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

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History has more than 147 million

specimens

, the world's largest collection, from giant dinosaur bones to delicate butterflies and pickled animals like this stonefish, the world's most poisonous, but less than one percent is on display, the rest is

hidden

. in what are called

hidden

behind the scenes collections, so this is our vault area, our secure storage area for the mineral collection. The museum costs more than $100 million to run and is funded primarily by taxpayer dollars, so why is the U.S. government spending it? so much money on things most Americans will never get a good look at the

specimens

aren't just sitting here collecting dust they are actively used for

high

impact research this is what caused the plane to land in the Hudson River but flooding could put everyone in danger.

I entered the secret collections in Washington DC to see how they are kept clean and protected by millions of specimens. This is what you can see of the natural history museum, but hidden collections make up the rest of the more than 1.4 million square foot space. Spread across the museum and external support center, there are seven different departments, from entomology to paleobiology, and the collections are constantly growing. The museum is free to the public to visit because it is funded by the government through tax money, but researchers here cannot use tax money. to acquire new items, so how do they get them right?

They are collected in the field, donated, or purchased with donations, for example, this giant crystal from Arkansas was donated to mineral sciences in 2021. We don't know exactly how much it cost, but it is estimated. There are millions in entomology, scientists collect half of the new insects in the field and get the other half from donations as people retire and look for permanent homes for their collections. Those who often come to us. These are Taylor Swift's scorpions. Anyone who has seen Harry Potter recognizes them, they are actually very docile, they are easy to handle, you can actually get them as pets, but getting dinosaur bones is much more difficult, so here are some of the dinosaurs.

Paleontologist Han Seuss faces a growing market of private collectors It started after those horrible Jurassic Park movies when everyone decided to have a dinosaur in their living room, people now think that if they find a toe bone they should get huge amounts of money for it and, since they have to depend on donations from museums. can't compete at multi-million dollar auctions, commercially collected fossils often don't have detailed locality information and that makes them almost scientifically useless, so all Hans can collect are bones he finds on federal lands or bones more small ones that you can buy with donations, but some collections in the museum.

They are very old today bird researchers rarely collect specimens in the wild this bird was collected in 1904 and if they do it is from healthy bird populations today we take tissues we take recordings of songs we keep skeletons we make spread wings so we have many more parts of the bird we saved and it is our ethical responsibility to do as much as we can with the specimen if we are going to take it from the wild for research, once a specimen is purchased or collected in the field it is transported to the specimen museum. like that giant crystal, then it goes through a process called session, where the museum inspects the objects so they can take them over, make sure they're in good condition when we receive them here at the museum, the museum acquires 300,000 specimens a year to They reflect the scale and diversity of the natural world.

Once a museum accepts an object, it must be cleared at the museum's support center. Any recent living creature is cleaned with beetles, which are very fond of chewing dry skin. They are a little more. Roaming freely in the largest chamber, there's nothing really containing them except trays you don't want storing rotting meat. Currently we have skulls of dolphins, elephants, sea turtles and I think there is a wallaby there. Cleaning dinosaur bones requires even more work. We'd be lucky if all we had to do was just dust them off. They are locked in their host rock, which is what we call matrix and that matrix has to be eliminated little by little.

Michelle uses this machine called an air scraper that explodes. compressed air in the rock, but how do you prepare something to store it forever? Well, a dinosaur bone can't just sit on an exposed shelf over time, gravity would start to break it down, so most bones are given a custom storage base built from fiberglass and plaster - it's basically a fancy tempur. -pedic each costs about eight hundred dollars they are pest and water resistant hans wants them to last because he loves his fossils i'm kind of a wallflower but you tell people you're a paleontologist at the

smithsonian

and suddenly you're the center of attention On the other side of the museum, some of the older animals have stuffed squirrels and others are left pickled.

When you pickle a whole organism, you can study not only its fur and its skeleton, but also its internal anatomy and everything. Those kinds of things, from a polar bear embryo to bats and giant fish, are stored in alcohol. These fish come from all over the world, so they don't fit in jars and the cheesecloth is to prevent them from drying out if the level rises. low, so they thought that the stila was extinct and in 1938 it was discovered in South Africa, it was a big problem, as you can imagine, in entomology, the insects are dried and fixed so that their temperature stabilizes, then Floyd and his team they put in these. hydraulic carts we have 35 million specimens in the collection we have four over 400,000 species represented in our collection, which is more than all other departments can buy, since insects are essentially our only major competitor for food and because have such a profound impact on human health, each of these storage techniques is designed to last indefinitely, but while researchers have done everything they can to safeguard these precious objects, it is unclear how much longer they will be able to do so.

The National Mall was once a swamp and today lies in the floodplain of the Potomac River we are literally at sea level, so one thing I have been doing this year is moving all the collections from the basement of this building to

high

er floors as the climate changes, flooding from stronger storms and the potomac is a growing threat water seeps into basements along the mall and threatens the nation's treasures the

smithsonian

will tell congress tomorrow it is overdue billion dollars and needs repairs already happened to the museum next door, causing millions in damage and the national government The history museum is next, but Congress has been slow to fund improvements.

We will have to start shielding the shopping center with increasingly larger dikes. The museum plans to expand the external support center. It's higher above sea level, so researchers have started moving more specimens for now to preserve their collections at the national mall. The museum has begun creating digital scans starting with easier-to-handle objects like plants and flowers. our flowering plants have been digitized so far, that is, around three million plant specimens that we have used on this conveyor belt today, this digital archive has more than nine million specimens, but the museum is still years away from having the entire collection online, so why put so much effort into storing things that most people will never see right for research?

So think. of a museum not only as a place that displays things but also as a place that studies and understands things, the collections are essentially a living library that can be accessed by 12,000 visiting scientists and their work has real-world benefits in mineral sciences that scientists around the world 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 is primarily used for scientific research. The department also monitors and tracks volcanic activity around the world. Pickled mammals are studied to find. finding out which species can transmit diseases one of the ways we study those diseases is to find the mammalian host of the virus every time a bird hits a plane in the US samples are sent to carla dove in vertebrate zoology the colors and the color patterns on some of these birds are just amazing, yes their last name is pigeon, yes I get it all the time, my name is very appropriate, okay I come from the mail room where I picked up the daily mail.

All of these packages have bird specimens. Remnants or some type of wildlife remains that were ripped off airplanes and Carla receives 10,000 of these packages a year. This is part of the horizontal stabilizer where the bird hit and caused the damage and you can see this whole bird. Here, which is what we call bird trapping or weaving, 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, They got 69 bags because as they went and investigated, they got to the engine and They wanted to know how far the feathers reached.

His team then uses these mailed bird remains to identify the species involved in the attacks. this one here you know what it could be carla looks like a black vulture there you go, it's one of her favorite birds no chicken is a favorite bird if she can't identify a specimen right away carla can compare its feathers with one of the five hundred thousand specimens in the museum collection, the location of this attack was Florida, so we looked at all the possible herons in Florida and matched it perfectly with an American bitter and it turns out this piece of beak fits.

Perfectly matched with the specimen's beak, aeronautical companies use Carla's data to develop airplanes that can withstand bird strikes. If you know which bird species are causing these problems, you can go out to airfields and manage the habitat to prevent those birds from wanting. come into these environments and, based on their research, air force units have adjusted flight training, thereby reducing the risk of bird strikes, but we also like to say saving birds as well, but we have barely scratched the surface of the countless museum research initiatives we have. We are collecting specimens so that scientists 50 years from now or 100 years from now will have access to the same diversity that we have now, and we may never know how important these collections may be to 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 will have specimens from this time that will be a distant memory for the people of then, but it will tell the history of planet Earth.