The shinbone's connected to . . . MCZ's mammal research collections aid scholars, other detectives

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November 11, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

By Andrea Shen
FAS Communications

A herd of (mostly bison) skulls adorns a wall in the research collections of the Mammal Department at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Downstairs, in the public galleries of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), harmony prevails – the porcupines nose peacefully near the pangolins, and the Mongolian tiger politely averts his gaze from the Bornean wildhog and the Indian rhinoceros.

But upstairs, in the research collections of the mammal department, is a world of skull and skin, teeth and bone, laid out starkly for scientific curiosity. In drawer upon drawer, case after case, pelts and skeletons and stuffed specimens wait for someone to use them. Bison skulls protrude from a wall, their horns resembling flaking bark. Kudu horns wind toward the ceiling. These collections occupy a suite of seven rooms, where the Victorian spirit of the MCZ’s past lingers in the lacy ironwork of the staircase and the lab benches built into the wall.

A Whale in the Attic
Maria Rutzmoser, curatorial associate of the Mammal Department, defines mammals as animals that have fur or hair, are warm-blooded, and produce milk to feed their young. The Mammal Department’s collection, the twelfth largest in the country, includes 72,000 specimens, representing about 85 percent of the 1,300 mammal genera in the world.

"We’re not the biggest collection, but we’re one of the most diverse," Rutzmoser says.

There’s a blue whale in the attic, and a pygmy shrew downstairs. Teddy Roosevelt donated tamaraws, and P.T. Barnum gave animals from his zoo. The MCZ’s founder, Louis Agassiz, who believed that natural history collections not only furthered scientific research but also demonstrated the power of a divine creator, would have approved this diversity.

Curatorial assistant Judy Chupasko wrestles with the jawbone of a lion during a group tour. Photos by Marc Halevi

Terri McFadden, curatorial assistant, lifts the steel door of a freezer in the hallway. "This is a beaver," she says, lifting a bag with dark matted fur showing through one side.

"This is a bag of rodents," she says cheerfully, nudging a plastic bag whose ice crystals mask its contents. "Jane’s cat is in here," she adds wryly. Jane Harrison is the department secretary.

A specimen can be anything from a bone, to a flat skin, to a "mounted" skin (old-fashioned taxidermic display), or a "study" skin (modern stuffed specimen). Three hundred to four hundred new specimens come into the mammal department’s collections each year, from animals donated by zoos, professional biologists, animal control officers, and the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife. Judy Chupasko, a curatorial assistant, also conducts collecting expeditions.

Specimens are prepared at the Museum’s field station in Concord, Mass. Then they are stored at the MCZ with detailed annotations: body measurements, location and date collected, habitat type, body fat measurements, reproductive condition, stomach contents.

"136-34-9.7-17.7-31g," reads a tag hanging from the foot of a mouse. "No internal/external parasites. Stomach full of green vegetables."

Mammals Studying Mammals
This kind of data is invaluable to scientists seeking to understand the behavior and characteristics of animals. Moreover, because the collection is almost a century and a half old, many of the first scientific descriptions of some animals – "type specimens" – can be found here. The mammal department has 342 type specimens. In a few months, the department plans to publish a catalog of these types.

An astonishing variety of mammals use the mammal collection. Zooarchaeologists bring bones found on digs to identify which animals lived in past civilizations. Police with homicide on the brain bring bones they discover during road construction projects. Anthropologists study the femurs of nonextinct primates to learn more about how extinct primates moved. Teachers at Harvard and schools throughout New England bring their students to learn about evolutionary diversity.

In addition to understanding our past, scientists use the collection to alter our future. A few years ago, an M.I.T. engineer interested in cylinder design used an electron microscope to study the interior bracing structures of porcupine quills. Another researcher has studied kangaroo leg bones for ideas on improving the design of artificial human knees. And recently, a researcher from the School of Public Health took a tissue sample from a 107-year-old mouse collected in a town near Old Lyme, Conn. DNA tests showed that the Lyme disease spirochete has been around for at least 100 years.

Curatorial assistant McFadden says, "We don’t know where science is going to go, just as they didn’t know 100 years ago. Maintaining this collection and taking good care of it is valuable partly because we do not know how it will be used in the next century."

Duty to Posterity
At a recent open house, Rutzmoser flexed the jawbones of a lion and a panda bear, comparing the knife-like side teeth of the first (good for shearing), to the blunter back teeth of the latter (good for grinding). She showed visitors how the three bones of the human arm – the humerus, radius, and ulna – appear in the sheep, the seal, the bear, and the bat, in radically different proportions.

"Their collection is an extremely important resource for understanding the relationships between different organisms," says Professor James McCarthy, director of the MCZ and Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography. "The opportunity to study the relationships between living forms – but also those that have become extinct – is extremely useful in unraveling evolutionary history."

McCarthy sees lessons in the collection for our future as well.

"With the increasing domination of one species – ourselves – we are really influencing the direction of evolution today, in a way more than any other species has before," McCarthy says. "And we must do that wisely."

The department has logged about 8,500 specimen descriptions into a database so far. In time, McFadden says, they’d like to complete the database and go fully online, so that anyone in the world could access their collection. They’d also like to complete some renovations and acquire more storage cases.

"We have a duty to posterity, to make sure that the specimens here are taken care of and preserved," Rutzmoser says. "This is really our planetary heritage."