Nobody likes moving, but imagine packing and moving a house full of 3 million fragile, old and priceless items, all of which have to arrive in perfect condition. That is the task the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History is currently undertaking.
This summer the CU Museum will relocate most of its specimen collections, laboratories, offices and its graduate program to the newly renovated Museum Collections Building on the Boulder campus.
The packing has already started, and although many of the specimens will be moving just across campus, their fragile nature dictates that they be carefully wrapped in padding and boxed.
"Although it will be difficult, the move to the Museum Collections Building, formerly the Geology Building, will provide safe and secure space for research, and will allow us to bring entomology together with our other zoological areas," said Pam Topping, coordinator of the move.
While the museum's public galleries and administrative offices won't be moving from their current location in the Henderson Building, many of the collections representing the disciplines of anthropology, botany, entomology, geology and zoology will move. And the move will be no easy task, according to Rosanne Humphrey, zoology collection manager.
"In zoology we have things like skulls with long, pointy antlers that are very bulky and weirdly shaped for packing," Humphrey said. "We have mounted birds like great blue herons with tall, thin necks, and birds with spread wings that are at least 50 years old and, needless to say, very fragile."
Humphrey also stressed the importance of completing the move without damaging anything.
"You could go out and collect again, but the context would be different. The natural habitats have changed," Humphrey said. "For example, specimens collected in 1870 could never be replaced. One thing the public may not understand is that the value of our collections is not monetary at all. They are historical records."
Two relevant examples are the zoology collection's Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon specimens, both of which are extinct.
Paul Murphey, the geology collection manager, agreed that there is no room for error in the move. "Because very few organisms that have ever lived were preserved as fossils, and each fossil represents a part of an organism which went extinct thousands to billions of years ago, none of our specimens are replaceable."
A substantial part of the entomology collection, which consists of more than 450,000 insect and arachnid specimens, also will be moved. The entomology section, which contains everything from bees and butterflies to giant horned beetles, hairy spiders and scorpions, offers its own challenges.
"All the dried insect specimens will be difficult to move because they are so fragile," said Virginia Scott, collection manager of the entomology section. The specimens all have antennae, along with six legs and up to four wings each, and they all have to arrive with all their parts intact.
"Something so seemingly unimportant as smacking a drawer on a doorframe or setting down a drawer with a bit of a thud will cause heads to roll, and then we don't know which head goes with which body. It's a big problem."
Other specimens being moved include fossilized crocodile skulls, dinosaur eggs, bison bones from two PaleoIndian sites, snakes in jars and many others, according to Linda Cordell, the museum's director.
The museum's herbarium is in the basement of the Clare Small Arts and Sciences Building and will not be moved.
The CU Museum was founded in 1902 as a small collection including fossils, a few mounted birds and mammals, some mollusk shells and rocks and minerals, according to Cordell. The museum has grown to a collection of more than 4 million specimens, far more than any other museum in Colorado.