The Fascinating Treasures Locked Away at California’s Best Science Museum

New Zealand’s ever so charming, yet critically endangered kakapo. Just over 100 survive in the wild. It’s in fact a kind of parrot, the world's heaviest, having long ago given up flight. There was never really a need to fly, because before humans arrived, the only predatory land mammals in New Zealand were bats. That changed, though, when Maori settlers brought along egg-loving rats in the 13th century, which have devastated kakapo populations. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

New Zealand’s ever so charming, yet critically endangered kakapo. Just over 100 survive in the wild. It’s in fact a kind of parrot, the world's heaviest, having long ago given up flight. There was never really a need to fly, because before humans arrived, the only predatory land mammals in New Zealand were bats. That changed, though, when Maori settlers brought along egg-loving rats in the 13th century, which have devastated kakapo populations.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The Guadalupe Island storm-petrel is extinct, having fallen victim to invasive species introduced by humans. It hasn’t been seen since 1912. Interestingly, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed almost the entirety of the California Academy of Sciences’ collections, these two were rescued and were the first specimens entered into the new ornithology catalog. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The Guadalupe Island storm-petrel is extinct, having fallen victim to invasive species introduced by humans. It hasn’t been seen since 1912. Interestingly, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed almost the entirety of the California Academy of Sciences’ collections, these two were rescued and were the first specimens entered into the new ornithology catalog.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

It’s hard to describe the terror of being in the presence of an elephant bird egg. Not that a giant bird would smash out of it and assault you—the 10-foot-tall birds were driven to extinction just centuries ago by humans—but the sheer rarity of it is horrifying. There are only a handful of these eggs left in the world, with one going at auction last year for over $100,000 dollars. I almost had an aneurism just watching someone handle this one. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

It’s hard to describe the terror of being in the presence of an elephant bird egg. Not that a giant bird would smash out of it and assault you—the 10-foot-tall birds were driven to extinction just centuries ago by humans—but the sheer rarity of it is horrifying. There are only a handful of these eggs left in the world, with one going at auction last year for over $100,000 dollars. I almost had an aneurism just watching someone handle this one.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

In 2011, the Academy's Moe Flannery hurried just north of San Francisco to observe a dead orca that’d washed ashore. This is its skeleton. It was probably brutalized by another orca, its broken ribs piercing its lungs. Strangely, its teeth had been worn down to nubs, likely due to a diet of sharks with super-rough skin. At the other end of it are tiny vestigial limbs, a reminder that whales and dolphins evolved from land mammals. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

In 2011, the Academy's Moe Flannery hurried just north of San Francisco to observe a dead orca that’d washed ashore. This is its skeleton. It was probably brutalized by another orca, its broken ribs piercing its lungs. Strangely, its teeth had been worn down to nubs, likely due to a diet of sharks with super-rough skin. At the other end of it are tiny vestigial limbs, a reminder that whales and dolphins evolved from land mammals.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The skull of the Caribbean monk seal. Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1494, the seal was last seen in 1952 on small coral islands between Jamaica and Honduras. The archipelagos that it frequented had no large carnivores, so when humans arrived it didn’t feel in the least bit threatened—a sad and frequent happenstance in island habitats. The seal is now officially extinct, though unconfirmed sightings have trickled in over the years. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The skull of the Caribbean monk seal. Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1494, the seal was last seen in 1952 on small coral islands between Jamaica and Honduras. The archipelagos that it frequented had no large carnivores, so when humans arrived it didn’t feel in the least bit threatened—a sad and frequent happenstance in island habitats. The seal is now officially extinct, though unconfirmed sightings have trickled in over the years.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

San Francisco may have its own flock of parrots (how they got here is a matter of some debate), but throughout the eastern US there used to soar the beautiful Carolina parakeet, and it actually belonged here. It was North America’s only parrot—until they went extinct in the 1920s. Deforestation had taken its toll, combined with hunting by overzealous farmers defending their fruit crops. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

San Francisco may have its own flock of parrots (how they got here is a matter of some debate), but throughout the eastern US there used to soar the beautiful Carolina parakeet, and it actually belonged here. It was North America’s only parrot—until they went extinct in the 1920s. Deforestation had taken its toll, combined with hunting by overzealous farmers defending their fruit crops.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Ah, the incredible lyrebird, my favorite avian of all. You won’t hear it from this specimen, but the lyrebird sings the most astounding song on Earth. It can perfectly imitate—perfectly—a wide array of both natural and man-made sounds, from other birds and car alarms to cameras and chainsaws. Watch and listen for yourself here. It’s real. I promise. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Ah, the incredible lyrebird, my favorite avian of all. You won’t hear it from this specimen, but the lyrebird sings the most astounding song on Earth. It can perfectly imitate—perfectly—a wide array of both natural and man-made sounds, from other birds and car alarms to cameras and chainsaws. Watch and listen for yourself here. It’s real. I promise.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Native San Franciscans largely appreciate the California Academy of Sciences as somewhere you can go on Thursday nights and get drunk among circling sharks and taxidermic lions and even an albino alligator named Claude, who may or may not be French. But behind the scenes of this premier scientific institution, which combines an aquarium, a planetarium, and giant bubble with a rainforest inside, are marvels few people beyond scientists see: 46 million creatures, all preserved and squirreled away (sorry about that) in row after row of cabinets, 56,000 square feet in all. From tiny beetles to hulking dino bones, it’s an indispensable catalog of nature’s awesome biodiversity.

Ace WIRED photographer Josh Valcarcel and I spent some 15 hours touring the stacks with the Academy’s many curators, and during the next three weeks we’ll bring you the most amazing critters we found. First up are these remarkable mammals and birds, many of them extinct or extremely threatened, specially selected for us by collections manager Moe Flannery.

Now, given the grief I got on Twitter when I tweeted photos of creatures during our visits, I’d like to take this opportunity to explain why such collections are absolutely essential to science. Sure, it’s hard to appreciate preserved specimens as much as living ones, but trust me on this: Scientists aren’t going out and indiscriminately murdering things they happen upon. And many of these creatures are sent to the Academy by regular folk who find them dead, or come from the confiscation of smuggled specimens like shells and corals.

The specimens provide invaluable information to scientists that you just can’t get from photos or written descriptions when observing them firsthand in the wild. Say you’ve found yourself what you think is a new species. To help confirm that, you can go back into the collections and run gene tests on similar preserved critters. And with a lineage of a particular preserved species at our disposal, we can show how it’s evolving before our eyes (yes, observable evolution can happen that quickly).

There’s no evidence to suggest that overzealous scientists have ever collected a species into extinction. What does tend to do that though is global warming, overhunting, destruction of habitat, etc. (I could go on but I’m depressing myself). Appropriately enough, comparing new and old specimens of threatened species can actually help inform how we go about conserving them to keep them from extinction.

Preserving specimens also means that when our stupidity drives a species to extinction, we can at least retain a material reminder of its time on Earth. It’s hard to explain the feeling of even seeing an enormous egg of an extinct elephant bird, much less touching it. So with any luck, that egg will be locked up safe and sound at the California Academy of Sciences for generations to come, a reminder not just of our negative impacts on Earth, but of our foresight in remembering lost species as best we can.