(Some pictures in the article may cause discomfort, please read with caution)
(Some pictures in the article may cause discomfort, please read with caution)
(Some pictures in the article may cause discomfort, please read with caution)
In Chicago, USA, there is a Field Museum of Natural History.
Its appearance looks very atmospheric, with more than 24 million items such as fossils, meteorites, and prehistoric civilizations exhibited inside, making it a very suitable place for children.
But under the museum, there is a mysterious area ...
Only staff and researchers are allowed to enter, there are no elaborate stands, only rows of cold shelves.
On shelves with no end in sight, there are 11 million taxidermy animals.
They have godless eyes open, soaked in yellow and clear embalming.
The basement of the Field Museum of Natural History is a bit scary, as the staff admits, who jokingly call themselves working in an "animal morgue".
Here you can see bats like pickled cucumbers...
The clean-skinned bat skull is like it has been cleaned up by a fussy vampire...
The developing bear fetus is about the size of a mouse...
Hundreds of giant cockroaches from all over the world...
The nearly two-meter-long Komodo dragon...
The brain, heart, eyes of a cougar...
Since its establishment in 1893, the Field Museum of Natural History has continued to collect anti-corruption specimens and will continue to collect them in the future.
It's fun to watch, but why collect such a huge number of specimens?
And why is it all in a wet antiseptic solution?
"Think of this place as a library." Museum staff told the media, "When stored in this way, wet specimens can remain in their original shape and sometimes, even preserve DNA." ”
"Basically, it's the closest researchers can get to running a live zoo in the lab."
"Each jar of specimens is a book that researchers can open, draw knowledge from it, and sometimes even discover new species."
Specimens in museums are mainly obtained through two channels,
The first is donated by others, and the second is when the staff themselves go out into the wild to catch it.
Sara Ruane is the assistant curator of the reptile gallery and is responsible for the entry of specimens of each reptile. The following water snake was caught by a colleague.
The process of making specimens is not complicated.
First, Sarah will sterilize the scissors, use it to open the snake's abdomen, and remove the snake's liver. She sealed her liver in a small tube, numbered it, and put it in the library's liquid nitrogen freezer.
The snake liver is specially removed because this part dissolves particularly quickly and is the most convenient place to extract DNA.
The museum's freezers hold thousands of animal samples, and future scientists want to know about them and can take them out at any time.
The remaining snake body is the part that needs to be preserved by embalming.
Sara loaded formalin into a syringe, slowly filled the inside of the snake, and then turned its genitals visibly out. This will make it easier for future people to know the sex of the snake without opening the can.
Finally, she coiled the snake in a circle and covered it with a paper towel soaked in formalin.
After a while, the snake can completely absorb formalin, maintaining its current shape.
Once the snake is set, it can be placed in a jar full of companions.
Some large animals need more formalin, such as catfish.
Handling it was Caleb McMahan, head of animal collections. He needs to calculate the amount of space inside the catfish and then figure out how much formalin to inject.
If there is less, the specimen will begin to rot, and if there is more, the specimen will deform and expand.
Once Caleb fills the catfish, he puts it in a stainless steel cabinet with more formalin.
Large animals are treated better than small animals, and they usually have single rooms.
After a week of soaking in the cabinet, the catfish is taken out and washed with alcohol. Alcohol is less corrosive than formalin, and you need it if you want to preserve it longer.
In the museum, there is a Komodo dragon that has been soaked in alcohol for decades. Its shape is still lifelike, as if ready to surface and bite at any time.
Josh Mata, who was in charge of it, said that except for the darker color of the alcohol, everything was the same as when it was preserved.
"Large animal specimens release a lot of residue, grease, which is originally in their bodies, but slowly penetrates into the alcohol. This causes discoloration, but it doesn't matter, it still preserves the animal well. ”
The Field Museum of Natural History strives to make specimens look like they are alive, but for some very small animals, they are treated differently.
"We want to look at the details of a small animal under a microscope, and in order to do that, we need to stain its bones and cartilage." Caleb explained.
Caleb prepared two pigments, the red one absorbed by calcium and the blue one absorbed by cartilage. After the fish was soaked in the paint for a few days, he rinsed it down and used trypsin to break down the protein while the collagen on the fish was retained.
As a result, the small fish becomes transparent all over, and the flesh and cartilage inside are clearly visible.
This look, weird and charming.
By looking closely at the fish bones, they discovered that the two fish, which were originally thought to be identical, were actually different because the skeletons were very different.
Surprises to discover new species are not uncommon in the museum.
Sixty years ago, someone found a spider-tailed horned viper. At the time, researchers thought it looked strange, unlike ordinary vipers. But they thought it was a mutated viper and made into a specimen and put it away.
It wasn't until 2000 years later that a curious herpetologist came to the museum and discovered that the snake was different.
In the end, he said, he determined it was a new species.
"Our library is like a library, except that instead of books, there are cans of animals on the shelves." "These animals are sorted into categories, and when you want to look them up, you can open them and look them up," Caleb said. ”
"We even have a database of when and where each specimen was found."
However, these "wet books" are not easy to consult. Because over the past hundred years, the collection of specimens in the basement has been increasing, and the specimens that were originally stored separately have to be crowded with other specimens.
There are 883 frogs in a cabinet, and although each one is marked, it can be difficult to find specimens of a specific year.
Scientists in Chicago are already satisfied that if they want to study the shape and DNA of animals, they come to this museum.
As the staff boasted, it was a zoo that could be studied arbitrarily, except that not many animals were dead.
Although it looks a little scary on the outside, from a scientific point of view,
Every embalmed specimen staring at a dead eye contains knowledge...