[Nhcoll-l] prepping frozen herps

[Haff, Tonya (NCMI, Crace)]

Hello all,

I have read (in John Simmon's book on herpetological collecting, among other places) that frozen snake and lizard specimens do not make suitable formalin-preserved specimens, and should be instead skeletonised. We have quite a few herp specimens in the freezer that we have been planning on prepping as 'pickles' (fixed in formalin and then stored in ETOH), but  I haven't started yet because of the concern that it may not be worthwhile. I wonder if any of you could weigh in on this and tell me what your experiences have been, and whether or not you would bother preserving these specimens in spirit, or if we should just prep them as skeletons?

Thanks!

Tonya

-------------------------------------------------
Dr. Tonya M. Haff
Collection Manager
Australian National Wildlife Collection
CSIRO

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20220427/265ec844/attachment.html>