Missile silos and flesh-eating beetles

I helped my friend Colleen collect some field data for a plant growth study she's working on at Harvard. That in itself isn't too exciting, but the plot is out in Bedford, and the MCZ has a little field station in the same location. So we dropped in. It was pretty excellent.

The field station is an abandoned Nike missile silo, and we got to check out two side buildings that are part of the former missile bunker -- one of them had the doors in the ceiling and launch railings even. That first building is where they prepare bird and mammal specimens, which essentially means turning a dead animal into a skeleton and/or pelt for later study. There were a couple freezers, like old ice boxes, when we first walked in; one of them held the organs of a dead deer that Tonya, the researcher who showed us around, said was dropped off on the doorstop that day. We also saw their colony of dermestid beetles, and the various bones the carrion-eaters were working on. One such bone was, I kid you not, a lion skull the colony has been working on for a few months. The rest were more commonplace animals like chickens and bats.

(Tonya does zoo-archeology, and some of her work involves examining the chicken bones of early colonials in the US. The chicken bones she's preparing will help determine if an archaeological site was eating free-range or English-bred chickens.)

There was also a collections room with whole specimens preserved in alcohol: shelves and shelves of jars with brownish-red liquid and some long-dead animal floating inside. Apparently there's one specimen that may have been collection by Charles Darwin on the Beagle; I was pretty taken with the fetal dolphins and what looked to be a beluga. Lots of bats, too. My first thought, to be honest, was of those spiced oil jars you find in well-decorated kitchens.

The other building was, basically, a warehouse for marine mammal bones. There were three good-sized humpback skulls in one corner, which Colleen was so good as to photograph me in front of. (I had completely forgotten about my camera phone until we were leaving, unfortunately.) A side-room held a lot more bones of some big whales, including a skull so long that about two feet had to be cut off the tip in order for it to fit under the ceiling -- basically, about half again as large as the skulls in the photo. (I was extremely proud of myself for correctly identifying it as a fin whale skull, incidentally.)

There were some other whale bones curing in the sun, which I'm guessing were right whale, or maybe bowhead, bones, but without the skull I'm not entirely certain. As we left, the dog next to Colleen in the picture was chewing on the edge of that vertebra.



So that was my exciting morning. Be happy I didn't describe the smell.