[Nhcoll-l] The Dangerous Museum

[Callomon,Paul]

Not strictly scientific but: at the school I helped to run in Osaka, Japan, there was one summer a familiar, sickly smell around the entrance. It got to the point that people were not coming in, so we investigated. From the roof, with a pair of binoculars, we spotted a cat with acute vitality deficiency in the foot-wide gap between our building and the next one. There was no way to get in there, and by that point (Osaka is hot and humid in summer) Tiddles was inflating and hosting an impressive invertebrate subfauna, so volunteers would have been few anyway.
The answer? The fire hose. We dragged it out and pointed it into the gap. Worked a treat. Kitty blew up like a grass hut in a typhoon, and soon there was no sign of him/her/it between the buildings. However: when you train as a policeman, you learn that before you discharge a firearm you should check what's behind your target in case you miss. We had neglected to do that, and our liquidized puddy tat was now adorning the sidewalk on the other side of the building - and the glistening flank, roof and windows of a very expensive automobile (whose resale value was now in single digits).

PC

-----Original Message-----
From: nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Harding, Deborah
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 3:38 PM
To: 'nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu'
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] The Dangerous Museum


Back in the mid-70s, the then-Florida State Museum was offered the carcass of a large male lion that had died in a roadside zoo. Initially they worked on skinning it in the one large workspace with little traffic--right in front of the air intake for the air conditioning unit. The museum was filled with the lovely combined odor of male lion and decomposition. 

There was no dermestid colony at the museum, so someone came up with the grand idea of letting wild insects take care of it on the roof of the University of Florida Life Sciences building, right next door. That went fine for a few days, until the wind picked up, and showered the passers-by on the sidewalk below with a rain of maggots. 

Great stories, everybody! The chairman of our department also did some forensic work, so I've other lovely stories, including the maggots-nothing-would-kill in the lab, but I think those are just a little too yucky.

Deborah Harding
Collection Manager
Section of Anthropology
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
harding at carnegiemnh.org
412-665-2608

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