CINCINNATI — Heather Farrington sorts butterfly skins, placing them in envelopes and then into multiple boxes. A co-worker teases her.
“Weren’t you doing that last week, too?”
Farrington laughs. Multiple dead birds are pinned to a table behind her.
“I’m almost like a librarian for animals,” Farrington said.
She's the zoology curator for the Cincinnati Museum Center. That means at a nondescript building on Fifth Street, Farrington is in charge of more than 200,000 animal specimens — from taxidermy to tissue samples and DNA in test tubes stored at 80 degrees below zero.
“This is basically a way for us to document biodiversity around the world — through history,” Farrington said.
See how the Museum Center solved a 180-year-old mystery:
Farrington thinks all the animals here are special. But one of them stands out: an extinct bird known as the great auk. This flightless bird looks a lot like a penguin, and it went extinct more than 180 years ago.
But here at its collections building, the museum center keeps one in a cabinet at the front of the room. Farrington calls this their priority cabinet, the one they'd try to get to first if there were a fire.
“She’s been with us since 1974,” Farrington said of the great auk, which was stuffed years ago for display. “At the time, we had no idea that it was potentially the last one.”
The bird was killed in 1844 off the coast of Iceland, hunted for its meat and feathers. It became so rare, there was an expedition to kill the last remaining birds. In 2017, researchers in Belgium discovered the last known male auk.
And their search for its female counterpart led them to Cincinnati, where there's an entire room with jars full of animal parts.
Makayla Dean, the zoology collections manager, showed me a bird that was closest to the great auk. Then, she showed me a folder of information they’ve collected about the bird.
“My job is making sure that an animal’s death has meaning,” Dean said.
The team did X-rays of the auk, including its feet — which became the source of a DNA sample tested against the male discovered in Belgium.
It was a match.
“We can’t go out in the wild and see this bird anymore — it’s gone,” Farrington said. “Our job is to maintain this for as long as possible. And hopefully, we can prevent that from happening again to similar species.”
