Why This Museum Stores Thousands of Dead Animals in Its Freezer | National Geographic

Humans have altered the environment more so than any other species that has lived on the planet. We see animals in our environment that are having to adapt to the world that we have essentially fabricated for them, and that includes them dying as a result of interacting with humans in that urban environment.

The Salvage Animal Program is a program where we ask people to bring in animals that they might find dead in their backyards or on the roads that they're traveling, and to bring those specimens into us for research purposes. Right now, in our walk-in freezer, I want to say we have approximately 6,000 animals.

Oh, holy moly! This animal is a bullock's oriole, and it's in its breeding plumage—absolutely gorgeous and going to become a really nifty scientific specimen. In lay terms, many people think of it as an autopsy, but we're not trying to determine the cause of death; we are simply trying to preserve that specimen for scientific research.

This is a western kingbird; he has a broken wing. Either he was hit by a car or hit a window. We take heart samples, we take kidney, we take liver, and we also take muscle. We try to save gut contents. Okay, so there's the inside of the stomach, and you can see it looks like some shell of a beetle. We try to get as much flesh as you can off of a skeleton, but then they go into our dermestid colonies.

Our dermestid colony is a colony of flesh-eating beetles; they do the dirty work for us. If they are hungry, you can put a small bird skeleton in there, and in two to three days, it'll be completely clean. The most common animals that we receive are things that you would see in your backyard. Squirrels—we get a lot of squirrels. We get many American robins. We get a lot of northern flickers. We've recently received a parakeet, so that obviously escaped from someone's house. That's a baby chipmunk!

Wow! Our collection exists in the digital world as an online database that's searchable by anyone, um, anywhere on the planet, and it contains as much information about our specimens as we can possibly have on there. We are essentially mapping historical change in organisms responding to us living in an area.

We can examine exactly how healthy these populations are and what's happening to them in response to things that we are doing. It doesn't only matter for tracking evolutionary change in these particular animals; it also impacts us because we live with these animals in these urban environments.