Jul 16, 2026 · 1 hr 20 min · 13 segments
Greg Watkins-Colwell is Senior Collection Manager of Herpetology and Ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum, where his work spans natural history collections, systematics, biogeography, research, and…
Greg Watkins-ColwellGuestAndersHostYeah, totally.
Yeah.
Um, but, you know, the collection for our division, for vertebrate zoology, will be things that are fluid preserved and in alcohol or formalin, depending on what they are.
Um, they could be skeletons, and skeletons can be prepared in a number of ways, including, uh, macerated, where you completely rot it into all the little elements, which is very useful for paleontologists because they never find a whole specimen-
Oh, yeah, right
... or zooarcheologists who are figuring out what some culture ate 2,000 years ago and this was in their garbage pile, you know?
Mm-hmm.
studying... owl pellets or, uh, cormorant pellets or something like that, and they need to know what this crested caracara ate.
Yeah.
We've had people look at our macerated collection of amphibians and found out that caracara in Florida are eating a, a pretty seas- a reasonable amount of, uh, Amphiuma.
Huh.
And I guess that makes sense.
And apparently they're, they're getting them as roadkill in the mornings because they'll cross the roads when they're breeding and-
Huh
... get hit by cars, and then the caracara are eating them as, you know, carnage, as dead on road.
Yeah.
That is...
Yeah, I think, I think that's the thing that, um, impressed me the most working in the collections is the type, or working in the collections is the type of questions that you can ask because it's rarely actually...
Well, oftentimes it's not about the specimen.
I mean, I know that like-
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
Um, but, you know, the collection for our division, for vertebrate zoology, will be things that are fluid preserved and in alcohol or formalin, depending on what they are.
Um, they could be skeletons, and skeletons can be prepared in a number of ways, including, uh, macerated, where you completely rot it into all the little elements, which is very useful for paleontologists because they never find a whole specimen-
Oh, yeah, right
... or zooarcheologists who are figuring out what some culture ate 2,000 years ago and this was in their garbage pile, you know?
Mm-hmm.
studying... owl pellets or, uh, cormorant pellets or something like that, and they need to know what this crested caracara ate.
Yeah.
We've had people look at our macerated collection of amphibians and found out that caracara in Florida are eating a, a pretty seas- a reasonable amount of, uh, Amphiuma.
Huh.
And I guess that makes sense.
And apparently they're, they're getting them as roadkill in the mornings because they'll cross the roads when they're breeding and-
Huh
... get hit by cars, and then the caracara are eating them as, you know, carnage, as dead on road.
Yeah.
That is...
Yeah, I think, I think that's the thing that, um, impressed me the most working in the collections is the type, or working in the collections is the type of questions that you can ask because it's rarely actually...
Well, oftentimes it's not about the specimen.
I mean, I know that like-
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