Museum beetles, goddam butterflies.
A year's worth of being turned down for work could get a guy down. But not me! An obvious solution presented itself: to offer my services for free. Hooray! Not great for finances, but who needs money in this bright new age of pennilessness and social collapse?
So I approached the nearby-yet-two-hour-bus-ride-away Maidstone Museum unsolicited and unqualified to provide my assistance. Okay, not entirely true, an old friend of mine from primary school works with them. Still, turning up with my home-printed application and expecting to start then and there felt like it, but start I did.
Renovating the dinosaur! The words stirred in me the young nerdy kid who loved the Natural History Museum more than marshmallows and swimming pool water jets. Working on a model dinosaur at a museum... the very idea was unreal. Sure, the animatronics broke down years ago, but so what? It's a freakin' dinosaur. No doubt the science behind the reconstruction would be decades behind, but the unbridled pedant within was strangely quiet, and I considered it best not to disturb the beast. I wondered what the dinosaur could be. Dromaeosaurus? Psittacosaurus? Surely not Tyrannosaurus? Although I had visited this museum many years ago, my memories of its small dinosaur exhibit was oddly missing, replaced entirely by the dead Egyptian princess laid out for all to see.
The dinosaur in question turned out to be the Chinese Gasosaurus constructus, a name which means "gas company lizard", and I'm not even kidding. A middle-sized theropod from the mid-Jurassic. The model itself had been melting out of boredom, and while most of the repairs had been completed, the ochre-and-black dinosaur needed repainting. The colours we had available were black, red, gooseberry fool and magnolia. As with all supplies used by a modern, well-funded museum, they had been retrieved from the local dump. Also, I wasn't allowed to actually paint it, partly because long-standing volunteer Terrance was well into it, but mostly because I was not yet an official volunteer, thus hadn't received the necessary training in technical stepladder and paintbrush safety. This meant that if I poked my own eye out with their paintbrush I would be within my rights to sue this underfunded nucleus of science and history unprotected by insurance. Modern world 1, dinosaurs 0.
Still, my friend and I did our best to direct the painting with out ideas, as academia and pragmatism collided spectacularly. In the days since, a rich seam of green and shit-brown paint was uncovered at the dump, which helps a bit. I've spent some hours now sipping hot chocolate, bouncing pattern ideas off of the Lady of the House, Ta-Kesh, who is not very insightful.
Before long I found myself assisting the museum with truly essential work in the rooms hidden from the general public. The Insect room, a working attic filled with drawers and drawers of dead insects, the most wonderful specimens you could ever see, each meticulously presented and labelled. The Death's Head Hawk Moth? Huge. And emblazoned with a white skull on its black thorax. Truly has heavy metal touched every corner of the world with its calming chords and soothing insignias.
What I was needed to do was catalogue the collection, starting with the Indian butterflies. These butterflies were originally captured and preserved by their discoverers, mostly colonial officers, but they had never been catalogued. Some boxes had never even been opened! The museum has put off this job for 130 years, specifically so that I can do it. I have to record the number of each species and reference the species in the describing texts, which are just as old as the butterflies. Of course, even though the butterflies were caught and named by the authors of these volumes, few of the names are the same in both book and drawer. I'm well aware of the problem of synonyms and reclassification, but I never thought I'd find myself roped into sorting it out. As Terrance says: I'm making history, literally, by doing this stuff for the first time. Doing it right and recording the discrepancies is essential. Nevertheless, I'm quite sure that in another century some poor bastard is going to be going through my yellowed lists, cross referencing some arcane tome and cursing my name just as I do those of Doubleday, Westwood, Moore, and bloody Swin. I may lose my mind before this work is completed.
Deep down I new I would encounter these beasts sooner or later. But my money was on later. I've read about them, heard about them. Museum guys speak of them in hushed, anguished tones. The scourge of the museum beetle.
These bastards find their way into every drawer eventually, just as soon as the last glittering, toxic crystal has evaporated (and been sucked into my lungs, no less). There they lay their eggs, and their larvae munch through specimens older than my great great grandfathers. You can see the trail of destruction: holes in the insects, dust on the polyethylene backing foam. And on occasion, a tiny speckled beetle scurrying about oh-so-proud. I wanted to know exactly what kind of beetle they were, but identifying the species was surprisingly difficult. I was surprised: here was a species that goes out of its way to come to those who preserve insects, yet they didn't seem to be represented.
I suppose most insect wardens are protective and pragmatic enough simply to eliminate them whenever they rear their ugly heads, with only a few sufficiently curious to capture, relax and pin them to labelled boards. I hypothesis the existance of a third type of entomologist, with just the right mix of pragmatism, curiosity, vengefulness and crazy that they simply pin and label the live beetles wherever and whenever they find them, leaving museum beetle specimens in drawers marked for entirely different insects. These people are quite probably potentially dangerous with the capacity for super-villainy, fortunately their very nature lends itself to leaving conspicuous evidence and thus should be easy to identify. I shall have to be careful not to make that mistake myself.
It's funny, they go to such lengths to keep them out. The windows are taped shut and covered with a fine mesh. Each drawer is littered with naphthalene crystals, making the whole room stink of it (and could potentially cause all kinds of health problems down the line: I endure for science!). Yet just around the corner is a hidden balcony overlooking a corner of the archaeology section, which is exposed by way of window and museum front door to the outside world.
I... I should probably mention this at some point.
