Dinosaurs in the Attic (2 page)

It also has one million birds, 600,000 fishes in jars of alcohol, one thirty–ton meteorite, eight million anthropological artifacts, one balding tarantula named Blondie, two skulls of
Tyrannosaurus rex,
several dozen dinosaur eggs, 4,000 Asian shadow puppets, 264,000 amphibians and reptiles, a stuffed gray parrot that once belonged to Houdini, the skeleton of Jumbo the elephant, 120,000 rocks and minerals, the Star of India sapphire, a grasshopper found on the observation deck of the eighty-eighth Boor of the Empire State Building, 8.5 million invertebrates, one Copper Man, 250,000 mammals, and one dodo bird.

There are also, I am told, 17 elevators, 35,000 electrical outlets, 800 air conditioners, 400,000 square feet of glass, 25 acres of Boor space, 200 scientists and technicians, 600 employees, 1,000 volunteers, and in excess of 650 rooms. Although the Museum's exhibits cover 700,000 square feet of Boor space, only about one or two percent of the collection is on display. The rest is carefully organized, preserved, and squirreled away in hundreds of vaults, storerooms, and attics throughout the Museum's twenty-three interconnected buildings.

The Museum defies reasonable description and enumeration. It possesses the most spiders, the most beetles, the most dinosaur bones, the most fossil mammals, the most whales, the most plant bugs, and the most birds of any museum in the world. It has the largest hippo on record (Caliph, who died in a zoo in 1908 of acute indigestion); the largest collection of skunks in formaldehyde, the largest collection of non-Western smoking pipes; the largest crab (twelve feet from tip to tip); Raffles, a starling that spoke more languages than any other bird; the longest elephant tusks; a hermaphroditic moth (left side male, right side female); the longest single piece of Peruvian cloth (about 4,500 years old and replete with ancient mummified lice); the most slowly cooled meteorite known (the Emery, found by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey); the largest collection of gall wasps (5.5 million, also collected by Kinsey); the finest collection of birds of paradise; the finest uncut emerald; the largest piece of polished jade; the largest azurite specimen (the Singing Stone, weighing 4.5 tons); the only red topaz; the largest cut gemstone (the Brazilian Princess); the only two
Pachycephalosaurus
skulls in existence; and the best fossil horse collection.

Far from being a gigantic attic of seldom-seen curiosities, these collections are the lifeblood of the research that is being done at the Museum and, indeed, in the worldwide scientific community. The Museum loans out thousands of specimens a year to scientists all over the world, and hundreds of scientists come to study the collections in New York.

Over the last several decades, the Museum has come to realize that the collections are not only more fragile than previously thought, but also far more valuable. Specimens preserved in fluids, artifacts of wood, leather, metal, feathers, and textiles, require constant care and are very expensive to stabilize and store. Furthermore, large sections of the Museum's collections have become absolutely priceless from a scientific point of view, since they could never be replaced or duplicated. The final compounding problem is that much of these collections, once considered worthless monetarily, have become highly sought after by private collectors and dealers who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for even mediocre artifacts—adding additional security requirements in a museum not designed for high-security storage.

Over the last fifteen years alone, to conserve and stabilize the collection and provide secure, well-organized storage, the Museum has spent in excess of $39 million, and over the next ten years an additional
$57 million
is expected to be spent before the stabilization is complete. Even when finished, additional millions will be required to maintain the collection.

Just as Sherlock Holmes reconstructed a crime by examining the clues, so a scientist can reconstruct evolution or figure out how a species fits into the staggeringly complex pattern of life on earth by looking at collections. These collections are the
corpus delicti
of natural science, but they are more than just courtroom evidence; many have great beauty or rarity, or represent nature in its most extravagant forms. And the anthropological artifacts are a record of what many peoples created and believed before their cultures were destroyed or changed by the modem world.

Was all this material collected for the sake of science? Of course. But the urge to collect goes deeper than this. It is a part of our very nature as human beings. When dinosaur eggs were first discovered by Roy Chapman Andrews in Outer Mongolia in 1922, the world was astonished. But Andrews wasn't the first to make this discovery. Twenty thousand years earlier, humans in the area had collected dinosaur eggs, fashioned them into little squares, and placed them in graves. Our almost atavistic urge to collect, as Kenneth Clark said, is "a biological function not unrelated to our physical appetites."

So, let us take a look at the myriad ghosts in residence at the greatest
collection
of all—in the American Museum of Natural History. And, if you're prepared to get a little fossil dust on your clothes, the tour is leaving right away.

PART ONE

THE HISTORY

As I write this, I am in New York City, sitting in a deck chair on the roof of a building physically larger than the Empire State Building. It is sunset. Central Park stretches before me, a cold expanse of leafless trees, winding paths, and dark ponds; just the tips of the bare branches catch the autumn light. Beyond the park is a row of buildings along Fifth Avenue, their windows flashing gold, reflecting the setting sun. To my left I can see West 8
I
st Street, with its row of elegant old apartment buildings, and behind me stretches a patchwork of Upper West Side rooftops. Beyond the rooftops, straight down 79th Street, lies the Hudson River, heaving slowly along like the gray back of some ancient, sluggish reptile.

I am on the roof of the largest private museum in the world—the American Museum of Natural History. Below me lies a fantastic complex of intersecting rooflines, greenhouses, Gothic arches, and towers festooned with granite eagles and copper globes. Far below are hidden courtyards, tiny parking lots, dumpsters, and low roofs. I can see people working behind hundreds of windows grayed with Manhattan soot: hunched over desks, typing on computer terminals, or fussing with animals in aquaria.

Beneath me, somewhere in this vast maze of buildings—the largest repository of scientific collections in the world—is a beetle. This beetle is no bigger than a grain of sand; to the naked eye it is merely a brown dot, the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Sandwiched between glass on a slide, it can be identified only with the aid of a microscope.

I have chosen this fellow—perversely, you might think—as the starting point for our exploration of this gigantic and unclassifiable storehouse of nature. I have chosen it because it is the meanest, tiniest, and ugliest specimen I could find in the Museum. Indeed, the beetle seems to lack any redeeming quality whatsoever; aside from being small and insignificant, it is also boring.

This creature is a common insect known to science as
Bambara intricata.
It belongs to the family of "featherwing" beetles, so called because they possess long feathery hairs on their wings. These hairs enable them to drift on the wind, much like dandelion seeds. This particular specimen is locked up with moth flakes in a clean white cabinet along with tens of thousands of other insects. Like all the Museum's specimens, it is carefully preserved to last for an eternity—or at least for as long as modern technology can afford.

This species spends its three-week life span buried in the decaying litter of the forest floor, feeding mostly on fungus spores. It is a peaceful insect, neither an annoying pest nor a crop destroyer. Although it is extremely common (literally billions can be found in most continents of the world), its existence is unknown to all humanity save for a dozen or so entomologists; and of these, only two or three have any
real
interest in the bug. As I sit on the roof of this Museum and consider that here, beneath me, are some of the most beautiful, rare, and extravagant creations of nature and man, I wonder what could possibly be important enough about this little beetle to warrant its inclusion in the Museum's collections.

To answer this question, we must look back thirty or so years to the discovery of
Bambara intricata.
This particular bug hails from the Bimini islands, a low, windswept string of cays in the Bahamas, not far from Florida. In 1947 the Museum established a research station on North Bimini (now closed) named the Lerner Marine Laboratory. Before then, the area had seen little scientific exploration, and only two insects had been reported from the island: the mosquito (whose presence was immediately and unpleasantly apparent to the visitor) and a pretty species of butterfly. Thus, one of the first priorities was to do an insect "inventory" of the islands to collect and record the species that lived there. In 1951 a group of Museum entomologists went to Bimini and spent four months luring and trapping as many insects as they could, using nets, funnels, ultraviolet lights, and white sheets. When they were finished they had collected 109,718 insects and 27,839 arachnids, including thousands of featherwing beetles. (To capture the featherwings, they used an ingenious contraption called a Berlese funnel, which drives tiny insects out of decaying leaves, bark, and soil.) They caught so many tiny featherwings that the beetles "formed a black cloud" when the collecting vials of alcohol were shaken.

Among these thousands of specimens, the Museum scientists found that six species of feathering beetle were present on the island. Eventually the vials of alcohol were transferred to the main entomology storage area in New York City, where for fifteen years they rested in a dark cabinet.

In the mid-sixties, someone finally took an interest in the insects. A curator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Henry Dybas, borrowed a number of the vials containing the featherwings for a research project on a strange phenomenon known as parthenogenesis—the reproduction of an animal without fertilization by the male. Dybas had evidence that many species of the featherwing beetle exist in all-female populations, reproducing without the aid of males. He wanted to examine a large number of specimens collected at the same time to see if indeed they were all female. In doing so, he developed several startling theories.

Through his examination of featherwing beetles, Dybas was able to illuminate the complex workings of a small corner of the natural world. He wondered, for example, why the beetles were so small. He wanted to know why many species or populations seemed to have done away with males. Finally, he had observed that the featherwing beetles from Bimini had no feather wings, even though the same species on the mainland possessed them. After some thought, Dybas came up with an interesting interlocking theory that explained these three questions.

First, he had reason to believe that the beetles had evolved from a larger into a smaller size, primarily because they needed to be light enough to float on the wind, and thus to occupy a niche in which smallness was an advantage. In becoming small, however, the featherwings could carry fewer and fewer eggs, since the eggs could not be "miniaturized" the way the insect could. Thus, the Bimini beetles lost the ability to carry thousands of eggs and produce many offspring at a single time, as most other insects do. Indeed, they became so small that the female was only able to carry one egg at a time. That single egg became much more biologically precious when it was the only one available—and thus the female had to ensure that it was fertilized and hatched. Unfortunately, this stricture made finding a male to fertilize the egg quickly rather important. Indeed, finding a male became such a matter of inconvenience for the female of a species with such limited mobility that the population eventually did away with males entirely. Instead, the egg matures
without
being fertilized, by the process called parthenogenesis. And when the males were bypassed in the reproductive process, they eventually died out.

To corroborate his theory, Dybas looked to see if other extremely small insects had developed parthenogenesis. Just as he suspected, he found other species that had done away with males.

Next, he addressed the riddle of why 80 percent of the Bimini beetles lacked the feathery wings that were present on the same mainland species. The obvious answer came to him in a sudden flash. On a low, windswept island such as Bimini, beetles dispersed by air currents stood a great chance of being blown out to sea and certain death. (On the mainland, of course, dispersal would be a favorable adaptation, allowing the beetles to spread to new habitats.)

Dybas' research, however, did more than just prove his hypothesis. While researching his theories, Dybas examined one vial of American Museum specimens in detail, all supposedly of the same species. He noticed that a particular internal organ in some of them differed markedly from the same organ in others from the same vial. He realized that one of the groups was a new species, entirely unknown to science.

The science of zoology has established that certain things must be done when a new species is discovered. In the first step, the discoverer must select one organism as the "type" specimen. The type specimen then becomes the physical and legal representative of all of its kind. It will be the actual specimen the scientist uses to describe what the new species looks like, and it is the individual that all others will be compared or contrasted with, and measured against, for the rest of time. Today, most species of animal are represented somewhere by a type specimen, many of which date back several centuries or more.
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