Back to the Burke Museum

We met yesterday at the Burke Natural History Museum on the campus of the University of Washington.  There are three floors of artifacts and exhibits. 

I spent some time on the ground floor with Indigenous artifacts.  I drew in pencil in the gallery and then went out to a lobby table to ink and watercolor.

I later found the prep room for mounts interesting.  Friends I knew in college were biology grad students who did mounts for our university museum.  I've seen the process up close.

This is the skull and front leg of a Grizzly Bear from Woodland Park Zoo.  It will eventually be cleaned by the museum's colony of beetles.  The braincase was removed to allow sampling of brain tissue.  "This is typical for zoo animals who go through a necropsy to determine cause of death". 

That's the tail of a whale skeleton in the background.