What Does The Future of Natural History Museums Look Like?
David Grimaldi stops briefly before a gleaming white cabinet, among lots organized in long rows in a sporadic, high-ceilinged space on the very first flooring of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. With care, Grimaldi pulls a glass-topped box from its rack, exposing row upon row of jewel-bright butterflies pinned to a support board, their yellow and aquamarine colors little dimmed by age. The odor of mothballs wafts from the interior, the ghost of the paradichlorobenzene utilized years ago to keep beetles and other bugs far from the valuable collection."Our collection of butterflies is most likely the best-organized worldwide," states Grimaldi, an entomologist and manager of invertebrate zoology at the AMNH.That's no mean task, thinking about that some 1.3 million bu...
