Excuse me – do you have sawfish saws?

Yes, what have I been doing with the sawfish saws and why am I stealing bits of sturgeon from museums? One of the projects I’m working on had me contacting all sorts of museums across the country saying: Excuse me sir, do you have sawfishsaws? May I have part of your sawfishsaw? I’m looking to isolate DNA from sawfishsaws.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t using the term sawfishsaw quite that frequently (the scientific word is rostrum) – but I was getting bits and pieces of sawfishsaws mailed to me. The Smithsonian Museum in DC and a museum in Philly told me that they had quite a few sawfishsaws and that it would be best if I could come by to sample them myself. Go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian (or any museum for that matter)? Yes please!
And so I packed my hacksaw to go saw sawfishsaws (yes this is the new version of she sells seashells at the seashore). As I was packing my bag I thought to myself, Shannon, it’s a good thing you’re not flying anywhere. There’s no way you’d get through security carrying a saw, a bottle of ethanol, vials, a lighter, razorblades and a serrated knife. A couple of people were a bit confused when I told them I was off to get pieces of sawfishsaws (I can’t help it, I like that word) from museums. They envisioned me walking in the front door checking out the museum exhibitions and taking parts of the saws on display. Okay, I might have given them a little bit of incentive to believe that :-)
The ichthyology (Fish) department in the Smithsonian Museum is usually in part of the building that is currently being renovated so I ended up in the attic with big freight boxes (the wooden kind, that kinda make me think if I opened the wrong one some archaic dinosaur would march out) and rows and rows of box-type drawer thingies. You unclip a huge board in the front which then reveals shelves of specimen with little tags on them (some of them a hundred years old or so!) about where they came from and what they are.

I was sawing off part of a rostrum that was probably about a foot long and joking around with the curator about how the fact that the tag said that this fish had been speared implied getting pretty close to it. We discussed whether or not that was a good idea. I quickly made up my mind when the next saw we pulled out was only a bit shorter than I am tall!
In Philly I did get to see the cellar which is where I found the big sturgeon (so no, on that picture I’m not stealing part of a sturgeon on exhibition!). I spent most of my time a few floors up in a room that not only housed (shelved) the dried specimen but also entire fishes crammed into jars (kinda spooky), or larger ones stacked in tanks. The shelves where the ones where they have big “steering” wheels that you can use to move them closer and farther apart so you can get at the shelves in between. As the curator climbed up one of the shelves the entire shelves starting rolling slowly, slowly, slowly closing the gap.
I quickly reached out my hand to stop the movement, but couldn’t help but wonder how many curators go missing every year in shelf rolling incidents…