The bones, feathers, shells and skins in the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates offer rare and valuable information into the biological history of species that may help today's birds, mammals, fish and other creatures survive.

The museum, which is located in the Johnson Center for Birds and Biodiversity, along with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, contains more than 1.5 million specimens (well over a million of which are fish) and serves as the primary repository for vertebrates collected by Cornellians doing research around the world. Samples from the collection are more than interesting artifacts; they offer treasure troves of biological data that are available to any researcher who needs samples for their studies.

For example, a few years ago researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee extracted DNA from a sliver of toe skin from an extinct heath hen specimen to examine its genetic diversity. The researchers found that the gene pool of prairie chickens is dropping significantly, approaching levels reached by heath hens before they became extinct in the early 1900s.

Cornell's Irby Lovette, director of the Evolutionary Biology Program and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, used a skin specimen from the foot of a now-extinct Bachman's warbler to extract and reconstruct DNA. While researchers had placed the bird taxonomically in the genus Vermivora, the DNA clarified that what we now call Vermivora is actually two evolutionarily distinct groups of birds. Bachman's warbler is most closely related to the blue-winged and golden-winged warblers, and not closely related to the other Vermivoras as previously thought.

Currently, visiting researcher André Desrochers, an evolutionary biologist from Université Laval in Québec City, is measuring the wings of 200 specimens of nuthatches and downy woodpeckers dating back to the mid-19th century to compare with today's birds. He hypothesizes that as such land use patterns as forest fragmentation in North America have changed, the birds' wing length and shape have also changed. While the work is ongoing, his preliminary results indicate there may indeed be measurable adaptation to the modified habitats.

For more information on the Cornell Natural History Collections, see: http://naturalhistorycollections.cornell.edu/.

Kim Bostwick is curator of birds and mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates.