Here Be Monsters
HBM065: We Pay Them In Meat
Preparing an animal’s skeleton for display is incredibly labor intensive for human hands. So curators have turned to a family of beetles with millenia of experience.
By Jeff Emtman • • 18m ListenWalk through any natural history museum and you’ll see rows of effortlessly clean animal skeletons. Chances are you're looking at a strange form of human/insect symbiosis happening in the museum’s back rooms.
dermestes maculatus, aka. “The Hide Beetle”. And for this reason, curators have enlisted their help as “museum volunteers.”
Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, British Columbia calls them. He’s the Curatorial Assistant of Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians and he approximates that he has 20,000 of these volunteers to prep the museum’s collection.
The Black SpotHappy Birthday Paul. We don’t know when your birthday actually is, but we hope it’s a good one...this year and every other.
unless you’re a wild turkey (and if you’re actually reading this, you probably are).
Timelapse of beetles eating macaw, owl and pheasant, from London’s Natural History Museum
dermestes maculatus "flesh-eating beetles at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia. Sometimes these are also called “hide beetles” due to their proclivity for eating leather.
dermestes maculatus seen under a microscope.
