Experiences: 1st Place

Semester at the Museum by Lauren Bynum, Texas A&M University

There is nothing more amazing to think about than all the living things that have called Earth home, and to me, nowhere captures the breadth of that quite as well as natural history museums. To see the fossils of creatures that existed before trees did, to be able to stare up through the bones of a dinosaur knowing that it was walking around just a hundred million years earlier—there is nothing like it. One of my favorite parts of attending Boston College for my undergraduate degree was the fact that we received free entry into the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and I took advantage of this free entry many times throughout my four years at BC. During my senior year, I received a dream opportunity – I heard through my animal behavior professor that the Harvard Museum of Natural Science was looking for a new mammalogy intern. I emailed the mammalogy department head right away, and my working interview that next week turned into my first day on the job. 

The mammalogy department was not what I expected. I had anticipated that I would be helping with the upkeep of the specimens displayed to the public in the museum’s Hall of Mammals, but I was led to what seemed like an entire different world that I never knew existed. Separate from the museum is a temperature-regulated library, shelves filled not with books but bones and pelts and horns. The full mammalogy collection is so much more than what is on display in the museum, and researchers visit from all over the world to examine the specimens. One of my favorite frequent visitors of the mammalogy collection was a scientist who was studying the healing of pelvic limb fractures. Every time we ran into each other I was greeted with a smile, a wave of the tibia, fibula, or femur of the day, and an explanation of the type of fracture he had most recently located. Most other visitors were graduate students or researchers studying the evolution of one specific creature, their research made easier by Harvard’s football field sized collection all housed in one giant building. 

My main duty consisted of preparing, labelling, and reorganizing the bovid section, which was rapidly outgrowing the shelf space available to it. Shelving the horns and skulls in particular was a rather difficult game of fossilized Tetris, sometimes due to the weight of the skulls, sometimes their size, and sometimes both. Shocking to no one, it turns out that antelope horns have evolved to be many things, but to be easily shelvable was not one of them. My favorite species of the bovids section was the bison, and I lived for the days where I tracked down the bison bones that needed labelling – the scientific name for the American Bison is Bison bison (and if it’s a Plains Bison, you chuck a third “bison” on the end for the best scientific name of all time: Bison bison bison). Another fun fact – I learned that the scientific name for the black rat is Rattus rattus. I’m a sucker for some repetition. 

I worried a little about whether or not it was wise to take this internship. I love natural history specimens, but it seemed like it may be better for my veterinary school application and my resume to work with animals that were still alive. Ultimately, though, I thought back to the reason why I like natural history museums to begin with: they offer so much understanding about the creatures who walked the Earth before us, along with plenty about the creatures walking the Earth now. With that in mind, it seemed like any chance to learn about animals past or present would lend itself to expanding my knowledge in the veterinary field. And it was true! While I can’t say I memorized anywhere near all the names of the bones in a cow skeleton, I certainly did gain a familiarity with bovine species in general, and also a serious interest in bones which has carried over to my love of veterinary radiology. And on top of that, I got to see all the secrets hiding in the archives—or, as us interns call it, the Harvard Museum of Natural History: Extended Edition.