How do archeologists preserve the past from the tiniest insect to prehistoric bones?

We'll find out today as Ohio History Connection opens their vault to us.

Hey Dave.

Welcome to the Natural History Collections.

I'm so excited to see the collection, can we just get started?

Let's do it, come on in.

So this is a beautiful facility.

What type of things do you collect here?

Well in this room we have most of our natural history collections, so really anything that can be found in the natural environment of Ohio, from fossils back in the past all the way up to modern species.

And this is our collection of moths.

We have some really interesting species in here.

This first one I'm going to show you is the largest moth in North America.

It's called a Sacropia moth, and it gets wingspan four and a half to six inches.

That is beautiful.

Isn't that a cool mind?

Yeah, so where do you collect all these from?

You know, a lot of these are donations from people that have collected specimens their whole life and they'll donate it.

Or sometimes people will find something dead and they will bring it into us.

And why is it important for you to collect?

Well, we're just trying to, as I said, have a representation of all the natural elements in Ohio.

And a lot of our curators in the past have been specialists in insects, which is why we have this whole row of insect collections.

So you've collected these, but if someone wanted to preserve a mouth, how would they go about that?

Well, the best way to preserve these is to dry them.

So first of all, you get it and put it on what's called a pinning board.

So you want to get the wings exactly the position that you see here, and then put a pin through the body, and then it has to dry.

So we have a little chamber heated just by light bulbs that dries the specimens out for a few days.

And then they're ready to store in the cabinets.

We have another moth.

I think it's probably my favorite.

And this is called the luna moth, Wow, look at the colors on those, those are beautiful.

Oh my goodness, they almost look like butterflies.

Yeah, these are actually moths and one way to tell is you look at the antenna, they have large fuzzy antenna, which is distinctive for moths.

That is fantastic.

So these are found in Ohio.

They are.

An interesting thing about this moth, and also the last one that we saw, is that as adults, they only live for a couple of weeks.

They spend most of their life, in this case, a large larva.

And then as adults they reproduce and they die off.

In fact, they don't even have mouth parts.

They don't eat when they're in this adult stage.

Oh my gosh, such a beautiful thing for it to last such a short amount of time, right?

Yeah, it's too bad, isn't it?

That's kind of sad.

Well, do you have some other things that you can show?

Yeah.

We have lots more cool stuff.

Let's take a look.

And this is part of our botany collection.

These are our pressed plants.

And this particular volume is really interesting.

And back in the day, they used to, if you were in med school, you had to actually go out and collect the plants that were medicinal that related to your subject.

So this is a herbarium book that was created in 1895 by a medical student named Edwin McKinney.

But one thing I really like, like you'll see the plant here.

It's been dry, it's been little pieces of tape to hold it down, the information as to what it is and where it was collected.

But then he put a lot of data here, and that's really important, like for science, to know what it was, where it collected, when it was connected, and to have a volume this old that has this much detailed information is really amazing.

Teaches you a lot.

Is there any other kind of neat little like plants in there, flowers that we can look at?

Oh, that's gorgeous.

This is well over 100 years old and you can still see a little bit of color in those flowers.

And so how do you best press plants into books?

That's always something I've struggled with.

You know, one of the most important things is to make sure you dry it before it goes into the book.

So, like, put it between sheets of newspaper.

If you can put it somewhere where there's some heat source to help dry it out, once it's completely dry, then you can it in a book like this, or you can glue it on paper and frame it, or anything you'd like to do with it.

I love this, this is a great book, and part of a natural history.

Alright, well what else do we got?

And now we'll take a look at part of our mineral collection.

Oh my.

We have some really spectacular examples here.

And this mineral is called selenite, and this is a form of gypsum.

Most people have heard of gypsem.

It's in drywall and things.

Selenite is one of the largest naturally formed crystals.

And in Mexico, there's a cave there where they have selenate like this, but it's over 30 feet long and weighs multiple tons.

Where was this found?

This one's from Northwest Ohio.

Okay, and so are all of these minerals kind of from Ohio?

The majority are, yeah, we try to emphasize Ohio specimens for the most part.

And how do you collect these?

Do people bring them in?

Do you find them?

Well, a lot of these were donated, too, over the years from collectors.

And then some were actually, when we first built our museum, they went out and purchased the specimens that would be perfect for the exhibit.

I see a couple over here that look pretty magnificent.

We have some more large crystals here.

Oh my goodness, it doesn't even look real.

And this one's called celestite.

And one of the features of celestate, a lot of the specimens have this kind of greenish-blue tinge to it.

And what about the one underneath, because that one I think is pretty amazing.

Yeah this is the same mineral, this is also celestite and this is just a little different form of the crystal.

Why is it important to collect rocks?

I mean, they're in here.

What can you learn from rocks that tell you sort of about Ohio?

Really, there's a lot of uses just in general of our collections.

Like one is we have things for exhibit.

So this is sort of a storehouse for things that we can put on exhibit for the public to see.

And we use it for education, education programs, and also for research.

A lot of researchers come in and use the collection for their studies.

And if nothing else, it just kind of shows people what is in Ohio, what kind of spectacular things we have here in the state.

So now we'll take a look at some of our fossil collection.

And these are trilobites.

What is that?

Well, trilobite were mostly aquatic, lived in the ocean, lived on a sea floor bottom.

And they're called trilobytes because their bodies made up of three different segments.

And a lot of people like to collect fossil trilobit.

They're amazing, they're all different sizes.

So how old are these?

Well, these are from the Ordovician period, which is from about 430 to about 480 million years.

So, they're extremely old and the Ortovician deposits are pretty common in southwest Ohio.

There's a couple of important sites where you can go and collect fossils and some people can find trilobites there too.

And this fossil, this is an example, it's called Isotelus and this is the official state fossil.

I didn't even know there was an official state fossil, so I learned something new today.

Well, we have a lot of Ice Age specimens in this collection.

And a lot people have heard of the Macedonian mammoth.

But we have some other species here that you might not be as familiar with.

And one of the most interesting species we have from the Ice Age is this giant beaver.

And this is the modern beaver, and if you compare it to the giant beaver, you can see they're very, very similar.

This is much, much larger.

Wow, and so when did this one become extinct or did it just evolve into that?

No, this species became extinct at the end of the Ice Age, so right about 11,700 years ago, roughly.

That's when a lot of the big Ice Age mammals went extinct, that same time period.

Anything else in here that maybe we don't have anymore?

Yeah, down here we have what's called an elk moose.

And this was a huge animal.

So here's the femur, that's the leg bone.

You can see it much bigger, longer than my femur.

And here's a lower leg of it.

So it gives you an idea of how tall this animal was.

What would it equate to today, like, size-wise?

It'd be similar to the modern moose.

Okay.

And they're huge.

But this one had real long branched antlers, a little bit like her elk, but even bigger with some flat surfaces as well.

So really strange animal.

Yeah, and very cool.

And this is our natural history lab.

This is where we do all the preparation of our specimens.

And there's something really cool in here I wanted you to see.

Check this out.

People ask us how we get our bones all nice and clean from the animals that we prepare.

And we have what are called flesh-eating beetles.

And the larva of these beetles eats the flesh off the bone.

So we get these nice, clean, pretty bones that we can put on our collection.

About how long does it take them to clean these bones?

These bones.

It really depends on how big the colony is.

Like the more you feed them, the bigger the colony gets.

This is an owl skeleton.

It took them about two weeks to clean that up.

Like this one for instance, this was a roadkill mink.

We just found this dead mink along the highway, brought it in here and then put the carcass in the beetle tank and they do the rest and we end up with this really nice clean white skeleton that we can put in our research collection.

Do you ever loan any of these out to different organizations and places?

Yeah, it depends on the type of collection, but we have research collections that we mostly keep here, but will loan to other researchers that are doing projects.

And we also have a separate education collection that we can send out for education type use.

Well, this has been an amazing tour.

You have a great collection and I really hope to come back sometime and see some more things.

So thanks for letting us to see just a little bit of your collection.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Thanks for coming by.