"My Favorite Museum Exhibit": Where exhibits come from

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few days, I'll be posting some of these submissions, under the heading, "My Favorite Museum Exhibit". Want to see them all? Check the "Previously" links at the bottom of this post.

This is actually a behind-the-scenes thing, submitted by Larry Clark, an editor at Washington State University's magazine. Clark made some videos about how curators at WSU’s Conner Museum prepare specimens for display.

In this video, curator Kelly Cassidy prepares a screech owl specimen. It is worth noting that this process involves flesh-eating beetles. Yes. Really.

Previously in this series:

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit": Two nuclear bombs, slightly dented

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: awesome • behind the scenes • gross • my favorite museum exhibit • natural history • Science

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RunawayJim

Damn. I didn’t see the request, but I don’t have pictures from one of the best museums I’ve visited… the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. It’s all medical oddities. In fact, I think I first learned about it on Boing Boing. :)
tonywonder

The screech owl video was a cool change. Liked the behind the scenes!
dr.hypercube

What? You don’t have a colony of dermestids?
Snig

I was talking once to my brother about my school’s dermestid colony and he didn’t believe that such a thing existed. It turns out he misheard me, and he thought I was claiming we had a colony of dermestid beagles, apparently specially bred to gnaw very carefully.
justine

Dermestids are cool…you can hear them eating!

A museum I used to work in had the following signs in the zoology wet lab…

“Carrion Crew”

“Trespassers will be Skeletonized!”

Good times…
emo hex

At one time there were a couple of actual shrunken heads at the Chicago Museum of Natural History, I don’t know what ever happened to them?
andyhavens

I love that the tiny little Cazenovia library in NY has an actual Egyptian mummy on display.

And it blogs: http://cazenoviamummy.blogspot.com/