On a hot afternoon in August, I walked out of the San Diego Natural History Museum carrying a whale rib, a leopard pelt, a taxidermized weasel and a small piece of fossilized dinosaur poop. These were real specimens that belonged to the museum, not gift shop replicas. But for two weeks, they were mine to take home, display in my living room, even bring to events with my friends.
San Diego, California, has the only natural history museum in the US with a collection of nature specimens that they allow members of the general public to check out and take home, just like checking out books from a library. Inside the museum, metal shelves of taxidermy fill the space floor to ceiling. Light glints off rows of plexiglass boxes: alert bobcats, their ears perked; birds posed on branches; a jackrabbit suspended in air as if in mid-leap.
There are Riker cabinets filled with beetles and butterflies, shelves of pickled sea creatures and snakes in jars, and plastic bins of exotic animal pelts. Haylie Priest, the loan program’s manager, guided me through the room’s wonders: 1,400 specimens in total, from a megalodon tooth fossil to a king cobra head in a jar. At the end of one aisle, on the lowest shelf, I found a small, stuffed alligator.
The natural history museum’s taxidermy library grew out of a loan program that started in the 1920s, to bring “nature cabinets” to local schools around San Diego. Some of these old kits are still on display – like a wooden box filled with mineral samples, with a type-written guide inside that looks like it’s from the 1940s. Sometime in the early 2000s, the museum opened up the program so that anyone who was interested could borrow the museum’s collection of specimens.
While it’s common for American natural history museums to offer scientific kits for schoolteachers, having a specimen loan program open to the general public is unique, said Elizabeth Merritt, a trends expert at the American Alliance of Museums. The San Diego program appears to be the only one of its kind in the United States. It would be easy for museums to offer a similar program, Merritt noted: “There are lots of kinds of natural history specimens that are incredibly common, and quite often natural history museums will have a bucket of them around.” A spokesperson for the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, which has a collection of 145.8m specimens and objects, called the San Diego program “certainly intriguing”.
The “Nature to You” program does fit into a larger pattern, Merritt said: many American museums are trying to open their collections to the public in new and untraditional ways, she said, a trend she calls the “distributed museum”, which started around 2014, at the same time as the rise of the tech “sharing economy”. The San Diego library’s customer experience is seamless: a cluster of sturdy plastic carts waits near the door, so that members can wheel them up and down the aisles, “grocery style”, as Priest put it, taking bats or bones or bobcats off the shelf and adding them to their cart. Priest readily identifies the predator mammals as the most coveted species: a large coyote is No 1, followed by bobcats and foxes, and then a stuffed sea otter reclining on her back with a sea urchin in her paws.
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