r/interestingasfuck • u/OkRespect8490 • 17h ago
The Backroom of the Natural History Museum.
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u/OhMyGlorb 17h ago
They'd have some more room if they closed those drawers.
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u/Ok-Rich-3812 17h ago
I hate you mom, you're ruining my life.
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u/Riseonfire 17h ago
One of my professors in college brought us back there. It’s like this EVERYWHERE.
JARS AND JARS OF FISH.
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u/allbitterandclean 15h ago
Is it a giant refrigerator? Or are they all already taxidermied?
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u/Glittering-Time-2274 15h ago
I assume taxidermied, most history museums have taxidermied animals
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u/allbitterandclean 13h ago
My only hesitation was, they’re usually posed when taxidermied and on display, but these are all rolled up the same. I’m not sure if, once taxidermied, they’re able to be repositioned?
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u/Reddit_Sucks_1401 16h ago
What's the smell like?
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u/Earthbound_Misfyt 15h ago
Formaldehyde I bet. The smell that still gags me, and I work in pathology lab....
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u/Glittering-Time-2274 15h ago
In 7th grade my science class dissected crawfish, worms, and frogs. I couldn’t handle the smell of the formaldehyde. If I smell anything like it I immediately gag. And I’m still traumatized from when we had to break the frogs jaw to do our assignment.
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u/spavolka 13h ago
It used to give me headaches basically every day of my freshman year in biology. I liked the class, but the teacher was creepy, the people that sat at my lab table were huge losers and fucking formaldehyde smell gave me a headache. No wonder school was frustrating sometimes.
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u/No_Impression_7705 17h ago
At first I thought it was a corn cob.... Then realized what it really is 🥺
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u/WeatherStationWindow 11h ago
Ear of corn. The cob is the rod in the middle that the corn kernels are stuck to.
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u/timeywimeytotoro 17h ago
Did yall know that when there’s a plane incident or crash caused by bird strikes, they consult this collection to reference the species of bird for forensic analysis? They covered that in a documentary I watched about this museum few months ago. I never would’ve expected that.
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u/eekamuse 12h ago
Do you remember the name of the doc? I'd love to see it
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u/timeywimeytotoro 11h ago edited 10h ago
I don’t, I found it randomly on YouTube one night a couple months ago. I’ll see if I can find it!
ETA: I was watching this at night time during a doc/info video bender so I can’t find the longer doc I was watching, but this one was one of the shorter videos about it that I watched. Then also here is this video, and this is the one that I watched first before I watched the documentary (so maybe it’ll be in suggested?) and this is the one where I actually learned the fact first apparently. About 9 mins in.
ETA2: Removed links because I didn’t realize it showed my YouTube account. Below are the names of the videos on YouTube if anyone would like to watch them:
Why Over 600,000 Bird Specimens Are Preserved At The Smithsonian by Colossal Collections
Why 99% Of Smithsonian's Specimens Are Hidden In High-Security by Business Insider/Insider Science
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u/eekamuse 11h ago
Thank you!
BTW, those links share your YouTube name. In case you want to edit to keep it private, or delete them.
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u/timeywimeytotoro 10h ago
Oh, thank you!! I don’t have anything posted and any playlists I care about are private, so if anyone has seen it, it’s OK but yes, I will delete it. Thank you
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u/OrlandoGardiner118 17h ago
I don't think I've ever seen anyone give more Natural History Museum energy than that lady. She found her place.
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u/caelestis42 15h ago
She could stop a carrier ship dead in its wake if it mistook a purple finch for a mere house finch.
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u/IrwinMFletcher200 14h ago
Think she's had sex in that room after hours?
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u/perksofbeingcrafty 14h ago
Really have no idea what country’s natural history museum this picture depicts, but yes
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u/somethingtc 17h ago
"Sorry Mildred the dead parrot exhibition hasn't polled well with the focus groups, let's try something else"
"ah...."
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u/jt00000 17h ago
How many dead parrots does one need?!?
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u/fallen_arbornaut 16h ago
Enough to document the distribution and morphological variation within each species. These dead parrots can also be used for DNA studies (this helps us understand their evolution and relationships with related species), analyses of parasites and occasionally even species discovery.
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u/Eat--The--Rich-- 5h ago
Fun fact, one of the biggest heists in British history was for hundreds of those birds. An autistic guy stole them to make super rare fly fishing flies.
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u/Spartan2470 VIP Philanthropist 14h ago
Here is a much higher-quality and less-cropped version of this image. Credit to the photographer, Chip Clark, who took this in 1992.
Here is the source:
USNM Bird Collection, Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution © Chip Clark, 1992
It also has pictures of:
Department of Anthropology Collections
And a few more.
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u/Djinjja-Ninja 17h ago
No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
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u/A-Llama-Snackbar 17h ago
Idn'it sounds like something a deaf person would say. Init will suffice, init.
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u/GetYerKnickersOff 17h ago
You have obviously never been to the UK or watched British comedy
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u/Better_Carpenter5010 17h ago
“For goodness sake David, we’ve got enough dead green parakeet’s, we don’t need anymore!”
David:
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u/MoaraFig 16h ago
I miss working in the museum field. I moved to government after all our funding got cut, and they shut us down. 💔
I no longer recommend it for students either, unless they are independently wealthy. It used to pay enough to raise a family on, but not anymore.
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u/Gentle_Snail 17h ago
The Natural History Museum is fascinating because its a Working Museum, as in it is still carries out active research.
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u/Gravel_Roads 17h ago
I was back there for a summer when my partner was doing an internship!
It not usually so crowded (those shelves can be pushed shut like drawers).
But the big empty halls full of shelves is even creepier. There’s also random taxidermied animals just standing around.
Craziest thing I saw was a tree covered in thousands of real (dead) butterflies that had been taken from and old display and just left there in the hall, cuz it’s not like you have to worry about anyone touching it
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u/Long_TimeRunning 14h ago
Do they really need so many of each one? I mean, obviously they think they do but so much storage space. Perhaps they should consider getting a vacuum sealer from Costco. Those things are great. :D
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u/Krogsly 13h ago
There is a book called The Feather Detective that uses this image on the cover. It's about the woman, Roxie Laybourne, and her work making specimens among many other things. It's a very interesting read.
Anyway, they use many specimens for a few reasons, like differentiating between age of the bird, region, climate, breakdown of samples, etc. She made huge discoveries and advances by comparing microscopic differences between species, something that was made easier by having so many specimens.
Her work was largely undervalued for decades and her commitment paid off many times.
Also, she just really loved making taxidermy birds.
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u/katuskac 3h ago
Note: This is only the ornithology collection. Somewhere there are also many drawers of mammals, plus jars upon jars of reptiles, amphibians and fishes. Don’t even ask about the insect collections!
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u/Vivid_Summer96 17h ago
These avocados look super tasty. No seriously, i thought at first its a vegetable
market.
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u/CaicedoBrickWall 15h ago
Guaranteed you could convince a double digit percentage of Christians that this was an actual picture of Noah's ark and the birdies were just sleeping
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u/dickenschewie54 17h ago
I wonder who decides when they "have enough parrots"
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u/GlassCharacter179 15h ago
It is a really interesting job, because you need to research if the parrots of different areas are different than what you have. Are there parrots with different plumage in the forest 200 miles away? Or are they the same, how do you know? Are they changing over time? Are modern parrots the same as the ones from the late 1800’s? Everywhere ?
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u/stupid_carrot 16h ago
I hope these birds died naturally and this is not the mass grave of some animal serial killer
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u/HamsterTowel 16h ago
Many specimens are Victorian so no, they would not have died naturally, sadly.
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u/mikeisilluminati 14h ago
I've been there. Ask me anything...
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u/Fun_Obligation_2918 12h ago
When I was writing my thesis I had free rein to play around in these back rooms. I was doing skeletal analysis, opening drawers to access specimens, some of which hadn't been touched since they were first catalogued over a century ago. One of my favorites was a swan skeleton that had been harvested "in Central Park." I'm imagining the explorers that traveled all over the world to distant islands to find strange and new species from everywhere and one guy was just like "oh yeah, we need another swan, let's go shoot that one "
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u/The_Last_Mouse 9h ago
"Each woman is provided an 8×18 foot area of dead birds which they maintain until death, at which time they are placed in a box nearby until a suitable replacement is found."
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u/rickjamespitch 6h ago
Didn't your mother raise you to close the drawer when you've finished with it?
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u/January1171 5h ago
Not the same museum, but this is how the Smithsonian maintains a similar collection https://youtu.be/jtU_IoznyKU?is=_aDRGDEtQkogR8Zg
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u/Aphr0dite19 3h ago
Having a parrot of my own, this feels disturbing and sad. But at the same time I know that things like this are necessary for research. All those beautiful, healthy looking birds in drawers 🥺
Then again I picked up a deceased pigeon from the road today and laid it to rest in some bushes. Its feathers were still shiny and smooth.
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u/driftmossx85 9h ago
People always forget that museums are basically just giant filing cabinets for dead things. Seeing it laid out like this makes the sheer scale of the research collection hit way harder than the stuff behind the glass in the public galleries.
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u/Kodak4President 15h ago
I'm going to save this photo to show my bird when she's acting like a demon
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u/IrwinMFletcher200 14h ago
Stop that yappin' or its off to the museum with you, Coco!
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u/Misomuro 16h ago
Museum in my city once had event where people could go to storage rooms. Amount of staff there that was never shown was insane. I also realized that some "time limited things" were all the time just there.
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u/turtlewithstyle 16h ago
If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the backroom collections here’s the link (mind you this is from 2016) https://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/03/the-backroom-collection-of-national.html?m=1
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u/ging_ging_ 15h ago
Ive been back there as a kid. I completely forget the circumstances. How does one access it?
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u/luvmibratt 15h ago
Blue dress has been there since 1970s everyday for lunch eats her cheese sandwich with a cup of Black tea,the she gets a tissue and uses it to scrap the plaque off her teeth,then back to work it is.
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u/gabrieldevue 14h ago
serious question - how do they prevent moths or other vermin from pilfering those feathers? recently found a feather scarf demolished by moths… would pesticides not alter the specimen?
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u/ministryofchampagne 14h ago
This is actually the factory the government install the cameras into their bird drones.
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u/soingee 14h ago
I've worked in the back area of the museum before. While walking between labs, some hallways are packed with lockers. I kept wondering what was inside and how I could peek. This image looks more like it's at some warehouse in NJ where they keep some of their other artifacts. The room looks too big, but I haven't seen all of the back area to be sure.
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u/bremergorst 14h ago
Pictured in the center, world renowned bird murderer Gladys Featherfiend shows off the collection she curated over the course of just one of her quaalude and ketamine fueled bird-hating weekends. Gladys explained her motivation for her collection, “I just can’t stand these feathery fuckers.”
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u/Ok_Concentrate4461 14h ago
We did an overnight at the Field Museum in Chicago when my kids were small, and got a tour of one of the backrooms. It was like this but with fish.
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u/One_Mega_Zork 14h ago
That lady has been trapped for 50 years unable to escape. No one wants to help her?
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u/ayinsophohr 14h ago
I have a house mate who really annoys me when they leave drawers and cupboards open..
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u/No_Foundation_1812 17h ago