48 Museum Employees Share The Coolest Facts And Experiences From Their Career

Museum employee here - boxes of fossil fragments were stored under the University of Oklahoma football stadium for over 50 years before someone looked at them. They ended up being the skull of Pentaceratops, the largest skull of a land-living animal ever found.

The Earth Globe and Moon wall display at the Clark Planetarium were hand-painted in the 1950s! That's why we don't have the dark side of the moon in our display. We didn't know what it looked like yet!

The museum I work at was built over where there used to be a cemetery... over 80 years later they started construction to make an underground level, the builders found bodies and to this day people have all kinds of stories and fears about the place

Worked in a science museum. It's not exactly not public, but when the museum was closed or on slow days we used to test out ideas we found on the internet for science activities. Anything from liquid nitrogen hurricanes to green and purple fireballs - if we had the ingredients, we could try it.

A couple of times, I was in Charles Lindbergh's pants. Also Neil Armstrong's boots. Also saw Buzz Aldrin's underpants.

Didn't work there but visited a friends uncle who was a professor of anthropology. He took us 'behind the scenes' at Sydney museum to see weapons and decorations/jewelry made from creatures that were now extinct.

I got to hold a pair of Roald Amundsen's skis.

Teddy Roosevelt's samurai outfit, gifted to him at a state dinner by the Japanese ambassador. He then drunkenly put it on and ran around the White House in it, iirc.

art conservation fun fact - there's a painting from the 1800's in the Brooklyn museum where excessive burnt umber (?) pigment in the oil paint prevented crosslinking, and the painting slowly started to slide right off the canvas - they tried hanging the painting upside down to stabilize it, but that didn't work

I worked at the Truman Library in collections. It was my first month and a coworker needed photos of an artifact. Told me the location but not what it was. President Truman’s teeth. One got stuck to my glove and I nearly gagged. And that’s when I learned people hang on to things. His dentist donated the teeth years after he passed.

I’m a volunteer at a museum.
Jimi Hendrix was very clean and tidy. He vacuumed every day.

Taxidermy likely had arsenic in it, old mirrors have mercury, and a lot of stuff has lead in it 🙃 museum collection workers really need more research done for occupational safety than exists rn

The dermestid beetles at AMNH are descendants of the original colony discovered in an elephant-sized box which had been shipped from across the ocean. Not much evidence of elephant left.

SPACE SUIT STORAGE. It's like a morgue but better. Fun story - one of the best ways to transport space suits is in coffin boxes. Always tripping over coffin boxes everywhere on shipping days.

Former museum worker…we had little textile munching bugs so we brought in teeny tiny parasitic wasps and a giant, sub zero freezer to get rid of them.

Franklin Pierce was likely the first US President to display a Christmas tree in the White House.

Submariners during WWII/The Cold War smelled so bad after a tour that it was often easier to just buy new clothes than try to wash what they had onboard.

There are multiple sets of the Gone with the Wind dresses and the items on display in an exhibition are often copies so the originals stay safe.

a Lewis and Clark original map of the Pacific Northwest, kept in the Library of Congress archives because it's too fragile to display

I worked at the Biltmore House for a few years. My favorite things were the two sets of samurai armor. Between that, some of the wall hanging, a few books and the katanas I always thought Vanderbilt was a bit of a Japanophile. Plus the rooms in the sub basement with the bared gates, that was fun to go check.