Wild Things : Skeletons in the Closets

You can find lions. And tigers. And bears. Not to mention dinosaurs, totem poles, scimitars, kayaks, a diamond that once belonged to Catherine the Great, a walk-in freezer full of animal pelts, Charlie Chaplin’s overalls from “Modern Times,” turn-of-the century wedding invitations and the contents of a 1950s pharmacy.

These are among the 15 million specimens and artifacts filling the vaults of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, but chances are you’ll never see them. The museum devotes nearly two-thirds of its space to storage and can only display a fraction of what it owns. “There’s a popular public misconception that everything is collected for display,” says history curator Janet Fireman. “Some things we collect for preservation, some for the sake of study, for research.”

This makes curators like Fireman among the most esoteric landlords in Los Angeles. Down the hall from her office, she unlocks the weapons vault, a 25,000-piece storeroom that could double as an armory. Crossbows, battle axes and cavalry swords line the walls. Pole arms are stacked in one corner. The middle rows feature firearms, including an African musket inlaid with a kaleidoscope of beads and a goofy five-barreled pistol that seems more at home in a cartoon than a duel.

Unlike New York’s American Museum of Natural History, which houses its entire collection of 30 million artifacts within the museum’s 23 buildings, the L.A. museum operates four off-site warehouses. Responding to the county’s fiscal crisis, Supervisor Gloria Molina last year proposed selling the contents of the warehouses to save $1.2 million in operating costs. But an independent audit released in March recommended against the sale, declaring the museum’s holdings to be “among the best curated and cared for in the world.”

“It’s like a big library,” says marine mammal curator John Heyning as he wheels his truck up to a warehouse in Vernon that contains 3,000 mammal bones, organs and tissue samples from all over the world. The fetid odor of decomposed carcasses permeates the building. “We like to think of it as a rich, organic bouquet,” says Heyning as he gingerly walks among a who’s who of whale bones scattered on the floor. An ivory tusk spirals from the unicorn-like snout of a narwhal, and the harpooned skull of a bowhead whale lies near the largest specimen in the warehouse: a 19-foot, 3-ton blue whale skull recovered near San Pedro.

Like minor league baseball players biding their time, some of the stored relics do make the Show. The current marine mammal exhibit, “Masters of the Ocean Realm,” which will soon tour the country, was born in the Vernon warehouse.