Week 7: Spiders and Pandas and Elephants, Oh My!

After three years with the Insect Zoo, this week I finally held a tarantula. Tarantulas aren’t handled very much; it’s not really good for them and there isn’t often a need to hold them, so they are usually left alone. However, this week I was making one of my instructional videos for volunteers, “What to do if a tarantula escapes.”

Before the museum opened one morning, my boss got out one of our tarantulas and demonstrated, for the cameras, what to do if she escaped. He placed her on the carpet and then scooped her into a deli cup. After the demonstration, I was able to pet her and then hold her. Tarantulas really aren’t that scary. She was very docile and soft and perfectly content to just sit still on my hand.

I was also finally able to go on an interns’ tour of MSC, the Museum Support Center. This complex in Maryland is where many of the Natural History Museum’s specimens are stored. There, a series of climate-controlled pods hold everything from fossils to Samurai suits to boats.

On this tour, we saw some of the Anthropology and Mammal Collections. In the Anthropology collection we saw 1,500-year-old Peruvian cloth, an amazing Japanese doll house, parkas made of whale intestines and more. I was even able to hold a one million-year-old hand axe from Kenya, donated to the museum by the Leakeys.

In the Mammal department, I held the rib of a manatee; saw multiple elephant skulls (including that belonging to the elephant in the rotunda); and viewed the pelts of Washington, DC’s two beloved pandas, Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing, who now reside in a drawer at MSC. Apparently many of the National Zoo’s animals eventually end up at the Natural History Museum.

Below: Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing, giraffe skin (note how thick it is), tigers (the one with an open mouth used to be a rug and was then donated), the skull of the elephant in the museum rotunda, the skull of a vampire deer, and a little something from the random reptile shelf in the mammal department.