Dinosaurs in the Attic (25 page)

Most large natural history museums require a freezer to store perishable remains. Here animals are stored until preparators are ready to turn them into skeletons and skins for study or exhibition. Today the animals that end up in the American Museum's freezer almost always come from zoos with which the Museum has made special arrangements. (The gorilla, for example, lived at the Bronx Zoo until her death.) By the time you read these pages, the gorilla will probably be a numbered skeleton resting in a drawer in the collection.

It is here that we are very likely to run into Steve Medina, the man in charge of reducing animal carcasses to skin and bones. There are few people in the country in his line of work—perhaps no more than a dozen or two.

"There are," Medina explains, "two methods of preparing a carcass: bacterial maceration ... and 'the bugs.'" Maceration is the preferred method for large animals whose bones will be disarticulated, while "the bugs" work best for smaller animals and for delicate parts of larger animals where curators want the skeleton to remain articulated.

Medina works mostly in the osteological preparation lab, a sprawling, sunny room overlooking Columbus Avenue. Along one wall are the maceration vats—three tanks, two converted bathtubs, and one enormous stainless steel vat that looks as though it could hold a rhinoceros—and indeed it has.

Bacterial maceration of an animal to obtain its skeleton begins with a process called "roughing out," in which the body is gutted and excess muscle, fat, and tissue are trimmed off—but not too thoroughly, since the bacteria need something to work on. Then the carcass is lowered into one of these vats filled with warm tapwater. Small burners keep the water at just the right temperature for rotting to proceed at an optimum pace. During the next week or two, bacterial action "digests" the tissues, which float to the surface as a foul scum. When most of the meat has liquefied, the tank is drained, leaving behind a greasy pile of bones. The bones are boiled in a solution of cleaning soda, and any stubborn bits of flesh are picked off by hand. Although large vents above each vat carry off most of the hideous combination of gases that percolate up during maceration, Medina says that "it can get pretty bad in here." If the bones will be going on exhibition, they are then whitened in the big tank.
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"The bugs" are the second method of preparing skeletons for study. A humid closet adjacent to the preparation area houses a large colony of dermestid beetles. These small, voracious beetles have become famous in the press because of the way they are used to obtain skeletons. Most large natural history museums maintain a colony of these black, perfectly ordinary-looking beetles. The dermestids eat the flesh clean off a dead animal, leaving behind a spic-and-span skeleton. The great beauty of the process is that the skeleton remains articulated, held together by connecting cartilage, which the beetles won't eat—until, that is, they run out of meat. If left too long, the beetles will eat not only the cartilage but also the bones, so they must be carefully monitored.

Contrary to popular belief, dermestid beetles are harmless to humans and are actually quite fastidious in their habits. As long as the Museum can supply a steady stream of specimens for cleaning, the colony maintains itself with little fuss. During occasional slow periods, Medina will supplement their diet with extra flesh cut from the animal carcasses.

The dead animal to be cleaned is placed in the dermestid room in a stainless steel box with slick sides and a bottom covered with cotton batting. The tubs rest some feet above the floor.

For maximum success, the animal corpse should be partially dried first with a fan, as the beetles don't like a sticky mess. The dermestids take about a week to polish off a large skeleton, but may finish a rodent or bat overnight. The Museum's colony can in fact handle many carcasses at one time. During my visit the beetles' assignment was about fifty small bats, a monkey, a fox, and an iguana. When a skeleton is more or less clean, Medina lures the beetles away with a fresh carcass, and the cleaned skeleton is immediately sealed in a cabinet with mothballs to kill any stray beetles, which otherwise might wreak havoc in the study collections. Finally, the skeleton is immersed in a water-ammonia solution, which removes grease and odor from the bones; then it is dried, numbered, and installed in the collection.
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The Museum's bones are in great demand for study. Not only do hundreds of scientists come from all over the world to examine them, but many thousands of bones are loaned to scientists at institutions as far away as India and China. For now, let us move on to some of the more unusual "remains" in the Museum—bones that have histories well worth telling.

THE CHUBB HORSES

Once obtained, bones are usually studied. But some are prepared especially for mounting and exhibition. The Museum houses a number of famous and unusual articulated skeletons. Some are on display; others remain hidden in storage behind various locked doors. Let's look behind some of those locked doors now.

Deep within the third floor of the Museum—in the preparation area—the corridors are lined with large glass cases of mounted skeletons. Most are of horses. In one case gallops the famous racehorse Sysonby, caught at the moment when all four hooves leave the ground. Other cases contain the skeletons of Lee Axworthy, a world-famous trotting stallion; a galloping Przewalski's horse being attacked by a wolf; four zebras mounted to show different gaits; and a grazing Shetland pony. There is, in fact, at least one mount of every species of
Equus.

These mounted skeletons are the work of S. Harmsted Chubb, who created them at the rate of about one per year for the half-century he worked for the Museum. Many present-day osteologists acknowledge that Chubb was a master of the art of mounting bones, perhaps the greatest who ever lived. Many of these skeletons were first displayed in the Museum's old Hall of Osteology and later in the Biology of Mammals Hall, but several decades ago they were moved into storage. (In 1985, however, they were taken out for a special exhibition on Chubb, "Captured Motion," which was displayed in Gallery
I
for several months.) One of the Chubb mounts, showing the skeleton of a man trying to control the skeleton of a rearing stallion, has become the Museum's logo and is on all its letterheads and business cards. It is often mistaken by the ignorant for a dinosaur.

A slight, precise man with a neatly trimmed goatee, Chubb was a familiar figure at the Museum during the first half of this century. He was usually fussily dressed in a gold pince-nez, with waistcoat and tie covered by a white lab coat or apron. When he wasn't mounting bones in the Museum, he could usually be found at horse or dog races, not placing bets but taking photographs and chatting with the owners and jockeys.

Chubb's interest in bones, he reported in an autobiographical article, began as a child, when he found a dead cat under the porch of his Maryland home. He began looking for other dead animals, which he would spread out on the roof of his father's barn to decompose. When this arrangement quickly proved unsatisfactory to his parents, he hid the carcasses in the woods and returned later when they had been picked clean by scavengers and the elements. Since he lived in Maryland horse country, most of his bones came from dead horses.

Through sheer trial and error he taught himself how to mount skeletons, and this experimentation led him in turn to study the horse's movements, and how its bones articulated with one another. (In his first experiment with bone movement, Chubb reported, he attached a row of horse skulls to the edge of the woodshed roof. When he pulled strings attached to their jawbones, the row of skulls clacked their teeth in a wonderfully macabre fashion.)

At sixteen, just around the turn of the century, Chubb came to New York City and found work as a machinist. He spent much of his spare time, however, at the Museum. He quickly realized that the vast majority of skeletons in the Museum (and indeed in most museums) were carelessly mounted—often more poorly than his own early efforts. Chubb concluded that these professional osteologists simply hadn't studied how the animals
moved
—they had merely observed where the bones connected and then stuck them together.

He found his way into the office of Henry Fairfield Osborn, at that time the curator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department, and with a few of his samples showed the paleontologist why some of the Museum's mounts were sloppy. Impressed, Osborn bought one of Chubb's mounted cats for forty dollars, and ordered a mounted opossum and a raccoon. In 1901, Osborn decided to hire Chubb full-time to help prepare the Museum's planned Hall of Osteology.

Naturally, Chubb decided that mounts of the horse would be the best way to teach visitors about animal locomotion; mounts of famous racehorses would be even better. Chubb made the rounds of some of the famous racehorse owners of the time, delicately suggesting that they donate the bodies of their prize horses if they should happen to die. While some owners immediately ejected chubb from their offices for such a morbid suggestion, others liked the idea that their best horses might end up in a museum. Chubb didn't have to wait long; the owner of the famous stallion Sysonby, James R. Keene, wrote to him in 1906 that his champion stallion had unexpectedly died, and shortly thereafter the dead horse arrived at the Museum.

Chubb wanted to capture Sysonby at the peak of his speed. At that time it had only recently been established (in a famous bet) that for a split second during full gallop, all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground. But before mounting the animal in such a position, Chubb wanted to establish the position of its legs and body during various phases of its stride. Using a borrowed racehorse on the grounds of the Museum, he painted white stripes and spots on the horse's body. While the horse trotted or galloped along, Chubb photographed it from every conceivable angle. One photograph of Chubb shows him dangling about thirty feet directly above a trotting horse, photographing straight down onto its back, which had been strangely painted with dots and lines.

Chubb spent eleven months mounting Sysonby. Following the usual procedure (described in the previous chapter) he roughed out the carcass and dumped it in one of the maceration vats. During the first few nights, Chubb lived in an adjacent room so that he could tend the small Bunsen burners that kept the water at an even 98 degrees Fahrenheit. In two weeks most of Sysonby could be drained out of the vat, and Chubb put the bones in benzene for another six to eight weeks.

Chubb assembled the skeleton under a complex scaffold he called his "osteological Christmas tree." He dangled each bone from the scaffolding by a string and made adjustments to its length until it was hanging in its correct position for the mount. A flexible rod, threaded through the spinal cord, anchored the mount, and the other bones were attached, one by one, with slender pins, pipes, and wires. During the months-long process, Chubb adjusted and readjusted each bone numerous times, using his marked photographs as a guide. When he was finally satisfied that everything was correctly in place, the ribs were hung and pinned to thin metal bands along the inside of the ribcage. Every bone of the horse became part of the mount, including several vestigial ribs no larger than a toothpick.

Innovative mount followed innovative mount as Chubb's career progressed. At last, in 1949, forty years after mounting Sysonby, Chubb began his most challenging—and his last—mount. This time he chose a less glamorous subject: a donkey nibbling at botfly eggs on his left hind leg. The donkey is rwisted in one of the most contorted and asymmetrical positions the animal could assume, making it an extraordinarily difficult mount. As Chubb was making the final minute adjustments to the mount, he collapsed. The most accomplished osteological preparator in the Museum's history died two weeks later, at the age of eighty-five.

Chubb's horses now trot along a twisting corridor, each one enclosed in its own glass case. Bringing up the rear of this lively procession is the giant skeleton of an elephant, its head nearly bumping the ceiling. This skeleton comes from one of the most famous animals of all time, whose name has become synonymous with immensity—Jumbo.

The story of Jumbo the elephant, although perhaps somewhat peripheral to that of the Museum, illustrates the fortuitous way in which many odd specimens can end up in its collections.

JUMBO THE ELEPHANT

The pillar of a people's hope,

The center of a world's desire.

—from a newspaper obituary of Jumbo, the King of Elephants

A little over a century ago, Jumbo the elephant arrived in New York aboard the ship
Assyrian Monarch.
The great beast was paraded up Broadway, accompanied by brass bands, dancing girls, wildly cheering crowds, and all the fanfare that P. T. Barnum's formidable publicity machine could unleash. Three years later, Jumbo was dead—struck down by a speeding freight train.

Barnum scattered Jumbo's remains far and wide. His tusks, badly shattered in the accident, were mostly sliced up for souvenirs, or eaten (more about that later). His heart was reportedly sold to Cornell University for forty dollars. His stuffed skin (mounted by the great Carl Akeley) was given to Tufts University, where it became the school's beloved mascot until it burned in a fire in 1975. And his bones—after a brief tour—were deposited in the American Museum of Natural History. His skeleton was exhibited now and then for seventy years, but as the memory of Jumbo faded from children's minds, it was eventually taken off exhibition permanently in 1977.

Jumbo's journey from Africa to the mammalogy section of the Museum began in nineteenth-century Abyssinia (now Ethopia), along the banks of the Settite River. It was here in 1861 that a group of Arabs trapped him, possibly for sale to a European zoo. (Another account has him captured on the shores of Lake Chad.) At the time, Jumbo was a calf, standing only forty inches high at the shoulder. The elephant first traveled to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which later traded him to the Royal Zoological Gardens in London, reportedly for a rhinoceros. At the zoo, Jumbo was a perfectly ordinary elephant until he reached the age of seven, when his keeper began noticing a vast increase in his appetite. His intake of food soon reached a point at which he consumed, on a daily basis, two hundred pounds of hay, two bushels of oats, a barrel of potatoes, several quarts of onions, and ten to fifteen loaves of bread. His keeper, Matthew Scott, allegedly said that for medicinal purposes Jumbo was sometimes allowed two gallons of whiskey. (Scott himself was a teetotaler.) Jumbo's fame grew with his size, and soon he had become the most famous animal in England.