Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

world. The MSC has first-rate laboratories and a specialized library for advanced zoological research. It also had a two-year-old pickled orangutan.

The orangutan in question had died at the National Zoo and was floating in a four-by-ten-foot ethanol bath with a pickled porpoise and crocodile. Sopping wet, it weighed several hundred pounds. It had a long ventral incision across its stomach and chest, where its internal organs had been removed during its necropsy. Its head had been shoved into its abdominal cavity. Otherwise, it was "beautiful."

It wasn't bald. It had long auburn hair: fifteen inches on the back of the neck, five inches on the knuckles. Matthews glanced at its gorgeous cape with envy. So did Rhymer. Somehow, they convinced the museum to let them use this skin instead of the bald one. Then they hauled the carcass into a prep lab, where they took measurements; cast its face, feet, and hands in dental alginate (the stuff dentists use to make a mold of your teeth) and Bondo; and skinned it (five hours of emotionally charged work, because apes harbor viruses, and they also intimately resemble humans). After two grueling days, they returned the skinned carcass and skull to the vat (to preserve it for scientific study) and shipped off the skin to be expertly tanned. Nothing could be farther from Borneo or more ecologically responsible. The taxidermists were ecstatic.

Lab apes and hunted apes might as well be classified as different species. This one had been soaking in ethanol so long that its hands and feet were blistered and its face had become inelastic and distorted—something taxidermists call "losing its memory." Matthews spent two days "relaxing" its face until it "remembered" what it had looked like and wouldn't shift once glued onto the form.

Walker helped carve the artificial body. Rhymer retexturized its palms and feet, which were as smooth as sea glass, to give them some epoxy life/love lines. When the tanned skin arrived in Newington (long after my visit), they set its glass eyes (brown irises and "nicely dirty" scleras) and rebuilt its ear and nose cartilage.

Finally, the ape was ready for assembly. Using tricorner needles, two, sometimes three, taxidermists sat and sewed its eight-foot arm span; they sewed the seams down its legs and stitched up its ventral incision; then they sewed its head back on. Thirty feet of ape seams were meticulously joined. "We put thousands and thousands of stitches into it ... an eighth of an inch apart," said Rhymer. As a finishing touch, they hid the seams with epoxy and paint and scrubbed off the excess with Windex.

I circled the lab until I reached Walker's station. He was disinfecting the bush baby in diluted Lysol. In the 1940s, bush babies were thought to harbor yellow fever. He shook his head, then said with disgust, "Hunted specimens are rarely diseased, because nature takes care of that. They have a real good system: it's called natural selection!" Then he wrung the skin, put it in a plastic bag, flung the bag into the freezer, and drove to the Hunter Motel for a chicken-fried steak.

In 1829, when the English amateur scientist James Smithson left America his vast fortune ($11 million or so in today's dollars) for "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" (apparently he felt snubbed by the Royal Society for rejecting one of his papers), the Smithsonian Institution became the first natural history museum to be scientifically organized. It was founded in 1846 and has since become the largest museum complex in the world.

Seven million people visit the National Museum of Natural History each year. Installing the new mammal hall took three years and involved around three hundred scientists, curators, production people, and designers. It cost $31 million and represented the most ambitious project at the museum in ninety-four years.

In 1998, an architectural firm began to renovate the West Wing, one of three wings that radiate off the museum's grand rotunda, preparing the way for the Behring hall. The West Wing has fifty-four-foot-high skylighted ceilings and terrazzo floors, the perfect setting for displaying mounted animals—or even administering life insurance programs for soldiers. During World War I, five hundred U.S. government employees subdivided the place with brick walls and got to work doing just that. Zoological displays weren't staged there again until the 1930s, when many of the cases were assembled by William Hornaday.

Renovating the West Wing was a tremendous job. Skylights were pried open, floorboards ripped out, and old mounts were discovered in the dusty attic. For two years or so, the museum was a construction site. To do their job, the contractors needed a storage area. Space is always at a premium at museums, but it was clear that something had to go.

One day the museum assembled a team of experts to walk through North American Mammals, a gallery of habitat dioramas similar to the AMNH's, to see if the 1957 hall was worth preserving. The survey team was divided.

Catharine Hawks, a conservator who has served as an adviser to more than seventy natural history museums, was on that team. She described the process to me one day by phone: "We were asked to walk through the hall and comment on the condition of the specimens. They said because of asbestos and arsenic, you can't move them. We said it's relatively easy, and it is." She went on: "It would have been easy to take down and move the foreground, the background, but I don't think that's what they wanted to hear. I wrote a memo at the time, saying basically it was possible to move the mounts. If they really wanted to preserve all of them, it could have been done. But it wasn't what they wanted to hear. I could see the way things were going. [The dioramas] weren't all sterling and stunning, but it was possible to preserve them in total. But I think the underlying plan was to have the space to do something else."

I asked Hawks to fax