Most of the Oregon State University specimens belong to two groups of snakes; garter snakes and water snakes; and two groups of salamanders comprised of woodland and dusky salamanders.
The University of Michigan received thousands of reptiles and amphibians, including some 30,000 snakes, from Oregon State University, as OSU felt that the museum at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology could “maximize the scientific potential” of the collection. The specimens are preserved in glass jars, and with their addition, the University of Michigan now has the largest collection of snakes in the world, curators with the museum said in a statement released by the university.
The collection was sent to the U-M in more than 100 boxes last month. They included snakes, lizards, salamanders, newts, frogs, and turtles. The collections are housed at the U-M Research Center, which measures 153,375 square feet, making it one of the largest facilities of its type at any U.S. facility.
“The UMMZ is one of the only museums capable of supporting a collection of this size,” evolutionary biologist Dan Rabosky, a curator at the U-M Museum of Zoology, said of the approximately 45,000 specimens from Oregon State University. “It takes lots of resources to integrate and maintain collections like this and to make the specimens and their data available to the global research community.”
Jars of snakes preserved in alcohol at the University of Michigan’s Research Museums Center. U-M recently acquired tens of thousands of additional reptile and amphibian specimens—including roughly 30,000 snakes—and now hosts the world’s largest research collection of snakes, according to museum curators. Photo credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.
“In that sense, the UMMZ is more like a giant scientific instrument—such as a telescope or a particle accelerator—than the stereotypical storage room that people sometimes associate with museums. It’s an active, vibrant place where people are asking all sorts of big questions about life on Earth and how we are impacting it.”
Most of the Oregon State University specimens belong to two groups of snakes; garter snakes and water snakes; and two groups of salamanders comprised of woodland and dusky salamanders. More than 30,000 tissue samples are also part of the newly acquired collection. The collection represents the lifetime work of Stevan Arnold and Lynne Houck, two retired professors at OSU.
“Many thousands of these specimens are from sets of related individuals—i.e., parents and offspring,” Rabosky said. “This is very, very rare for museum collections and is incredibly powerful for research because it lets researchers ask questions about genetics that would otherwise not be possible.
“This is scientific information that is not replicated anywhere else on Earth, and”WW. It’s an amazing opportunity and responsibility for us.”
