Beyond the display cases and exhibits of the KU Natural History Museum’s main floors lie about 1.5 million fish, reptiles and amphibians — all carefully preserved in glass jars that line the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

The animals are part of the museum’s ichthyology (fish) and herpetology (amphibians and reptiles) wet collections: animals stored in jars preserved in alcohol. The collection also includes some mammals, birds, crabs, snails and insects. Some of the specimens date back to the 1880s.

The museum houses more than 8 million specimens, but at any given time, less than one percent of them are on display. A lot of the remainder is kept in the wet collection, housed in a four-story annex behind the museum. Museum employees admit that many students probably don’t realize the collections exist.

Andrew Bentley, ichthyology collection manager at the museum, said the specimens come from KU students and staff researching in the field and members of the public. Researchers euthanize the animals and place them in formaldehyde, which hardens the body and stops the process of decomposition.

Once in the lab, specimens are tagged, photographed and logged into a database. Before being shelved, they are put in glass jars with a mix of 70 percent ethyl alcohol to ensure preservation. Bentley said the museum used about 10 55-gallon drums of the preservative each year. The alcohol preserves the specimens for upwards of hundreds of years. The museum has to have a special permit in order to buy and use the pure ethyl alcohol.

“You could drink it,” Bentley said. “You could literally take a tiny little bit and put it in punch and it would be like drinking alcohol.”

After working around the collection for ten years, Bentley said, he couldn’t even smell the sharp scent emitted by the alcohol.

Bentley said the collection was growing by about 5 to 10 percent each year and that there were about 750,000 fish from 70 countries housed in the collection, and 350,000 reptiles and amphibians.

Bentley said the job of a collection manager had become more involved in recent years.

“My job as collection manager used to be thought of as a glorified bottle shuffler,” Bentley said. “Essentially all you did was shuffle bottles around and fill them up with alcohol.”

He said now he and other collection managers were more focused on research and working with databases.

Bentley welcomes free tours of the collection to students, staff, school groups and the general public. He said the materials within the collection were being used for research all around the world.

“It functions very much as a book library,” Bentley said. “We get visitors coming into the collection and using material here. We also loan materials out to people. We’ll take the specimens out of the jars, wrap them in cheesecloth, wet them down, double seal them in plastic, stick them in a box and ship them out.”

Brian Oberheide, Paola junior and wet collection assistant, said the collection’s main function was to act as a research resource.

“They also allow us to compare specimens from the past with recent specimens, and specimens that have yet to be discovered,” Oberheide said.

Bentley said new species were constantly being discovered.

“People are finding specimens in our collection that were collected 30 years ago that turn out to be new species,” Bentley said.

Bentley said researchers were using data collected in the wet lab to create models to predict the distribution of species throughout time.

“The data now is becoming a lot more important than the species themselves,” Bentley said.

David McLeod, lecturer and doctoral student, said the specimens in the collection were important because the research had reached a global scale.

“Like seeing an original copy of a Shakespearean work or an ancient manuscript, I’m always mindful of the fact that there was someone hundreds of years ago collecting and preserving this animal that I’m now working with,” McLeod said. “Where else can you go and see global diversity in one room?”

— — Edited by Melissa Johnson