Hidden away in a strange space behind 107 Shanklin lecture hall, multiple generations of forgotten equipment, books and teaching materials have been moldering for decades. At the very back there is a huge wooden cabinet, apparently built-in to the oddly shaped room. The case has glass paned doors and shelving, but most remarkably it has two stories, with an upper gallery and more doors and shelves.
We were first attracted by the mounted skeleton of a goat on one of the lower shelves, almost entirely hidden by stuff, including a bicycle rigged to generate current for some old physics lab. Extracting the goat lead us to discover other treasures, among them a badly damaged stuffed gar and boxes and heaps and stacks of jars- from pill-bottle size to jumbo-pickle jars and larger. The contents of many of these were impossible to identify, as they were blackened with soot, and the contents murky and indistinct.
An intrepid student named Nate Ko ’17, unencumbered by squeamishness and not afraid of getting dirty, took on the task of moving all these treasures up to the Burke lab, two floors above in Shanklin. The process of identification and cataloging had to await a major cleaning job. Getting the grime off the jars took weeks. Margeret Fitch ’22 inventoried the specimens, and with Andy Tan ‘21 and Yu Kai Tan MA ‘21, we found that it included taxa from 21 Phyla!!
Once the grime was off, it was clear that many specimens had desiccated completely within their jars, and many others were half evaporated and in danger of the same. Rescuing these specimens from utter uselessness required rehydrating and then re-filling jars with 70% ethanol. Just opening the jars was the biggest challenge.
