cc >> 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 )