It is not easy to store even one elephant, let alone one hundred. Nor is it a simple matter to find space for the half-dozen preserved gorillas, the fifteen-foot whale skull, or the hundreds of rats in jars of alcohol*36; or the giraffes, lions, platypus skins, narwhal horns, and 250,000 other specimens that constitute the Museum's mammalogy collection. For over eighty years mammals had been accumulating in the Museum, filling up an alcove here, an attic there, until parts of the collection became virtually unmanageable. A scientist looking for a particular bear, for example, often had to open a dozen or so fluid-filled tanks just to find it. Skeletons were separated and scattered throughout several storerooms, taking hours of detective work to link one bone to another. During the last twenty years, and especially in the last five, the department, under Guy Musser, took the matter in hand and launched an overhaul of the collection. For a year the senior technicians in the department moved tens of thousands of specimens, from elephant skulls to shrews, into newly renovated storage areas.
