This is Scientific American Science Quickly. I'm Christopher and Daljata. It's pretty much

every kid's dream. Or at least it was mine. Well, welcome Christopher. You're at the Natural

History Museum and the scientists who work there are like, kid, we're taking you behind

the scenes. This is not part of what the public is to see. Well, at a recent evening, my

childhood dreams came true, as collections manager of the crustaceans Adam Wall took me right

into the vaults of the Natural History Museum of LA. This room we consider to be incredibly

valuable. These collections are the part of the museum that hides in the shadow of the T-Rex

and Triceratop skeletons. The part of the museum that's not as charismatic as the stuffed elephants

and lions. It's a vast biological library, shelves upon shelves upon shelves with tens of

millions of specimens, not on public display. So we have things like coconut crabs. We have these

absolutely alien looking rabbit-eared barnacle, then an acorn barnacle, which is this really

traditional hard looking thing. And then also you have a little chunk of the whale skin,

that barnacle is attached to you. And there's fairy shrimp too, which I'm kind of obsessed with

because of their Mad Max level abilities to evade fire and drought and then just suddenly spring

to life. Adams got lots of them here. This is incredibly valuable stuff. He says this room alone

is insured for $600 million, and it's built to last with special lights and electrical switches.

It's a very similar setup that you would have in like an oil refinery. And the reason for that

is there are hundreds of thousands of gallons of 95% ethanol in this room that we use to preserve

specimens. Ethanol is also highly flammable. It is explosive, so in this room if there's an earthquake

we don't want there to be sparks because that's how you lose museums is fires. He turns big wheels

on the sides of the shelves to roll in the park. Those things that you have in your local library,

so you can fit even more books into a small space. It exposes a tower of fairy shrimp samples.

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