and individuals who can't otherwise get a loan, because most museum institutions will not loan directly to an individual, so we are a vehicle for them to borrow specimens. And we house them at the museum. But we also have a lot of researchers that come in and they do a lot of faunal analysis, or do a lot of comparative studies, in addition to the fact that we have a lot of artists come in. Wood carvers, people who draw, people who paint. 

The woman over on the picture that's the furthest from me, her name's Marie May, and she comes in every Friday afternoon and she draws. This is actually one of her pictures. She does skeletons. She does bird skins, so she does quite a variety of different art techniques. And then we also have an outreach component, which we have a couple of small exhibits. And we're in the process of re-doing an exhibit that's been up for a long time, about five years, about the Galapagos Islands, which we do have a collecting agreement with, and I'll talk about that in just a second. And then we have some smaller exhibit cases scattered around Nolan Hall, which is where we are located. We also do outreach in that, this was actually from Darwin Day this year. The university put on a celebration of Darwin. And we had little workshops set up, and this is Angela and I actually working at the workshop. 

And our little stand was about bird morphology, and how you would group birds if you based it on their morphology, and how when you look at the genetics, how different that grouping is. So we had a little game that everyone got the move the little birds around. Then we had some specimen's laid out, too, so everybody could see them. And now I'm going to talk a little bit about the history. I always like the history of institutions, because it kind of tells you how far they've come. In 1848, prior to the construction of any of the university buildings, the regents initiated collecting for a "Natural History Cabinet." And at that time, museums were considered cabinets of curiosity. Horace Tenney, who later became the state geologist, with Increase A. Lapham, who's pictured here, began collecting samples for use in teaching natural history courses on campus. Then in 1851, the collections were housed in the newly-finished North Hall. 

And as the collections grew, so did the university. And finally, in 1855, the ever-growing collection was moved to South Hall. In 1859, University Hall, which is here, which was later named Bascom Hall, was completed. And at that time, the collections were moved into University Hall. And six years later, in 1865, the collections totaled 12,137, which wasn't really too bad of a size of a collection that was only 13 years old. In 1875, Edward A. Birge was hired as an instructor at the university. And he also became the assistant curator of the cabinet. He later went on to become a professor, dean and president of the university. In 1876, Science Hall was completed and the museum was moved on to the fourth floor of that building. 

At that time the museum was really central to natural history teachings and research, and so it was put on the fourth floor. And sadly in 1844, Science Hall burned down, and this is actually a picture. I don't know if you can see the black kind of coming out of the windows. This is after Science Hall burned down. The entire collection was lost. But by the start of 1855, in January, E.A. Birge had begun acquiring natural science and anatomical specimens, models and equipment to replace what had been lost in the fire. And this image right here is Birge's catalog. We still have this catalog at the museum. It recorded what he bought and how much he bought it for. And we still have that. 

Up in the top picture, if you can see, there are some articulated skeletons in the very front of the classroom. And those are skeletons that Birge purchased at this time. And if you notice, this is our current lab, and we still use of lot of those specimens in teaching today. A lot of them were costly at the time, and they would be extremely costly to replace now, if we could even replace them. A lot of them can't be replaced. This picture is of Aaron Ludwig Kumlien. His father was hired by Birge to provide and prepare approximately 500 bird skins to replace what was lost in the fire. The skins that he donated date from 1856-1888, and they are a primary resource for monitoring the chemical changes of the environment throughout the state during that time. Later, Aaron Ludwig Kumlien, who's pictured here, donated his collection of bird specimens to the Zoological Museum, as well. So we have two generations of Kumlien specimens. 

In 1887, new Science Hall, the one we know today, was completed. In 1888, university personnel began occupying the new space. And here's a picture of Science Hall. It hasn't really changed a whole lot. And if you notice the picture down at the bottom, that is the Cabinets of Curiosity that were in Science Hall. And they're kind of neat looking cabinets, and they're a little more unorganized than exhibits are today, but they look pretty neat. And shortly after this time, Birge became dean of Letters and Science. And then in 1897, he was appointed superintendent of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. He served as both superintendent and director of that program from 1900-1919. And while he was doing that, he met George Wagner, who also worked on the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. 

Wagner was hired in 1903 to teach a number of courses here. He also was an early curator of the museum. While he was a curator, he worked to elevate the museum to the status of the State Museum, which has never actually happened. There has been a reinvigoration of that goal right now. The Herbarium on campus, the botany, plant museum, in 1994, they were elevated to the State Herbarium. So we're kind of trying to follow in their footsteps and reinvigorate that goal. Let's see, starting in the summer of 1905, Wagner began collecting fishes for the Wisconsin Survey of Fishes. And all of those fishes were deposited at the museum. And from 1917-1920, Birge and Wagner worked together to recruit notable herpetologist, to deposit reptiles and amphibians from the museum that they had collected during that time. Wagner also began a bird banding program between 1925 and 1943. 

And he and the students that he used to help with that program, banded approximately 3,000 birds. And those birds, they used for a number of different studies and we have some results of those studies at the museum. George Wagner was also the first curator to systematically catalog specimens at the museum. And between 1905 and 1940, his tenure at the museum, he cataloged the initial 13,000 entries, except for those that were cataloged by Hartley H.T. Jackson, who at the time, was a student museum assistant under Wagner. And Harley H.T. Jackson later served as a mammalogist with the U.S. Biological Survey, and in 1919 was one of the founders of the American Society of Mammalogists. He also wrote a book called the "Mammals of Wisconsin." His personal collection of mammals that ranged in dates from 1898 to 1923, was deposited at the museum. This is the inside of Birge Hall shortly after it was built. The museum moved into Birge Hall. There was a space provided for the museum. 

We moved in 1912. We actually remained in Birge until we moved into Nolan Hall in 1972, which that slide's coming up. And we're going to jump ahead a little bit to John Emlen, who was a professor of zoology from 1946-1974. He came shortly after Wagner. John Emlen specialized in ornithology, and he intermittently acted as director of the museum. And his early studies really focused on birds in the area, and ecology. Later, he became the major professor of George Schaller, who did a lot of work on mountain gorillas. John Emlen's focus changed, and he ended up donating a number of crucial voucher specimens from African birds and mammals. We still have those today at the museum. And there's John Emlen. 

Let's see, in 1962 William G. Reeder, who was a professor of zoology, was also the museum director. He was the director until about 1979. During his tenure at the museum, a number of collaborative research and collecting programs were initiated. In the 1960s, in conjunction with William S. Laughlin from the Department of Anthropology, Reeder began collecting trips in the Aleutian Islands, bringing back marine invertebrates, birds, and sea mammal specimens. In the late 1960s, Reeder was the major professor for a number of graduate students studying the biota of the Galapagos Islands. And one of those was Craig McFarland, who did a lot of work on the Galapagos tortoise. And I think, if this is the right story, Craig couldn't decide if he wanted-- He wanted to do his dissertation on a large reptile, and he had narrowed it down to the Komodo dragon and the Galapagos tortoise. And after a little nudging, he decides on the Galapagos tortoise. 

And so, Bill and his graduate students at the time began a rare and lasting collecting agreement with Ecuador. And it was later continued by E. Elizabeth Pillaert, who is here today, too, so she can answer questions about that, too. And also in the 1970s, Reeder worked out an agreement with the Primate Research Center, so that their anatomical specimens would be vouchered in the museum. So we have a number of specimens from that lab, as well. And this is Nolan Hall. This is where we still reside on the fourth floor of this building. And the museum was moved into Nolan Hall in 1972. From 1980-1983, John T. Robinson was the museum director. 

At the time, he was acknowledged as one of the world leaders in the study of human evolution. He was a professor in both zoology and anthropology, and he left his reprint collection to the museum when he passed away, as well as many cranial casts and memorabilia from the South African paleoanthropologist Robert Broom, including some of Broom's original sketches. And we have those at the museum, as well. In 1982, while John T. Robinson was director, Milton College, which was an early higher education institution in this state closed, and the bird and mammal collections there were deposited at the Zoological Museum. And they had a lot of specimens dating back from 1844 to the 1940s, which was really remarkable, because, as we had lost early-early specimens in the fire, we could replace a lot of that. Some of these early specimens were collected by Ludwig Kumlien, who you saw a photo of earlier, and F.G. Hall, and they collected them while they were teaching at Milton college and curating the collections there. So it was a contact that led back to us. From 1983-2006, John A.W. Kirsch was the director of the museum and also a professor in zoology. And he established a lab for the study of bird and mammal DNA, using techniques of DNA and DNA hybridization. 

From John and his graduate students, we have received a number of specimens from Australia, Tasmania, Argentina and Ecuador. And along with other professors Kirsch played a key role in our acquisition of the Charles G. Sibley Genetic Bird Collection, which we'll talk about a little bit later, too. This is E. Elizabeth Pillaert. She is the current museum director. She is also a distinguished researcher and the curator of osteology. And she took on the role of the kind of the connection with the Galapagos Islands, and that agreement is that we can go down and do salvage collection. Nothing can be killed. It's just picked up. 

And I have some photos of those specimens when they're found, and they're brought back. Of all the complete skeletons, half are sent back to institutions in Ecuador, and half are kept in the museum. They don't want anything that's incomplete though, so that's why we have such a sizable collection. And so, Elizabeth has been collecting in the Galapagos since the early 1970s, and has returned over 1,400 specimens for ecological and behavioral studies here. And she has made eight scientific trips and six alumni trips to the Galapagos, and couple of trips for enjoyment, as well. And this is a summary of our collections. In total, we have half a million zoological specimens. I probably don't have to read through all of them. But we'll go with through each of these collections. So you can see a little bit of what every collection has. 

And we're going to start with the Bird Collection. I handed out some brochures, or maybe you picked one up in the back. I tried to follow that brochure, so if you want to follow along, you can certainly do that. Birds are some of our oldest specimens, as we talked about from Milton College. Some of the oldest are from 1845. And the specimens from Wisconsin really kind of predominate in the collection. And we have a lot from Wisconsin ornithologists Thure and Ludwig Kumlien, in addition to specimens from A.W. Schorger, from 1913-1969. As I said, we have a lot of specimens from Wisconsin, but also we have a number of North and South America and Asia. And we have the Sibley Genetic Bird Material, which contains thousands of blood and tissue samples from nearly all avian families, many of which are rare or impossible to obtain to this day. So we have Charles G. 

Sibley, who worked at Cornell, and with our connection that John Kirsch had, we've now acquired that Genetic Bird Collection. The Bird Collection has a number of study skins that are used for research. I actually have a study skin of a Scarlet Tanager up here. Then also, a teaching collection, and these are just kind of miscellaneous wings, and other parts. And then we have a number of other mounts. This mount is actually a Northern Flicker. And I think it is a hybrid of the yellow and the red. And the mount was actually created by someone who did a lot of bird stuffing and mounting while he worked at the museum. We also have a nest collection, in addition to an egg collection. Egg collecting was a big deal a while ago, and then it was outlawed. 

Our egg collection was actually used in the debate against DDT. In 1968, hearings began because people started noticing that the egg shells were thin, and it was creating a lot of reproductive failures in the eggs. I think it started at the time, in 1968, I think there were 400 nesting pairs of eagles. And that was what got people really riled up about it. In 1970, DDT was banned in Wisconsin. And in 1972, it was banned, there was a national ban on DDT. And the problem was that DDT was being sprayed on plants to stop bugs from eating them, or to get rid of the mosquitoes. That was carried to the water systems, and it built up in the fish. The fish were eaten by birds. The DDT accumulated in their bodies, and it created very thin egg shells, which resulted in reproductive failures. 

So our egg collection was a big deal in the DDT debate. We also have a mammal collection. This is a photo of a mounted wolf. And Wisconsin mammals are strongly represented in this mammal skin collection. We are also a repository for endangered species, such as the wolves. We have hundreds of wolf skin and skeletons. And actually our curator of mammals, Paula Holahan, is actually, today, working on a project with a couple of genetic labs around the country, one in Colorado and one in Oregon. She took some tissue samples and sent them away to the genetic labs. And they are comparing the genetic data with the morphological data. So what Angela might have suggested, if she looked at all the characteristics, or if Paula came in and looked at all the characteristics, and they wrote down whether they thought it was a wolf, or a hybrid, or a dog. 

Then, they're comparing that data with what the genetics say, so it should be some interesting results. Here are a couple of mounts and some small mammal skins. There's a mount and a skin. The Mammal Collection includes collections from early mammalogists like H.H.T. Jackson, William H. Elder, and A.W. Schorger, among others. Another subpart of the Mammal Collection is fluid and histological slide collection from Harland W. Mossman. Harland Mossman was a professor in the Department of Anatomy from around the early 1920s until he retired in 1968, at which time he was appointed adjunct curator at the Zoological Museum. He moved his specimens, both fluid and the histological slides to the museum. The slides and the fluid collections consist mostly of female mammalian reproductive organs and fetal membranes. 

It's one of the most complete collections of its kind. We actually have researchers from Denmark who come yearly, or biannually, to visit this collection, and gather data and do research. In 1987, he published a compilation of his lifelong research in the book, "Vertebrate Fetal Membranes." We have his reprint collection and these hundreds of thousands of serial slides. And also, we still have the paraffin blocks that he embedded the tissues in and made cross sections of the slides, so we still have all of those, too. Next, we have the Herpetology Collection. Richard C. Vogt has deposited nearly 4,000 herpetological specimens into this collection. And many of those specimens serve as the base for his book, "Natural History of Amphibians and Reptiles in Wisconsin," which was published in 1981. I hear it's very hard to get. 

And if you can get it, it's pretty expensive. And this book is still the most comprehensive resource for Wisconsin herpetology. Dr. Vogt currently works in Brazil, and he's collaborating with Dr. Warren Porter at UW. They have together deposited some Brazilian specimens at the UWZM. Angela spent a field season in Brazil working with Dr. Vogt. She's a graduate student of Warren Porter's. She studied nesting patterns of turtles there. 

So we're all anticipating the results of her studies down there. There are also collections from southeast Asia, Africa, Mexico and South America. And actually, this picture over there is a Gila monster. Just in the last year, I think they found a hormone in the saliva of the Gila monster that is helping to cure Type 2 Diabetes. This is just a picture going down of the collection of all the jars of pickled reptiles and amphibians. This is a picture of Marlin Johnson, who just recently donated his personal collection of fishes to the museum. Dr. John D. Lyons, who works for the Wisconsin DNR, is also the adjunct curator of fishes at the museum. He has spent thousands of hours on research projects and preparation of specimens for deposition at the museum. 

And Marlin Johnson, who I just mentioned, not only is he right now curating, preparing, cataloging his own personal collection, but he was also a graduate student at UW in the 1960s, and he taught a number of field zoology courses, of which we have acquired those collections. He then went on later to work at UW-Waukesha. Let's see, we also have a number of fishes from Eastward Cruises, which between 1972 and 1977, John J. Magnuson and James F. Kitchell, who were professors in zoology and limnology, led a number of expeditions off the coast of North Carolina. And we have many, many fish from the Eastward Cruise time. And there were a number of collections between 1960 and 1978 that were deposited at the museum to help establish a fish database for southern Wisconsin, and to also aid in the revision of the book, "Fishes of Wisconsin." And next we have the Osteology Collection. That's a picture of some of the bones. Then the picture on the bottom is from one of our large skeleton rooms. 

That's how the collection is boxed up and in the collection room. This collection contains specimens from all vertebrate classes, and it's used extensively by zoologists and zooarchaeologists conducting faunal analysis. And there is a large Galapagos connection, as I talked about earlier. Here is just a map of the Galapagos Islands. I mentioned earlier that nothing is killed. It's all salvage collected. And these are marine iguanas. This was found, I think that's on lava rock. And this one is actually at the museum, and it is all just kind of dried. I think the weather dried the tissues onto the bone, and that's what it looks like now. 

The far picture up here, is of some cormorants. It's comparing the-- What is it? It's the sternum, yeah, I know. I'm trying to think of the name of the cormorant. -- What's the other one? 
(inaudible)
 Okay, the sternum that's closest to me is of the flighted cormorant, and you can see the large keel. They have a large muscular structure so they can fly. And the flightless cormorant, on the far side, you can see has a much smaller sternum. The bodies are kind of reversed. 

I have some samples, if you want to look. I brought those along, so you could actually see them. The picture doesn't really do justice to the bone. We have a number of, well we have about three or four tortoises? 
- Seven. 
- Oh, seven! We have seven Galapagos tortoise-- 
- Complete. 
- Complete, okay. You can see some of the shells. 

When you go through the museum, if you go on a tour, it's kind of neat to actually see them in person, because these are small pictures The shell is not a small item. And there's a tortoise up there. We also accession and hold the Limnology Collection. In 1981, John J. Magnuson, who is now director emeritus of the Center for Limnology, initiated a long-term ecological research program to document the changes in seven northern and four southern lakes in Wisconsin. Dr. Steven Carpenter has continued the project, which has yielded thousands of plankton samples collected over time. These are boxes and boxes. I was going to show a sample of plankton, but you can't really see it. It looks like water, kind of murky water in a jar, but it's very important work. 

We have some very important specimens, but you can't really see much. They also have started to move a lot of those samples onto slides. So they're now preserving them in slide form, and we house those as well. We've actually just added on to their collection space, moved things around a little bit so they have a little bit more space to add, because they're constantly bringing in more specimens. We also have a Paleontology Collection. There are three mastodon specimens. And this is the skull of one of the mastodons. They were all found around Deerfield, Wisconsin. This is actually the most complete giant beaver skull ever found in the state. The giant beaver skull was found midway between, somewhere between Madison and Milwaukee. 

And if you a see any dark soil as you're driving through, most of those are peat bogs, and that's where a lot of these specimens are found. They're kind of right outside your backdoor. We also have a large Mollusk Collection. A large portion of the mollusks were collected from the Mississippi drainage. This collection is very useful to document ecological changes. We have a couple of sub-notable collections within the mollusk collection. One is from F.C. Baker's collection. It was deposited here. It's now on long-term loan to the University of Michigan, Museum of Zoology. We also have a collection that was donated around 1886, or collected from Brother Joseph Dutton. 

He cared for people with Hansen's Disease on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. He donated a number of land snails to the museum, many of which are endangered or extinct now. We also have a collection from David A. Baerreis, who worked in the Department of Anthropology. And he collected a number of snails from both archeological and modern contexts. They're now recently being worked on, and rehoused, and catalogued. And as you can see, there are many, many little jars. All those little brown spots are cork caps, plugs in small vials, and the snails are almost minuscule. A lot of them, you have to see in a microscope to see them. We also have a Crayfish Collection. 

The collection was made through the 19th century from Wisconsin watersheds. Some of the species that we have at the museum have now become endangered or extinct, so it kind of highlights the changes in the ecology over time. And this collection has just been recently been-- The fluids have been topped off and we're just starting to systematically catalog this collection, too. We also have a large collection of Historical Objects. A lot of these items were used for biological instruction and research. They were acquired between the 1880s and the early 20th century. Here's a wall chart that was used for instruction. The picture on the other side is a microscope. It's the only one of its kind. It was built by hand by the manufacturer. 

And it's really heavy, so it doesn't move much. We have some other instruments, such as these clay and wax models. And then the picture on the far left is Elizabeth Smith, who worked at the department. You can kind of see there's a microscope in front of her with like a little paddle in front of it. That actually had a mirror on it, and it's a camera lucida. And she would use that to inspect things and then draw them, and make drawings and models, and things. That's how they did it at the time, before they could plug it into their computer and see it pop-up. And actually this collection, we just started a new class, with the History of Science Department. Students are coming in, and they've all picked an object, a historical object, and they're coming in and they're doing a research paper on that object. So it's going to be very interesting for us to see what avenues they'll take, and what they're going to come up with for their projects. 

Here are a couple more historical objects. These are Blaschka models. And actually, there was just recently an article on the wisc.edu Web site about the Blaschka models. They were made in the 1800s and bought from Ward's Natural Science Establishment. And the models were sold to universities and museums for instruction and exhibit. They're glass. They're blown glass. And in 1890, Birge bought a number of them for instruction and for exhibit at the museum. He spent $185, and they ranged in price from 30 cents to $12. This picture right here is Leopold Blaschka. 

And the one that's farther from me is his son, Rudolf Blaschka. They were a 19th century father and son team of German glass makers who made all of these models. They had their own original formula for the glass, the glues and the enamels, which unfortunately died when Rudolf died in 1939. It's really amazing that they had this whole recipe for making these models, but the fact that the recipe died with Rudolf makes it really hard to conserve and care for the specimens. It's hard to put them back together, or clean them, even, because no one knows what's going to disintegrate. It's a costly and time consuming project to conserve these specimens. And other museums that have Blaschka models are Cornell, the British Museum, Harvard, and us. We also have a number of Library Resources. We have 3,000 books, over 200 dissertations and theses, and several thousand monographs, reprints and journal issues. This is just a small sample of some of our reprint collections. 

So now we're moving on to Specimen Preparation. We actually get a number of specimens from the zoos, both Henry Vilas and the Milwaukee County Zoo. And here's Angela, our preparator with a zebra. We do most of the preparation work in-house, so we'll get the specimens whole, as you can see in the picture. And they are skinned and defleshed, as you can see in the picture up on the top over there. That's actually at the Vet School, but we skin and deflesh them. And down on the bottom, that is a group of students making small bird skins where they cut them open and take out the insides, pretty much, and then they stuff them with cotton. You'll see the end result of that in just a second. The skeletons, however, take a little bit longer. After they have been skinned and defleshed, the remaining flesh on the bones is dried. 

Then the bones are brought to our dermestid beetle colony which is an off-site colony. Let's see, the room that we go into, it's kind of, well, it's not really an underground tunnel, but it's kind of tucked away. And it's a little bit creepy when you go down there by yourself. But the large tanks hold the beetles, and there's a mesh screen over top, so that they're all contained, and they have to be in there and do their work. The room is really warm and humid, which I like, and they like too. And the osteological or the bone materials stay in these stainless steel tanks for days or weeks, while the bugs eat the remaining flesh off the bones. 
(laughter)
 You can kind of see down there, all the little flecks are the dermestid beetles eating. They eat at their larval stage, so when they're adults, they're pretty much retired and they just reproduce. But they go through a couple of different stages while they eat. 

Then the bones are brought back, they're cleaned up, and they're dried. This is bones drying on a screen right there. Once the bones are cleaned, they are brushed to get the remaining dust and other particles off. They are labeled, every single bone and every single box is labeled so that if someone wanted to take the right scapula of every wolf, they could. And we could get them all back in the right boxes. And actually, the picture down in the bottom is, again, people working on bird skins. Oh, the bones at this time, once they're labeled, they're cataloged and put into a collection. The bird skins are wrapped up in little gauze strips and they're dried, so after they have been stuffed, they lay here and they dry. Now we're going to kind of move into our Preparation Types. These are study skins, so these are used mostly for research, but some exhibits, as well. 

And these are round or cased specimens. And small birds and mammals are prepared this way, where the insides are taken out and their filled with cotton and they're dried. And these are flat skins. These are from medium or large animals, and we kind of say that's roughly larger than a woodchuck. They're skinned and salted and sent to a tanner. And then they come back and they're cataloged and put into the collection. And actually, the tiger that you see over there is a good example of a large skin. We also have a number of mounted specimens. And in the past, the skull was left in the skin to retain the shape when they were mounted, and the body was kind of wrapped around a wooden, or wire, and cotton frame. Now, the skulls are generally removed and skins are stretched or wrapped over a preformed mold. 

And sometimes in the past, they would fill-in pigments and other fillers to help imitate what had been lost. And we have a number of different mounts here. Beaver, okay. And these are wet collections, which we talked a little bit about. And wet collections are fluid, and the fluid is generally ethanol. They include fish, reptiles, amphibians, marine and terrestrial invertebrates, tissue samples. We do have some birds and mammals that are preserved in alcohol. And historically, the specimens were fixed. Fixing is a chemical treatment that prevents the break down of the amino acids and makes the cells insoluble, so it keeps the specimens whole. And they used to be fixed in formaldehyde and then later in formalin. 

Then they're transferred. Most of ours have been transferred into ethanol, or alcohol, to preserve them for their research potential. We're moving on to skeletons. Most of the skeletons in the museum are disarticulated, meaning that they're in a box like this, so that for researchers, this is the way that they're going to be able to take the bones out and handle them, put them out on a table. And I have a couple of disarticulated skeletons that you can see here. They're all boxed, and in order in the collection, and that's what that picture is showing over there. And these are some articulated skeletons. I brought, actually, an articulated snake. These are a lot of the skeletons that we use for labs and for exhibits. I'd like to note that the specimen at the top actually belongs to the Milwaukee County Zoological Society. 

And they asked our preparator to clean and deflesh that. It's a cheetah. And she, along with Dave Hoffman, who works in the department, they articulated the spinal column of the cheetah, and it actually moves. You can bend it up and down. It's kind of neat. It's put together with wires and tubing. So they're going to use it in their teaching collection, so that kids can see how it moves, and adults can see it too. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about different types of specimens that are, I guess, most significant to us, and that is extincts. Specimens of an extinct species are extremely important, because the genus and species no longer exist. And these are passenger pigeons, which are extinct. 

Notice that they are on a cotton pillow. Nobody else in the collection is. And types are also significant to us. Another word for a type is a holotype. That is a specimen or individual designated as the type of a species or lesser group that serves as the final criterion of the characteristics of that group. Meaning that if someone else were to-- They think they have found a specimen from that same genus and species, this is the one that they would go back to, that they would refer back to as the final characteristics, this is what it is. And we actually have a couple of type specimens. The one pictured here is the type specimen of the puma concolor schorgeri, which was collected in 1857. It is the only known or vouchered specimen of mountain lion from Wisconsin. There are also a couple of subtypes of type, which the allotype is a term. 

It's not regularly used, but you might hear it. It's designated for specimens of the opposite sex of a holotype, but found at the same time, the same collection location by the same collector. And a paratype is also any specimen that is of the same or different sex, but also found at the same time and same place as the holotype. Voucher specimens. Vouchers are permanently archived specimens with associated data, deposited in a secure research or museum collection, used to verify the identity of specimens in order to repeat studies and corroborate results. We actually ask that graduate students who are doing research for their dissertation or master's thesis, voucher their specimens in the museum, so that if anyone were to look back at their study and maybe question it, they could come into the museum and they could re-identify the bird, or take a different genetic sample. That's the value in having voucher specimens. Other projects that we are working on right now. We are working on a Brittingham Grant with the UW Library System. We're digitizing much of our Galapagos Exhibit. 

You can see that there's a Web site that you can go to. We also have a Brittingham Grant working on our Mossman collection. And at this point, we're taking a list of his references cited and his reprint collection. It's going to be a link where you can go in, it's kind of an interactive bibliography. You can go in and click on one of the lists, one of the reprints in the list and it will pop-up in a PDF form for you to look at. We are also working on a course proposal to have a more formal museum course offered through the department. We are also planning to do some summer workshops to teach teachers how to teach things about the museum. We are also working on a proposal for a unified database for the UW Natural History Collections. And many of you may not have known that we even existed. I didn't when I was an undergraduate here. 

But there are actually five other Natural History Collections on campus. One of the them is the Anthropology Repository, with the Department of Anthropology. They have ethnographic, archaeological and biological anthropology collections. You probably know about the Geology Museum. They have a very large exhibit area. They're in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. The Wisconsin State Herbarium, which I talked about before, with the Department of Botany. They have a lot of plants focusing on Wisconsin. And then the Insect Research Collection through the Department of Entomology. Aside from the Milwaukee Public Museum, this is the only substantial insect collection in the state. 

Then there's the Wildlife Ecology Collection with the Department of Forests and Wildlife Ecology. They have significant collections from Aldo Leopold and Bill Elders, from his small mammal collection. And then there's us. I actually should mention, too, we just found out yesterday that we received a Conservation Assessment Program Grant, which is an outside conservator from some other museum comes in and they will tell us the things which we need to change, which we already know. But they document it, and we can use it as leverage to try to obtain other grants to make improvements on our collection and add to our collection. So that's it. Are there any questions? 
(applause)
 
- Is this open to the public, or how do you get in to see this? 

- If you look at the back of your brochure, there's a number on there. That's the main museum line. You can call, come in and we'll give you a tour. I would really like to give everyone a tour, because I think-- I tried to do kind of a visual tour through the PowerPoint, but being there and actually seeing it. You can't do justice in a PowerPoint presentation when you're talking about Galapagos tortoises. You can just call that number and we can set up a time that you can come on in. You can call that number anyway. I just invited you 
- We use research loosely. If you find a bone in the woods, you call up and say I want to do research on skeletons, and I say what do you have, and you say I have a bone I want identified. 

I say fine. You say, I want a "tour," you may get an answer no. So just use the right word, I want to do "research," and we don't care what it is. 
- We actually, last week, had a couple stop down in our exhibit space. It's a classroom-size exhibit space on the first floor. And it's closed because we are in the process of renovating it, but we let them in. We opened up the door and let them in. Elizabeth and I got really excited about what we were showing them the exhibit, so we brought them upstairs and they got a whole tour. so we spent about an hour and a half with them, just because we got really excited. And as you can tell, I talk really fast, because I get really excited about the museum. 

So you can come by, and someone will get excited and show you around. Yes? 
- How many animals do you bring in like that zebra? 
- You know, I can't really say the number. Angela can answer this in just a second, but when she was doing her field work in Brazil, I'll just say this. The Henry Vilas Zoo called and said they had a 300-pound orangutan die. He just had a heart attack, because he was so overweight, because zoo animals don't really have to do much. And so they said, "Can we drop him off?" and I said, "Sure, you can drop him off." So they brought him. 

We have a big walk-in freezer, and they put him down on piece of cardboard on the floor and he laid there. And then the zoo called while Angela was still gone, and they said, "We had a giraffe die." And I kind of started to panic a little bit. And we ended up not getting it, because they ended up-- When they did the necropsy to find out why it had died, they had to cut into all the bones, and they kind of chopped it up. Really, it's not a huge value to us any longer. And then, they called and said a 650-pound black bear died. I kept thinking when is Angela coming back, because we don't have enough room in here. Not to mention the fact that we get five or six wolves every month. So it's piling up in this freezer. They they brought the black bear over, and it was kind of like a checker board in the freezer to try to hop to anywhere to get in there, because this big bear's in there and this big orangutan was laying face down on the floor. 

So anyway, you can answer the zoo question now. 
- Normally, when I'm here, not that many animals die. 
(laughter)
 It always happens when I leave for vacation. But typically, in an average year, we'll get maybe about 12-15 large animals from the zoos, and usually about 20 or so wolves. and anywhere from 100-500 smaller animals, birds, reptiles, mammals. 
- When she talks about large animals, she's talking about rhinos. 
- Really big. Things that would take more than a day. 
- As far as large animals go, I should mention that we don't just have the tiger skin to show people and keep the skeleton, but the vet school does use these skeletons, if they need to do surgery or just to look at. 

If somebody's limping at the zoo and they need to know why, they'll borrow the skeleton from us to look at the skeleton to kind of try to figure out why it is, what's going wrong. There is a lot of scientific value to these zoo specimens and they get to kind of live on in the museum. Did you have a question? 
- Your animal collection, is it only animals that have died a natural death, or do you actually go out and harvest other animals. 
- We don't kill. 
-> We don't kill anything. And I should mention, too, that people do bring us things that have died, like when they clean their windows in the spring, we tend to get a lot of birds in. So people bring them in. So if you find something in your yard, or you're walking down the street and you happen to find something, and like me, you feel a little bit weird about the fact that you feel like everyone's looking at you when you pick up the bird, walking down State Street, but you can bring them in. You can put them in a freezer, put down where you found it, your name so we know who collected it, and the date, and you can bring it in. 

Yes? 
- It's illegal for you to pick it up. But if you get caught, you just say, "I'm taking it to the Zoological Museum," because we have a permit that covers you once it gets there. And when they call, if they say, we just heard that somebody has something, we'll say yes, it's covered. We know it's coming, even if we don't know it's coming, because we know that that's what you told them, and so it does cover you. So anything you find dead, you can bring to us, but you can't keep it yourself. 
- Any other questions? Okay, well I think that's it then. 
(applause)