Pictured above holding a bird study skin is Ruth Trimble, a scientist who served as an assistant curator of Ornithology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History from 1934-1940. Trimble wrote the following in her book “The Bird Collection of the Carnegie Museum,” published in 1936.
Although the bird collection of the Carnegie Museum is not among the oldest of American collections, it has the distinction of being among the largest. Listing American collections according to their size we find Carnegie in fourth place, with approximately one hundred and ten thousand specimens, representing about one-fourth of the known species of birds in the world.”
“No munificent gifts of large private collections have increased our store, and no spectacular million-dollar expeditions, such as have contributed to the history of our sister institutions, have come our way. It would seem that the bird department of Carnegie Museum, much after the fashion of its founder, whose name it bears, has lifted itself by its own boot-straps.”
