Burke Museum shows off mammals

Exhibit No. 35526 was a Virginia opossum that had just given birth.

But as the tag attached to her with a string stated tersely, she met her end on the Preston-Fall City Road in 1987: "Road kill."

So goes one of the actual, individual stories behind the mammal exhibits at the University of Washington's Burke Museum. The museum's third annual "Meet the Mammals!" event Saturday allowed some 700 visitors to learn some of those stories.

The museum has 54,000 mammal specimens, and, as with all museums, only a small percentage are exhibited.

But once a year, exhibit No. 35526 and dozens of others get taken out of boxes, cases and trays.

The mother opossum had been stuffed with cotton, her tail straightened out with wire, her front and back legs stretched out.

These exhibits are not taxidermy work, with glass eyes and the animals mounted into some kind of pose.

"These are 'museum skins,' " said Jim Kenagy, the museum's mammal curator. The animals are made to be handled by researchers and students.

Kenagy, 63, retired this year after three decades as a UW biology professor. He does the curating as volunteer work.

He is quite passionate about the museum's mammals.

"There is more to mammals than cows and sheep and horses," he said.

When he talks mammals, he talks excitedly about their incredible variety — the koalas, the armadillos, the kangaroo rats found right in Walla Walla, with their big rodent feet and long tails. Mammals!

Kenagy had a story to go with every exhibit.

The museum has the skulls of six sperm whales as well as a whole bunch of partial sperm-whale skeletons. Five of the skulls are kept at an off-site facility, given that they are each 8 feet long.

At the museum, kids can ogle the skeletons and can only imagine where the whales came from.

The whales came from a mass stranding of 41 of the mammals in 1979 in Florence, Ore.

A Tacoma surgeon, Murray Johnson, with an avid interest in mammalogy, took it upon himself to have the Burke Museum get the skeletal remains, Kenagy said.

"It was an engineering operation, salvaging all those body parts," he said.

He said the whales ended up being trucked to land in Graham in Pierce County, near an industrial plant that made animal food. The plant had the large steam containers necessary to strip the bones bare.

The visitors on Saturday inevitably said they were happy to have stopped by.

There was John Monger, 31, a mortgage broker, who had told Stephanie Joyce, also 31, an office administrator, that he was taking her on "a surprise date."

Monger admitted that if the Huskies were any kind of decent football team, that surprise date would have meant watching the Apple Cup on TV.

Instead, Monger went online and started to figure some kind of cool event. There it was: "Meet the Mammals!" at only $8 general admission.

He had guessed right.

"It's fascinating," Joyce said. "Like how the Arctic fox changes colors."

She was referring to seeing side-by-side the museum skins of a pure white Arctic fox in wintertime — so his fur would blend in with the snow — and that of an Arctic fox in its summer brown fur.

There is a permanent exhibit at the museum that doesn't have a tag with a string on its display.

It just has a sign that says, "Sea-Tac Sloth."

It is a giant ground sloth, a 12-foot skeleton intact because it was preserved in a peat bog. It was found in 1961 while work was being done at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

The sloth is about 12,000 years old and has a huge head and looks scary. But it was a vegetarian.

The visitors Saturday would stop and stare at the skeleton and take pictures and maybe imagine a little bit.

Twelve-foot sloths peacefully eating tree leaves, where now there are now industrial parks and shopping malls.

Sometimes, maybe, change is not so good.

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com