Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to

explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of time at museums.

Whether it's geology, science, arts, or general history,

there are few places like a good museum for immersing yourself in the past.

At their most cynical, they are tax havens for rich donors,

but at their best, they provide centers for culture, learning,

and research.

If this show has taught me anything over the years, it's that the past is still very much

alive in small, tangible ways, because life leaves behind evidence, from the fossils of

the dinosaurs to the footprints of small creatures walking through your backyard, and all that evidence requires intensive cataloging and studying from many, many people.

But it's not just people who work at museums.

Some of their work is done by colleagues that aren't exactly human.

I'd like to introduce you to the strangest employee of many natural history museums,

a creature called

the dermistid beetle. These small bugs have been part of museum preservation for over a century,

and their function is a delicate one. You see, animal bones can be incredibly fragile,

and cleaning them with man-made tools would likely damage or destroy precious specimens.

It's possible to use boiling water to clean individual bones, but it's a labor-intensive

process, and it contains many opportunities for human error.

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