Why 99% Of Smithsonian's Specimens Are Hidden In High-Security | Big Business

the smithsonian museum of natural history has over 147 million specimens the largest collection in the world everything from giant dinosaur bones to delicate butterflies to pickled animals like this stone fish most venomous in the world but less than one percent of it's on display the rest is tucked away in what's called collections hidden behind the scenes all right so this is our vault area our secure storage area for the mineral collection it costs more than 100 million dollars to run the museum and it's mostly funded with taxpayer dollars so why does the us government spend so much money on things most americans will never see well the specimens aren't just sitting here gathering dust they're actively used for research with big impact this is what caused the airplane to land in the hudson river but flooding could endanger it all we went inside the secret collections in washington dc to see how they acquire clean maintain and protect millions of specimens [Music] this is how much of the museum of natural history you can see but the hidden collections make up the rest of the space more than 1.4 million square feet spread across the museum and the off-site support center there are seven different departments from entomology to paleobiology and the collections are constantly growing visiting the museum is free to the public because it's government funded through tax dollars but researchers here can't use tax money to acquire new objects so how do they get them well they're either collected in the field donated or purchased with endowments [Music] for example this giant arkansas crystal was donated to mineral sciences in 2021 we don't know exactly how much it cost but estimates put it in the millions over in entomology scientists collect half of the new insects in the field and get the other half from donations as people retire and they're looking for permanent homes for their collections those often come to us these are the taylor swift scorpions so anybody who watched harry potter we recognize these they're actually really docile they're easy to handle you can actually get these as pets but getting dinosaur bones is much harder so here's some of the dinosaurs paleontologist han seuss is up against a growing market of private collectors it started after the those awful jurassic park movies when everybody decided to have a dinosaur in their living room people now think that if they find a toe bone they should get enormous amounts of money for it and since they have to rely on endowments museums can't compete at million dollar auctions often commercially collected fossils have no detailed locality information and that makes them scientifically almost worthless so all hans can collect are bones he finds on federal lands or smaller ones he can purchase with donations but some collections at the museum are just really old today bird researchers rarely collect specimens in the wild this bird was collected in 1904 and if they do it's from healthy bird populations today we take tissues we take song recordings we keep skeletons we make spread wings so we have a lot more parts of the bird that we save and it's our ethical responsibility to do as much as we can with the specimen if we're going to take it from the wild for research once a specimen is purchased or collected in the field it's transported to the museum specimens like that giant crystal then go through a process called a sessioning is where the museum inspects the objects so they can take ownership of it make sure that it's in good shape when we receive it here at the museum the museum acquires 300 000 specimens a year to reflect the scale and the diversity of the natural world once a museum accepts an object it has to get cleaned out at the museum support center any recently living creatures are cleaned using beetles that really like to munch on dry skin they're a little bit more free roaming in the larger chamber there's nothing really containing them except for trays you don't want rotting flesh in storage we currently have a sea turtle elephant dolphin skulls and i believe that's a wallaby in there cleaning dinosaur bones takes even more work we'd be lucky if all we had to do was just dust them off they're encased in their host rock which is what we call matrix and that matrix has to be removed little by little bit by bit michelle uses this machine called an air scrape it blasts compressed air at the rock but how do they prepare something to be stored forever well a dinosaur bone can't just sit on a shelf exposed over time gravity would start to break it down so most bones get a custom storage cradle built out of fiberglass and plaster it's basically a fancy tempur-pedic each costs about eight hundred dollars they're pest and water resistant hans wants them to last because he loves his fossils i'm kind of a wallflower but you tell people that you're paleontologists at the smithsonian and you're suddenly the center of attention on the other side of the museum some of the older animals got stuffed squirrel and some get pickled when you pickle a whole organism you can study not just their fur and their skeleton but their internal anatomy and all that kind of stuff everything from a polar bear embryo to bats to giant fish are stored in alcohol these fish come from all over the world so see these do not fit in jars and the cheese cloth is to keep them from drying out if the level gets low so the stila they thought it was extinct and in 1938 it was discovered in south africa it was a very big deal as you can imagine over in entomology the insects get dried and pinned so their temperature stable then floyd and his team put them into these hydraulic carriages we have 35 million specimens in the collection we have four over 400 000 species represented in our collection which is more than all the other departments can buy since insects are essentially our only major competitor for food and because they have such a profound impact on human health each of these storage techniques is designed to last indefinitely but while the researchers have done all they can to safeguard these precious objects it's unclear how much longer they'll be able to do that the national mall was once a marsh and today it sits in the flood plain of the potomac river we're literally at sea level here so one thing i've been doing is this year moving all collections out of the basement of this building up to higher floors as the climate's changing flooding from heavier rainstorms and the potomac are a growing threat water seeping into basements along the mall and threatening the treasures of the nation the smithsonian will tell congress tomorrow it's one billion dollars behind and needed repairs it's already happened to the museum next door leading to millions in damage and the national history museum is next but congress has been slow moving to fund improvements we're going to have to start armoring the mall with with larger and larger dikes the museum does plan to expand the off-site support center it's farther above sea level so researchers have started moving more specimens out there for now to preserve its collections on the national mall the museum has begun creating digital scans starting with easier to handle objects like plants and flowers all of our flowering plants have been digitized so far that is about three million plant specimens that we have run on this conveyor belt today this digital archive has over nine million specimens but the museum is still years away from getting the entire collection online so why put in so much effort to store things most people will never see well for research so think of a museum not just as a place that displays stuff but a place that studies and understands stuff as well the collections are essentially a living library that 12 000 visiting scientists can access and their work has real world benefits in mineral sciences scientists across the globe can ask jeff for a piece of any of his rocks for research this is our reference mineral collection so this is the part of the collection that gets used primarily for scientific research the department also monitors and tracks volcanic activity around the world pickled mammals are studied to find out which species can transmit diseases one of the ways we study those diseases is to find the mammal host for the virus whenever a bird strikes a plane in the u.s samples of it are sent to carla dove in vertebrate zoology the colors and the color patterns on some of these birds is just amazing yes her last name is dove yeah i get that all the time my name is very appropriate okay so i'm just coming from the mail room where i picked up the daily mail these packages all have specimens of bird remains or some kind of wildlife remains that were scraped off of aircraft and carla gets 10 000 of these packages a year this is a part of the horizontal stabilizer what the bird hit and caused the damage to and you can see all of this bird ick on here which is what we refer to as snarge or bird tissue bird strikes cost the airline industry billions in delays and damages remember the 2009 crash landing in new york city less than a minute into the flight the pilot reported a double bird strike in that case we got 69 bags because as they went through and did the investigation they went all the way into the engine and they wanted to know how far into the engine the feathers went her team then uses these mailed in bird remains to identify the species involved in the strikes this one here do you know what this might be carla it looks kind of like a black vulture there you go it's one of her favorite bird no chicken is a favorite bird if she can't identify a sample right away carla can compare its feathers to one of the five hundred thousand specimens in the museum's collection the location of this strike was florida so we we look at all of the possible herons in florida and we match it up perfectly with an american bitter and this piece of beak just so happens to fit perfectly with the beak of the specimen aeronautical companies use carla's data to develop planes that can withstand bird strikes if you know what the species of birds are that cause these problems you can go out onto the airfields and do habitat management to keep those birds from wanting to come in to these environments and based on her research air force units have adjusted flight trainings thereby reducing the risk of bird strikes but also we like to say saving birds too but we've barely scratched the surface of the museum's countless research initiatives we're collecting specimens so that scientists 50 years from now or 100 years from now will have access to the same diversity we have right now and we may never know how important these collections may be for scientists in the future museums are the memory of our culture and the memory of our planet and imagine the smithsonian of the year 2400 it'll have specimens from this time that will be a distant memory to the people then but it will tell the story of planet earth you

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 3,707,549

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, big business, smithsonian, smithsonian collection, specimen, Smithsonian Natural History Museum, pickled animals, priceless gems, dinosaur bones, science, scientific research, invasive species

Id: Oese1nrwXk0

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ThisIsPaulDaily]

What a cool overview video, thanks for sharing

[u/photocopytimmy]

This is nuts. Imagine your job, like the thing you do all the time with your life is to organize thousands of dead birds into thousands of drawers.

[u/vapidamerica]

I met a woman one evening at a dive bar in Fells Point years ago when I was playing the National Theatre with a broadway show. She enquired about getting a couple tickets to see the show that she would trade for a tour of the archives of the Smithsonian American History Museum where she was an archivist/ conservator.

And that’s how I ended up blubbering like a little kid, tears in my eyes… holding Kermit the Frog.

[u/byParallax]

Well, according to the documentary Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, it's probably so they don't accidently come back from the dead. Haven't seen the video yet though, so maybe they touch on that point.

[u/Carburetors_are_evil]

What is a Smithsonian Specimen?

[u/livejamie]

Cool video but the flesh-eating bugs, pickled animals and bird remains on airplane parts were all pretty gross to watch while eating my lunch

[u/kalasea2001]

Well you can't just leave the Ark of the Covenant out in the open. I heard one dude got a severe sunburn from it.

[u/BannyDodger]

Answer: Because 99% of the specimens are used for research purposes so they are stored away.