London's other collection of crown jewels resides in the recently opened Darwin Center of the Natural History Museum.
This biodiversity treasure vault contains more than 22 million creatures—the kind that can be preserved in alcohol, including fish, plankton, seaweed, corals, giant squid, frogs, and sharks. The so-called Spirit Collection houses samples of all these creatures so that scientists can classify them and understand the evolutionary relationships among them—a science called systematics.
Tall cylindrical jars hold a moray eel from the Galapagos Archipelago, a parrotfish from Tahiti and a South American swift lizard, all collected by Charles Darwin on his voyage of the HMS Beagle.
A more recent contribution is a deep-sea oarfish—it can grow up to 24 feet (7 meters) in length, the longest bony fish in the world—that washed up on a beach in England. A man walking his dog discovered the oarfish, cut it up with a saw, and delivered it to the center.
"It's so rare—he did the right thing cutting it up and bringing it right to us," said Oliver Crimmen, the curator of fishes.
"The job of finding new things is far from done," said Crimmen. "There is a misconception that we know what's out there, but the more we look, the more we find. For that reason we need to keep looking."
Pickled Creatures
The 22 million specimens in the Spirit Collection are stored at 13° Centigrade (55° Fahrenheit) in 3,500 steel gray cabinets on seven dim fluorescent-lit floors. The 25,000 shelves in these cabinets stretch more then 17 miles (27 kilometers). "You have to like walking to be a curator here," said Crimmen. Crimmen has held his position for 29 years.
The core of the Spirit Collection is the Tank Room. Here the shelves hold glass jars of every shape and size—one containing three pickled heads of orange roughy; another, the head of a porbeagle shark; and another, a pygmy hippo.
Huge stainless steel tanks hold larger species: a swordfish, a loggerhead turtle, a massive arapaima originally from the Amazon, and a Komodo dragon.
Among the center's prizes are what the researchers call "type" specimens, the first samples of a species to be named and described. The Spirit Collection contains 170,000 type specimens. Often the original notes and manuscripts of the discoverer accompany the donations.
"If you think you have discovered a new species, then you come here to compare it to other related specimens," Crimmen said. "That way, all (scientists) are referred to a single standard. Through these comparisons, scientists discover new species all the time."
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