Word: smithsonian
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...million tourists who flock to the Smithsonian's ten museums every year are familiar with the big draws: the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk, the moon rocks, Archie Bunker's chair, the Hope diamond, the First Ladies' dresses, Fonzie's leather jacket, the ruby slippers that took Judy Garland back to Aunt Em in The Wizard...
...these and other objects on display represent only 3% of the Smithsonian's holdings. Out of sight, filling every nook and cranny of space, is a decidedly odder assortment of things-100,000 bats (including 6,629 vampires), 2,300 spark plugs, 24,797 woodpeckers, 718,605 pieces of pottery, 16,694 baskets, 82,615 fleas, 12,000 arctic fishing tools, 14,300 sea sponges, 6,012 animal pelts, 2,587 musical instruments, ten specimens of dinosaur excrement and a male gorilla preserved in formaldehyde...
Another intriguing item: the pickled brains of some former Smithsonian officials. It is said that one of the officials, a pioneering geologist named Major John W. Powell, donated his gray matter in order to settle a wager with a colleague about whose brain was larger. Curators are not sure what happened to the colleague's brain...
...Anything you can think of, we usually have two of 'em," says Al Bachmeier, a collections manager for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. "After you count 40 bio-belt pouches (for collecting and transmitting information about heart and respiratory functions) from the astronauts, you begin to wonder why you need...
...previously been overlooked." At the National Natural History Museum, researchers found nine whale skeletons that somehow were misplaced in the 1950s and a never-opened crate containing the bones of big game shot in Africa by Teddy Roosevelt. Although many items seem ridiculous or redundant, Perrot says that the Smithsonian wants them both for scientific research and as "testimony of the past being kept for the future...