Skinning deceased animals and gluing plants: Specimen preparation on display at the Bell Museum

Have you ever wanted to watch a biology student slice open a deceased otter and yank its tailbone out from a knot of yellow fat?

Or a curator swirl the defrosted remains of a Mexican mouse in water, then skin it and remove its rotting organs?

Or a researcher demonstrate how two peregrine falcons with sunken eyes came to their end?

This week, the Bell Museum in St. Paul is hosting its annual series where curators, students, and lab specialists invite the public to see how they preserve plants and animals for museum collections and research.

It’s a graphic mashup of animal biology, taxidermy and forensic science. If animal entrails make you queasy, you can learn about plant specimens — and even prepare your own flower specimen on pH-neutral paper — in the indoor foyer area of the museum.

On Tuesday, the expedition opened with dissection of an otter, sending wafts of fishy odors onto the August breeze. More specimens on the table under the big tent this week include a swan, a groundhog and a porcupine. From Thursday to Saturday, the plant presentation will be replaced with a fish exhibition.

Many specimens used in the public demonstrations are donated through the Salvage Wildlife project that recovers samples of deceased birds and mammals across Minnesota, said Keith Barker, curator of genetic resources at the Bell Museum.

A dissection can go two ways. The first method, called a round skin preparation, is done by taking out the musculature, organs, and most of the skeleton from the animal, leaving skin and a few supporting bones — including part of the skull, tips of wings, and feet bones.

The animal is then stuffed with cotton and supported by wooden dowels in a pose that will allow researchers to easily examine its parts in the future. Scientists may brush back and moisten the specimen’s feathers to lay them on the skin realistically.

“Those kinds of skins that we prepare last centuries if they’re properly cared for in a controlled environment where they’re protected from insect infestation,” said Barker.

For specimens that have dried out or are too crusty for round skin preparation to be valuable, researchers may choose to scrape all skin and meat from the specimen’s bones, keeping the entire skeleton instead.

Despite the inevitable gore, the Bell Expeditions are kid-friendly. Tuesday’s session entertained a host of first- and second-graders attending summer camp at the museum’s planetarium, who listened to researchers speak about animal anatomy.

With free admission, the Bell Expeditions at the Bell Museum, 2088 W. Larpenteur Av., in St. Paul, continues through Saturday, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.