backstage passes at the museum.

Two Wednesdays ago, our class met at the backdoor of the Ranching Heritage Center for a tour of the bird collection led by Dr. McIntyre (the bird curator/biology professor). She started by showing us through a room filled with all kinds of mice specimens, and then led us to the beetle room. 

Yes, beetle room.

I have an intense fear of clusters of little things (a cluster of beetles would be a great example), but thanks to Dr. Hamilton's forensic entomology* class, the beetle collection wasn't a surprise to me.  We had learned in her class that museums use dermestids (skin beetles) in order to clean skeletons of any remaining gunk or soft tissue.  To see, however, her lesson on the skin beetle's usage up close and personal was another lesson of its own. The room was guarded by a double door, smelled terrible, and I have never seen so many damn clusters of beetles in my life. Yuck. Cool, but yuck.  Apparently, if a couple of the dermestids get free into the museum, they can wipe out whole collections with their insatiable hunger. So that was interesting.

Another interesting part of the tour was Dr. McIntyre's explanation of the museum's genetic library.  I had known that the biology department at Texas Tech has a library of herps* and tarantulas, but I didn't know that it went any further than that.  Apparently, the museum also has a genetic library for birds and rodents as well.  Genetic libraries are useful for species identification through looking at the specific sequence of DNA each specimen has and comparing it to other members of the species on record.  Neat stuff.

**forensic entomology: the use of insects to solve crimes --- most often in cases of murder. One of my favorite classes in undergrad.  

**herps: herpetology: the study of reptiles and amphibians.  If you take the course, you shout, "HERP!" anytime you spot like a frog or lizard or snake.... and then you go catch it if it's a friend of jack.