This is on point. I'm Meghna Chakrabardi. What happens when a little known place home to great treasures may soon have no home at all?

That's the puzzle Kathleen Pryor is facing. She's a professor of biology at Duke

University and she joins us today. Professor Pryor, welcome to Onpoint.

Hello, thank you. So what is this little known place home to great treasures that you care so much about?

I wouldn't call it little known. The Duke Herbarium is perhaps the six largest university herbarium in the United States and it is tied

with Cornell so it's very well known in the area of a biodiversity research and climate change research.

But it's stunning that now is being told it needs to find a better home.

Okay, so what, for those people who don't know,

can you describe Duke's Herbarium a little bit?

First of all, what is a herbarium

and then what is in Dukes? That's a, so unique. a It's a collection of dried plant materials that have been collected over time from various

professors, students, researchers that have gone on explorations and brought these treasures home.

So no herbarium replicates what another herbarium has.

It's unique to the history of Duke and the people who worked at the

Duke herbarium. And so our collection of 825,000 specimens is special only to, it's special to Duke. It's not replicated anywhere else.

And 825,000 specimens, is that the equivalent to the number of

different species represented in the collection or is it just specimens?

No, it's just specimens. Okay.

So can you just give me a visual tour of what it looks like?

I mean, how are these specimens stored when you want to look at them?

What do you see?

So, Duke is also well known for a lemur center, and a lemur center is easy to sell when you have, you know, creatures

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