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I'm Kenneth Bader. I'm a fossil preparator at the Vertebrate Paleontology Lab and I also
run the Skeletal Prep Lab for the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Texas Natural
Science Center.
In our freezers, we have a number of different types of birds, reptiles and mammals that
we're skeletonizing for the museum's collection.
Okay we're currently working on an adult Cooper's hawk. It's one of the more common species
of hawk found in Texas and our first step is we remove it from the freezer, let it thaw
out from the fridge, then we'll dissect it, removing all the skin and gutting the animal.
The next step is we'll take the specimen and put it in a drying rack. We want the meat
to be dried out to the consistency of jerky. That's how the dermestid beetles like it.
I'll go ahead and take a bird, put it into the colony and usually I'll go ahead and spritz
it down with a little bit of water, and leave the room, turn off the lights. And as soon
as the light turns off, the swarm descends on that carcass.
And if you go back in after maybe 10 or 15 minutes, in some cases you can't even see
the carcass anymore. All you see is the writhing swarm of dermestid larva.
I kind of think of them as my minions. They do all the work for, pretty much for free.
Basically, they do the skeletonization in exchange for free meat, which we're happy
to supply.
After the beetles have cleaned off all the soft tissue, we'll take the specimen and put
it in a bath of 5 percent ammonia just to disinfect it and help whiten the bone a little
bit, followed by a quick rinse with water and then we can take the specimen, put numbers
on it and add it to our museum collection.
A number of different research projects will use this skeletal collection. For example,
archaeologists can use this to identify birds that may be in the trash piles, so it would
be birds that people were eating thousands of years ago. We can use the bones to identify
animals that are in cave deposits to look at what animals were present thousands of
years ago or millions of years ago. One of our researchers, Julia Clarke likes to use
a lot of these birds for comparison against fossil species and she uses them to help understand
the evolution of different groups of birds.
We have volunteer opportunities in the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Texas Natural
Science Center where students can help out with some of the processing of cleaning up
the skeletons and also numbering the specimens so they can be put into the collections.