This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Halima Shaw.

This is a skeleton of one individual and I don't have it laid out in anatomical order

but you can see this is the spine right here.

So I recently visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

And I went there to meet with two anthropologists.

One is David Hunt.

That's his voice you're hearing right now.

And these two, these three here likely

are arthritis from trauma, such as what happens to most of us if we lift things wrong and we get hit in a car.

He basically researches skeletal remains and tries to figure out their story.

And then the tail goes back out here, so there's some extra, these extra bones right here.

And if you haven't guessed, the bones we're looking at are not human bones.

They belong to an animal that you wouldn't typically see in a natural history museum.

This one is icky. This one is Icky.

This one here is Yahoo.

And this one over here is Lika.

They're dogs who were family pets.

Yahoo and Icky were Irish wolfhounds. who were

Irish wolfhounds.

And Lika was the German Shepherd.

David Hunt doesn't just collect and preserve bones for the Smithsonian.

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