Organising fossil tetrapods

For the second and final day of curation experience, I was working with a palaeontology curator and someone, I think, from the pest management team who was nevertheless also a palaeontologist. Aptly, the day's activities involved pest management and general organising of fossil tetrapods.

In the morning we finished off what yesterday's students had worked on. We were in the museum's quarantine area, inspecting a new collection that had been donated, funnily enough, by someone who once taught me. It was boxes and boxes of Triassic synapsids, the group that gave rise to mammals, including little Diictoton that would have looked something like this:

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diictodon-A72-01.jpg

 The boxes were very well organised, though we had to swap out most of the packing material. Over the long term, things like fleece wrap and South African newspapers from the 70s don't make good packaging because they can break down, release chemicals that can harm specimens (most paper is acidic) or be eaten by pests. Another part of the job was looking for said pests. They might not be able to eat fossils, but just having them in the same building as more edible materials is risky. Fortunately we only found a few, and those were very dead, so the collection was pronounced clean and hauled into the museum proper. It's currently languishing in a sub-basement, on shelves and pallets lest there be another flood, waiting for shelf space in the proper stores. But at least its new packing materials will keep it safe.

The proper location for Triassic synapsids is a cupboard in the palaeontology building that a previous curator had instead filled with moas.

Classic moas vs. eagle. This eagle had a wingspan just shy of three metres.
Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Giant_Haasts_eagle_attacking_New_Zealand_moa.jpg

 These were quite important, though often not much to look at: they were all type or figured specimens. Figured ones have been illustrated in a publication, so should be publicly available for anyone to see. Type specimens are very special. These are the specific objects that carry the name of a species. The type specimen of an organism represents that specimen in the eyes of taxonomy, and is what you'd use to identify a specimen if you thought it was of the same species. Unfortunately, many extinct species were defined on just odd scraps of bone. Fortunately, that means they fit in museum drawers.

Moa sizes. Summary: would not fit in drawers.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dinornithidae_SIZE_01.png

 The previous curator had collected together all of the type and figured moa specimens into one cupboard, so that if the building was at risk (it apparently floods alarmingly often) someone could quickly rescue them all, rather than having to search through dozens of cupboards and over a hundred drawers. But that one cupboard happened to be where the Triassic synapsids should have gone, so we spent the afternoon emptying out the moas and squeezing them back in their original drawers.

After we'd finished, we stood back from this cupboard and realised that there was no way the new fossils could possibly all fit in there anyway. But the collection was a little more organised than before. Success.