Why do my stories always contain scenes in museum storage facilities?
Because they're the strangest, most fascinating places you'll ever see. Here are some drawers full of dead birds at the Smithsonian warehouse...
And the birds aren’t even the tip of the iceberg that is the Smithsonian’s natural history collection. Equivalent collections exist for insects, flowers, mammals & inverterbrates (snails etc). You can even find giant squid. It all seems rather extravagant until you understand what these collections are for.
These drawers full of dead things, along with similar collections in London, Paris, Berlin and St Petersburg, are the definitive record of man’s exploration of the natural world. They provide a baseline against which any new discovery can be compared. When an excited naturalist thinks they’ve discovered a new species of bat in the caves of New Guinea, they first have to check in the drawers to make sure there’s not another one just like it.
Different museums face different storage dilemmas, each fascinating in their own way…
Where do you keep your native American canoes? Next to the Burmese temple dog statues, obviously. This is Chicago’s Field Museum.
Is it possible to have too many terracotta heads? Ask the guys at the Larco museum in Lima, Peru
When you run a tank museum, storage is definitely an issue. This is Bovington, in Dorset, England.
Some museums adopt elegant high-tech solutions to make their storage facilities accessible to the public. This is the Museum an der Strom in Antwerp, Belgium.
But when a museum is strapped for cash, as many are, things can get a little out of hand.