The Quirk of Collecting That Skews Museum Specimens Male

When I think of museum specimens, I think of the American Museum of Natural History, where dim hallways smell like time passing and wolves bound over moonlit snow. I think of the delicious thrill of comparing my size with a lion’s and of the difficulty I have remembering, sometimes, that these creatures would be infinitely more impressive if they weren’t behind glass and dead. That these dioramas are a shadow of the natural world.

The animals in these displays represent a tiny fraction of the animals that natural-history museums keep in their collections. , who oversees collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, estimates that only about 1 to 5 percent of a museum’s catalog is typically on display; most specimens in its research collections are preserved and in its stores, and about 280,000 of species that still roam the planet. This bounty, in turn, represents only a fraction of the Earth’s multiplicity of species.