Carnegie Museum of Natural History
One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
This is a venomous pit viper species. Pit vipers are distinguished by the heat sensing pit organ located on each side of their head. This specimen was collected from California in 1958.
This post was originally posted on our curatorial assistant’s Instagram, which features specimens in the museum’s historic Alcohol House.
by Kaylin Martin
Reptile and amphibian specimens are not the only things stored in 70% ethanol in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Alcohol House!
Departments such as Ornithology, Botany, and Mollusks preserve select specimens in fluid for further scientific use. This method preserves soft tissues that would otherwise need to be removed, maintains the natural three-dimensional shape, and slows down DNA degradation.
Fluid collections are more difficult to maintain, however, as they take up more space and have to be regularly monitored to prevent the specimens from drying out.
Keep an eye out for our future Alcohol House public tours to see these specimens up close and to meet collection managers.
Kaylin Martin is a curatorial assistant in the Section of Herpetology. She blogs about the collection in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s historic Alcohol House, which is home to thousands of fluid-preserved specimens.
by Kaylin Martin
Red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) are the most popular pet turtles in the United States. This one in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Alcohol House has two heads. Due to extensive trading and people releasing their pets into the wild, red-eared sliders are listed as one of the world’s 100 most invasive species.
Kaylin Martin is a curatorial assistant in the Section of Herpetology. She blogs about the collection in Carnegie Museum
of Natural History’s historic Alcohol House, which is home to thousands of fluid-preserved specimens.
by Kaylin Martin
Tucked away under the public galleries of Carnegie Museum of Natural History are thousands of glass jars containing decades of collecting efforts. This collection space, known as the Alcohol House, is the ninth largest herpetology collection in the United States and the most complete collection of Pennsylvanian amphibians and reptiles in existence. The Alcohol House is named for the 70% ethanol alcohol that collection managers use to preserve specimens and prevent
degradation and the formation of bacteria.
The importance of this collection prompted the museum to find funding to improve collection preservation and facilitate public interaction. The Alcohol House secured a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to hire a full time curatorial assistant, Kaylin Martin, to coordinate efforts to revamp the storage facilities.
The grant will enable Collection Manager Stephen Rogers and Kaylin to purchase new equipment, such as jars, gaskets, tanks, photography equipment, shelving inserts, and specialized cabinets, to update the storage facilities.
During this revamp, they will streamline the database that contains specimen records, reorganize the facility based on updated taxonomy, and tackle the project of digitizing holotype and paratype specimens. The public web interface iDigBio hosts 170,000+ specimen records for public use and research.
The goal is to link the most important specimen records with images. Digitizing the collection makes it accessible to researchers around the world in a few short clicks without the need to travel to Pittsburgh.
Renovations are also under way to make the Alcohol House accessible to the public for guided tours. An accompanying exhibit is being planned for the museum’s public galleries, as well as an introductory exhibit to herpetology at the start of
the planned guided tours. Keep an eye out for the grand opening of these in the near future!
How can you contribute? Carnegie Museum of Natural History is always in need of volunteers to help maintain the wet specimen collection and catalog and update the database. Volunteers are invaluable assets to any museum collection in order to prevent degradation and mobilize data for researchers on a public interface.
If you are interested in helping to maintain this collection for future generations, please contact Kaylin Martin at martink@carnegiemnh.org
Kaylin Martin is a curatorial assistant in the Section of Herpetology. She blogs about the collection in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s historic Alcohol House, which is home to thousands of fluid-preserved specimens.
This photo shows Neil Richmond at work in his lab at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Richmond was the curator of Herpetology from 1955-1971 and the curator of Environmental Studies from 1971-1979.
by Patrick McShea
In the wild, even the limited wild of our backyards, snakes don’t pose for identification near the numbers of convenient reference keys. Still, the small snake I encountered one cool November morning while raking leaves remained still enough for a prolonged close inspection.
The pencil-thin and ruler-length reptile was in a tight coil beneath a pile of leaves I had neglected to remove the previous afternoon. The unfamiliar creature apparently found both cover and relative warmth in the isolated pile, and I guessed it would depart on its own once the day warmed. As I gently replaced its leafy blanket I remembered where to find its identity.
Some natural museum exhibits function as three-dimensional field guides. Number 13 in the Non-Poisonous Snakes of Pennsylvania display case on the Daniel G. & Carole L. Kamin T-rex Overlook bears the simple descriptive name brown snake, and is known scientifically as Storeria dekayi.
With that information I found out more about the harmless creature I had unknowingly been sharing space with by visiting the website PAHERPS, which specializes in images and data related to Pennsylvania’s amphibians and reptiles and is a great tool for educators and curious gardeners alike.
Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences of working at the museum.
