Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994                   TAG: 9402170111
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 4   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium

WHY A BIGGER BUILDING? FOR THE DEAD RACCOON, AMONG OTHER THINGS

A dead racoon.

"It had a little note on it that said, `Do you want this? Yes or No,'" Wells remembers.

Not that this was especially unusual.

"We're almost the dead-animal collection center - you go to the SPCA if you have stray cats in the back yard; if you have dead animals, they always call us," says Wells, one of four people who help construct the museum's exhibits.

How often do they call? Within one two-week span last year, some 45 dead songbirds were deposited at the museum - they are being freeze-dried, taxidermy-style, so they can be added to the museum's collections.

There are at least two cardinal rules in building up a museum's collections, says exhibits manager Karen Sickles. Don't kill anything, and don't turn anything down.

"We get a lot from private donors who call up and say, `I'm dying, take my butterfly collection.' We may not use it for 20 to 30 years, but you never turn anything down.

"You'd be surprised how many people find a bird that's flown into a window, so they bring the bird here. Or they find huge bugs in the swimming pool and bring them to Dr. [Richard] Hoffman [the museum's insect expert] to identify. They're gross, but they add to the collection."

And that's what makes this particular raccoon so noteworthy.

This was just one roadkill too many.

"I had to put a stop to it," Wells says.

The museum, Sickles explains, simply has no more room to store any more stuffed animals. Already, the gymnasium in the old schoolhouse that serves as the museum's headquarters is packed - there's so little floor space left, the museum's stuffed moose is balanced on the ledge above the door.

Meanwhile, the rock and fossil collection spills out into the hallway (there are some shells sitting precariously on a radiator).

And this is only pof the museum's collections, which now number some 800,000 items. A few years ago, the company that once looked into mining uranium in Pittsylvania County donated 70 miles' worth of core samples to the museum - an invaluable source of research material. They are locked away in a warehouse somewhere near Danville.

So why does the museum need so much stuff in storage? Because, museum officials say, you never know when you might need it, if not for an exhibit, then for research.

"An art museum may only have 5 to 10 percent of its collections on exhibit," says collections manager Paisley Cato. "Natural history museums rarely have more than 1 percent. There's an awful lot of stuff that, to the average eye, is not very pretty; but, to a scientist's eye, is."

Like dead raccoons.