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Philadelphians reacted with outrage<\/a> when Drexel University<\/a> and the Academy of Natural Sciences announced the closing of its museum on the Ben Franklin Parkway earlier this month. <\/p>\n But the museum is only a part of what the academy does. And while most Philadelphians think of dinosaurs and dioramas, the main business of the academy \u2014 its \u201cbeating heart,\u201d as one board member calls it \u2014 will continue, even if it has often escaped the notice of the general public.<\/p>\n Housed backstage beyond the museum walls is one of the world\u2019s largest repositories of natural specimens: bird carcasses, fish, mollusks, minerals, and bones of various kinds \u2014 millions of them amassed over more than two centuries. <\/p>\n And now, amid reports<\/a> that the academy\u2019s building may be sold and the collection moved, all eyes are on the fate of this trove.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just the scope of the collection that\u2019s so important \u2014 19 million specimens representing every aspect of the natural world,\u201d says Robert McCracken Peck, curator of art and artifacts and senior fellow emeritus of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. \u201cThe collections are not only important because of their associations with historical figures like Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson. <\/p>\n \u201cBut these collections were made at specific times in history. We can never go back to collect more of these voucher specimens. They tell us how our world is changing.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is by definition irreplaceable.\u201d <\/p>\n Microalgae too numerous to count <\/p>\n Among its peers, the academy\u2019s group of species collections is one of the most significant in the world, and is perhaps unrivaled in certain areas of concentration and historical importance.<\/p>\n More than 220 plant specimens collected by Lewis and Clark on their landmark 1804-06 expedition between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean are housed at the academy. Among the institution\u2019s corresponding members over the years were Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, and Charles Darwin. The American Medical Association was founded here in 1847.<\/p>\n The plants and fungi collection holds 1.4 million specimens of algae, lichens, fungi, and slime molds and includes some of the oldest and most important plant collections in the Americas. The invertebrate paleontology collection is the oldest such collection in the United States.<\/p>\n The number of diatoms in that collection is unknown, says Laura Aycock, manager of the academy\u2019s hoard of the single-celled microalgae that are neither animals nor plants, though the academy has around 300,000 slides, with some slides containing upward of a hundred thousand diatoms.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to attempt to calculate that,\u201d Aycock said.<\/p>\n The diatoms captured at the academy \u2014 which go back to the 19th century and come from around the world \u2014 serve as a time capsule.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can actually look at water quality and monitor how it\u2019s changing and biodiversity of the diatoms looking at our slides,\u201d says Aycock. \u201cSo people will reach out wanting to see, \u2018Hey, can I see a snapshot of what this river looked like X many years ago?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The academy\u2019s collections are a magnet internationally, says Ted Daeschler, professor emeritus, curator, and chair of vertebrate zoology at the academy.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a stopping point for people studying a wide variety of different things,\u201d says Daeschler. \u201cEvery time I talk to any mollusk person in the world who\u2019s done research, they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh yeah, I\u2019ve been to the academy. I\u2019ve done research there.\u2019 Talk to anybody working on crickets and grasshoppers \u2014 \u2018Oh yeah, I\u2019ve been to the academy.\u2019 People working on Devonian fish, they all came through at one point or another.\u201d<\/p>\n The academy has seen some novelties over the years: an albacore tuna shipped to the institute from Ernest Hemingway in 1934, fingernail samples from now-retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer collected in 2010, and two red-eared sliders donated in 1977 by Sylvester Stallone as souvenirs from the original Rocky film.<\/p>\n Hemingway\u2019s tuna remains. But Breyer\u2019s fingernails were tested for stable isotopic composition of carbon and nitrogen to determine the justice\u2019s diet and then discarded, and the turtles Cuff and Link are no longer with us, a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n A key to the \u2018next pandemic\u2019?<\/p>\n If some of the collections work and research going on at the academy seems esoteric, there\u2019s no way of knowing what might become urgently relevant at some point. <\/p>\n \u201cWe all lived through a pandemic recently \u2014 pretty much hell on earth for most of us,\u201d says Jason D. Weckstein, curator of the academy\u2019s ornithology collection and professor at Drexel University College of Arts and Sciences. <\/p>\n \u201cUnderstanding the ecological interactions that lead to those kinds of events is part of this kind of research. So why are some parasites specific to some hosts, whereas other ones can jump between hosts easily, and there are ecological characteristics that allow that?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou just never know when something\u2019s going to happen in the world,\u201d says Weckstein, \u201cand then it turns out there\u2019s something here. We have tissue samples from all over the world. It\u2019s possible we could discover something in those samples that is important for understanding the next pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s possible, in part, because in the future, specimens might be tested for characteristics whose existence is beyond our current base of knowledge. <\/p>\n Paul Callomon, the academy\u2019s collection manager for malacology and general invertebrates, says that when the first snails entered the academy, \u201cWe had no idea what an isotope was. Nobody knew anything about that. But we had an unshakable faith that if we preserve and stabilize these things, as time goes on, they\u2019ll become more important to more people. And so it\u2019s turned out to be. And now of course, with climate change and with this enormous Anthropocene influence on the natural system, the number of ways in which our specimens are going to help tell that story is enormous.\u201d<\/p>\n Each specimen functions as an irreplaceable snapshot in time. Organic materials in their environment are continually breaking down and becoming something else. But when a bird or fish is plucked from its environment, it becomes a permanent record \u2014 of itself, but also of the world as it existed at that particular moment.<\/p>\n Biological specimens are often called upon to help solve certain mysteries.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are examples in the world generally of new pharmaceutical products being developed from the study of mollusks and their venoms,\u201d says Callomon, \u201cor closer to the academy, we provided shells that were material evidence in the lawsuit against BP for the gulf [Deepwater] Horizon oil spill \u2014 historical specimens that proved there was oil in the gulf\u2019s waters before any drilling started, but that it was of a very low level.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a bigger role now for the academy\u2019s species collection to play, Callomon says.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real world is on fire. And the real natural world, the natural ecosystem that sustains all life on Earth, is undergoing enormous changes at the moment. And the only place that you can find material evidence for what it was like before that started, or what it was like at an earlier stage of that process, is natural history collections, and they are mostly housed in museums.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Profound concern\u2019<\/p>\n Curators and scientists say that as the academy has arrived at a vulnerable juncture, its collections and research are more critical than ever given the march of climate change, microplastics contamination, biodiversity loss, and other crises.<\/p>\n The scientific powerhouse\u2019s own future is a question mark at the moment. Drexel is facing deficits and a challenging enrollment environment, and, in a cost-cutting move a decade and a half after a partial merger of Drexel and the academy, the two groups announced last week that the academy museum will end its nearly two-century run at the end of the month.<\/p>\n