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How To: Preserve a bat for museum display

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:14 am Wed, Nov 14, 2012

Here's a big difference between nature and a natural history museum: In the wild, when you find a skeleton of anything, it's seldom arranged in a neat, orderly, anatomically correct manner. Even if an animal dies in captivity, nature won't just conveniently produce a skeleton suitable for mounting.

So how do museums get the perfect skeletal specimens that you see behind glass?

The answer: Lots and lots and lots of tedious work. Plus the assistance of a few thousand flesh-eating bugs.

This video from the University of Michigan traces the creation of a bat skeleton, from a fleshy dead bat in a jar, to a neat, little set of bones in a display case. It's painstaking (and moderately disgusting) work. Sort of like building model cars, if the Ford Mustang had realistic organ tissue.

Thanks to Neil Shurley!

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.

TAGS: animals awesome behind the scenes biology gross museums Science skeletons

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http://www.facebook.com/postelwait Cameron Postelwait

posted just in time for lunch.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1566210660 Bryce Caron

So dude just has a huge jar full of bats? Awesome.
ethicalcannibal

That seems like a really cool job.