Frozen penguin among millions of specimens moved to new home at CSIRO’s National Collections Building

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The Australian National Wildlife collection is a scientific treasure trove. Now, the prestigious collection – making up millions of preserved animals – in a state of the art facility at the CSIRO in Canberra.

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00:00It's not your typical moving job.

00:06Preserved animals like this stuffed emperor penguin are getting a new home at the CSIRO's

00:11Black Mountain site.

00:12Happy with that?

00:13Yep.

00:14Lifting?

00:15It's taken months to move the millions of bird, mammal, reptile and insect specimens.

00:22We can derive DNA from the specimens, we can link specimen data to climatic data and other

00:29forms of environmental data.

00:31So every specimen is a small piece in a really big jigsaw.

00:35Before settling in, first they need to acclimatise in massive walk-in freezers.

00:42They get brought in and left in these minus 35 freezers for about, again, two weeks to

00:49make sure that there are no museum pests that are left alive on them and then they're removed

00:54from here and brought upstairs and straight into our vaults where they'll be put away.

00:59One of the collection's four vaults belongs to the insect collection.

01:03We've got around 23,000 drawers of pin collection and also around 280,000 slides.

01:12Residents range from butterflies to beetles and stick insects.

01:17So these are incredibly special.

01:20Lord Howe Island stick insects or tree lobsters were declared extinct in the 1920s but decades

01:27later DNA from these specimens was matched with living stick insects bred in Melbourne,

01:33reclassifying the species as critically endangered.

01:36And we could do it only because we had these two very special specimens.

01:40The CSIRO says the collection and building will be complete by August this year.

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