New digs are planned for the skeletons in Denver’s closet.
Thousands of bones — and hundreds of thousands of other specimens and artifacts — for decades have sat crammed into 49 storage spaces at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Sometimes referred to as a “library of life,” the 109-year-old institution functions even more as an archive than an exhibit space. One percent of its 1.4 million-piece collection is on public view. The rest is stored wherever staffers find space.
That means a team of mostly male geologists has to traipse through a ladies rest room to reach a corridor where they store some of the planet’s rarest rocks.
It means the bones of a 66 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex sit unprotected on movable shelves where only a few curators get to see them.
It means the roof leaks into a room storing a stuffed black bear and a hand tool carved by Homo erectus.
And it means glass cases holding tens of thousands of dung beetle and camel spider specimens vibrate from the noisy IMAX overhead. The collection gets rattled whenever dinosaurs roar or space shuttles launch in the films played hourly in the theater.
“They have more the look of somebody’s basement than the look of a treasury,” chief curator Kirk Johnson says of the labyrinthine spaces holding the priceless stash.
Deep in the museum, behind the curved walls of a diorama depicting an elephant seal habitat, the staff stores stacks of books on topics ranging from African reptiles to ethical issues in zoology. Two retired librarians, Helen Petterson and Peg O’Connor, have volunteered there for more than 20 years trying to organize them.
“One day, hopefully in this lifetime, we’ll finally get these books in order,” Petterson says.
That day will come sooner than expected after last week’s announcement of an $8 million gift by the Morgridge Family Foundation to help build a three-story addition for science and technology education. Beneath that will be 60,000 square feet of storage space — enough to house most of the museum’s collection.
The addition will free up space for more exhibit halls.
It will secure precious gems and other valuables such as a collection of metal peace tokens handed to American Indians during colonization. It will help avoid keeping geological samples in, say, Budweiser boxes.
Thousands of furs currently wadded up on shelves will be laid flat and separated.
The bodies of now-extinct passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers will no longer be packed as if into sock drawers.
And the brittle bones of dinosaurs and mastodons will be stored to ensure generations of study.
It will take at least two years to move the collection once the space opens, as scheduled, in 2013.
“It’s a big job,” says collections manager Jeff Stephenson. “But we work in the public trust. That means we need to keep these specimens in a condition that they’ll be around in 3,000 years.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
