Original subtitles

- [Narrator] New York, a city of industry and ingenuity.

And at its heart, a museum of science and humanity

with secrets dark and strange.

Mesozoic mayhem.

Cosmic mysteries.

And an encrypted message from a once proud civilization.

Secrets hidden in plain sight

inside the American Museum of Natural History.

(ominous music)

Manhattan, America's capital of culture and business

and a magnet for immigrants from all over the world.

And across from Central Park, a world under one roof,

the American Museum of Natural History.

The museum covers an entire city block,

home to 32 million specimens from all over the planet.

But none are more impressive than these,

a herd of African elephants.

It's hard to gaze up at the elephants

without feeling their power.

For many visitors, the word that will spring to mind

is majestic, or perhaps even noble.

Just a few blocks south on Broadway,

the same words apply to our

favorite fictional African animals,

kings of a sunny savanna.

But not so long ago, African wildlife

occupied a different place in the popular imagination.

Early Hollywood portrayed a vision

of the ferocious beasts of darkest Africa.

(roaring) (screaming)

(gunfire)

Jeanette Eileen Jones is a cultural historian

who studies portrayals of Africa.

- All those images of just wild animals

that will attack you at no provocation,

that it's a dangerous place,

that the climate is not hospitable, particularly to whites.

- [Narrator] Back then, this scary image of African wildlife

was reinforced in museums.

(screaming)

- With an African lion, often they're depicted snarling

and as mean and ferocious as possible.

Looks more like a gargoyle or a mythical beast.

- [Narrator] This stuffed lion would've been typical

a hundred years ago.

Like a B-movie villain, it's a stereotype lacking character.

How did museum specimens go from this to this?

And how did Africa's wildlife exchange

their evil image for one of nobility and light?

The answer begins with a man named Carl Akeley.

- Akeley was a young man who loved

natural history and wildlife.

He grew up in New York state on a farm.

At an early age, he developed an interest in taxidermy.

- [Narrator] On the farm, Akeley grew up

around animals that were slaughtered.

So stuffing animals wasn't a big step.

The largest animal then in captivity

was an African elephant named Jumbo.

When Jumbo was killed by a train,

Akeley took part in his preservation.

Jumbo was transformed into the largest

stuffed animal in history.

- [Steve] It was from that experience

that Akeley gained his fame.

- [Narrator] He won a job

at the American Museum of Natural History by promising

to create an exhibit of African elephants.

Akeley had been to Africa before,

but he saw something very different

than what appeared in the movies.

- He sees beauty in the flora and the fauna.

He sees beauty in Africa that is linked

to its natural landscape.

- [Narrator] In 1909, Akeley looks for elephants

in the forests of Mount Kenya.

And its here that Africa teaches him a lesson.

He's charged by an elephant, pinning him to the ground.

Suffering a badly broken nose, for a time

he looked a bit like the Elephant Man.

The life-threatening experience could've

made him hate Africa, but the continent works

on his spirit in a different way.

- It was said during that convalescence

he dreamt of this splendid hall,

this hall of African mammals that would celebrate

the beauty and splendor of African wildlife.

- [Narrator] When Akeley returned to New York,

he began to realize his dream by reinventing taxidermy.

Steve Quinn takes us into an area the public never sees

to show us the difference Akeley made.

- The big difference with this method of taxidermy

is, if you'll listen, (knocking) it's hollow.

And that's the clue, which indicates

that it's Akeley's method.

- [Narrator] Rather than stuff specimens with straw,

Akeley used their skeletons to create hollow molds

with muscles shaped in clay

to match the measurements made in the field.

- And because the sculpture was sculpted

to the exact specifications of that animal,

the skin, when tanned, fit like a glove.

- [Narrator] The results were the most lifelike

African specimens ever seen.

But Akeley was only getting started.

Up until now, most museums had presented animals

as isolated specimens.

But Akeley wanted to show animals

within their natural habitat.

He took artists to Africa to record

the animal's home environment,

which they then recreated on curved painted backdrops

behind the stuffed animals.

These scenes are called dioramas.

Akeley borrowed the technique from the theater.

He urged the patrons of the American Natural History Museum

to pay for a brand new gallery

to be filled with 28 African dioramas.

In an age before television, this exhibit would be

the only way New Yorkers would ever see

these exotic African animals.

One animal was known and unknown, the mountain gorilla.

For the movie-going public, the gorilla was a savage beast

that deserved to die at Tarzan's hand.

(heroic yelling)

- The mountain gorilla was steeped in folklore and myth

and thought to charge on sight of a human

and snap rifles with its jaws

and run off with women into the forest.

- [Narrator] In Akeley's eyes, the mountain gorilla

was a gentle giant.

But in 1921, the only way to show the American public

the noble gorilla was by killing one.

Akeley was amazed by their kinship with humanity.

But that made them harder to kill.

He later wrote, it took all one's scientific ardor

to keep from feeling like a murderer.

I was the savage and the aggressor.

In 1936, after years of effort and preparation,

the Hall of Africa is unveiled.

- That day, if you read the New York Times,

everybody was out there, everyone who was anyone,

mostly a lot of white upper-class, middle-class people.

A lot of patrons.

- [Narrator] A Times reporter wrote,

"One can feel the wind sweeping across the plains

"and mountains to the startled creatures

"which look out from the grass."

- There were raves.

People were amazed at the realism of the exhibit

and the exotic creatures, and the places depicted.

- [Jeanette] People claimed to

have been transported to Africa.

They felt like they were in Africa

when they walked through there.

- [Narrator] But one VIP could not be there that day.

Before the work was completed, while on safari

in the mountains of the gorillas he loved,

Carl Akeley caught dysentery and died.

This diorama displays the gorilla he found so hard to kill,

and something else as well.

- [Steve] If one leans into the diorama,

and looks to the far right,

you'll see Mount Mikeno standing against the sky.

And when visitors view the diorama,

they should realize that it's the burial place

of Carl Akeley.

- [Narrator] His final resting place has become

part of his life's work,

his heartfelt vision of brightest Africa.

Next, on Museum Secrets, ancient monsters and modern cures.

The American Museum of Natural History

is trying to tell us something.

It's trying to tell us that all life is connected,

even if not all species last forever.

These creatures died out 65 million years ago,

but dinosaurs are upstarts

compared to this strange lifeform.

- The oldest horseshoe crab fossil goes back

to about the late Ordovician,

we'll say about 440, 450 million years old.

- [Narrator] The horseshoe crab is unique

not because it's so old,

but because it has survived so long.

- [Ward] Most species don't last that long,

couple million years.

Horseshoe crabs have been around for a long time.

- [Narrator] This remarkable species has seen

the dinosaurs come and go,

multiple ice ages, and the rise of the human race.

Recently, their continued vitality

became linked to our own.

- [Ward] Some of the aspects of the immune system

of horseshoe crabs are extremely general and useful.

They can detect the toxins produced by various bacteria.

- [Narrator] A unique clotting agent

in the crab's blue blood surrounds toxins

and neutralizes them.

This has made horseshoe crabs invaluable

to the pharmaceutical industry.

Every year, the blood of thousands of crabs is extracted.

It's used to purify the world's vaccines,

saving us from dozens of deadly diseases.

After some of their blood is taken,

the crabs are returned to the wild.

But there's a problem.

Their breeding grounds, like this stretch of sand

40 kilometers southeast of the museum

have become despoiled by pollution.

Their stocks are dwindling.

If we want to keep harvesting their blood,

we're going to need to breed them in captivity.

But this has proved extremely difficult.

For decades, biologists have tried

to breed them in the lab, without success.

Then, in the year 2000, Dr. Carmela Cuomo

decided to look for the secret.

- I think it would be really awful

if an organism that has managed to survive

countless climate change, glaciations,

meteorite impacts, continents coming together

and going apart, dies because humans were here.

So, I don't know, it speaks to my heart somehow.

- [Narrator] Carmela began her research

by observing the nitty-gritty.

- What they do is the female digs under and digs

and she lays the egg, and then she kind of moves forward,

and then the male deposits his sperm.

And the females have tremendous numbers of eggs.

I mean, they can have tens of thousands of eggs

that they can deposit.

- [Narrator] As to why they would breed here

but not in captivity, biologists had only a few clues.

- There is some evidence that they like

to be where they were born.

Sort of makes sense for a lot of creatures,

because you know that it worked,

so it makes sense to go back there.

- [Narrator] In her lab, Carmela simulated

the conditions of the breeding beach.

She placed a male and a female together,

and to her utter amazement they reproduced.

- They've laid eggs and they continue to lay eggs

all until October.

- [Narrator] Success was so unexpected

that Carmela decided not to revealed what happened

until she made it happen twice.

But at the next breeding cycle, no crab romance.

- [Carmela] Over here, we have some mating behavior

which does not mean they're going to mate.

It just means because they can hook up like that

for a significant portion of the year.

- [Narrator] Somehow, Carmela had stumbled

on the secret and then lost it.

- It didn't seem to us at the time

that we had done anything different

than we did the year before.

And so, basically, we drove ourselves crazy.

It was like, what did we do differently?

So we started to take factors out.

Okay, we'll change the beach.

They would show us the behavior but they wouldn't lay eggs.

- [Narrator] What was it about a real beach,

was it the tides, the light of the sun,

a specific phase of the moon?

Carmela's team tried and failed

to find the answer for eight long years.

- And then, a couple of years ago, some students

were working with me and they went out

and collected the crabs, and they brought back

some sediment that was with them and the water.

We put them back out, then we put them in the tank,

and they mated and they laid eggs.

And they laid eggs, and they laid eggs,

and then when I looked at my notes, what did I see?

I saw the exact same thing that we had done the first year

which was we brought sand with us

from where the animals were.

- [Narrator] Horseshoe crabs will only breed

in the sand where they were born.

That is the secret.

- If we can breed them, make sure nature

has a steady supply of them,

make sure industry has a steady supply of them,

everybody will hopefully be happy.

- [Narrator] But as Carmela and her colleagues know,

her solution will only work as long as

viable natural habitats continue to exist.

- So if you destroy the habitats where they live,

where they breed, where they eat

via pollution or development,

then you're really going to hurt these creatures.

- The fact that an organism has been around

in some form for some long, it inspires an awe in me.

That's the best way I can say it.

And so there's a desire to kind of make sure

that these animals continue.

- [Narrator] For if we can't co-exist with a species

that has survived for half a billion years,

no species is safe.

Not even our own.

Next, on Museum Secrets,

dinosaur detectives unearth a murder.

Inside the American Museum of Natural History,

the ancient bones of dinosaurs inspire awe and questions.

How did this plant-eater live?

How did this meat-eater die?

To discover the answers, all we have to go on

is the physical evidence.

And that's why behind the scenes,

the museum's paleontology department

looks a lot like a modern crime lab.

- I see some right there. - Yeah.

Looks like there's some fossilized bits on the bones.

That's kinda neat.

- [Narrator] The museum's head paleontologist,

Mark Norrell, is one of the world's

leading dinosaur detectives.

- We're able to use CAT scans to be able

to peer into things.

We're able to use mass spectrometers

which are able to look at things

in very, very low concentration.

Advances in technology has changed the way

that we do things really dramatically.

- [Narrator] High-tech tools can amplify

a detective's deductive powers.

But sometimes, an investigation remains unsolved

until a new piece of evidence blows the case wide open.

That's what happened when Mark Norrell found this.

- I think it was a really exciting moment

when we found it.

We knew that because basically we were overturning

over 60 years of orthodoxy in the field.

- [Narrator] What it is, and what it revealed

is our museum secret.

The story begins in 1922,

as the American Museum of Natural History

mounts its first major expedition

to the deserts of Mongolia.

The museum's explorers made their way through mud,

sandstorms, and searing heat.

- Mongolia really turned out to be

a treasure trove for fossils.

The American Museum collected fossils there

of everything from dinosaurs to mammals and lots of them.

Probably their most spectacular finds

were found at a place called the Flaming Cliffs.

- [Narrator] Beneath the cliffs, they found

dozens of skeletons of a plant-eating dinosaur,

called Protoceratops.

This evidence revealed for the first time

that some dinosaurs lived in deserts.

And then they unearthed a type of fossil

that no one had seen before, dinosaur eggs.

- They found several dinosaur nests

during the 1923 expedition.

But one of the most spectacular things

that they found was a dinosaur nest

with the remains of another dinosaur lying on top of it.

The animal that was found on top of the nest though

wasn't a protoceratops, it was a carnivorous dinosaur

which they named oviraptor.

- [Narrator] The fossil evidence pointed

to a kind of crime scene.

(crunching)

They deduced the oviraptor died while stealing an egg.

Caught in the act by a mother protoceratops.

(crunching) (squawking)

The 65 million year old story became front page news.

- When the news first came back to New York,

it was big news, it made all the newspapers

and everything else, made newsreel footage.

- [Narrator] The museum displayed the prehistoric

family scene of dinosaur eggs and their proud parents.

The dinosaur detectives were celebrated

for the brilliant deduction that revealed

the violent death of the egg-stealing oviraptor.

(roaring)

But this isn't our museum secret.

Because their conclusion was completely wrong.

In the next part of our detective story,

Mark Norrell plays a leading role,

because he, himself, is a gifted sleuth.

In the 1990s, he was in the forefront of the discovery

that two-legged dinosaurs looked less like this,

and more like this.

This revelation became another front page story called

The Truth About Dinosaurs: Just about everything

you believe is wrong.

- 20 years ago, we didn't know they had feathers,

we know that now.

20 years ago, we didn't know that they had

bird-like physiologies, we know that now.

So there's been a lot of progress made.

- [Narrator] To discover more about the link

between dinosaurs and birds, Mark Norrell led a team

back to Mongolia.

Like their predecessors of the 1920s,

they found skeletons of plant-eating protoceratops

along with a clearly birdlike specimen

of the egg-stealing oviraptor.

And then they discovered something no one had found before.

As they carefully uncovered a dinosaur nest,

they found one egg with a fossilized embryo still inside.

- Inside the egg, there was an embryo of a dinosaur,

but the embryo wasn't a protoceratops embryo,

and the foot was sticking out,

and weathered out of the inside of the egg.

And I could tell was the foot of an oviraptor dinosaur.

- [Narrator] And that means that the oviraptor

found on the nest was not there to steal but to nurture.

- It was sitting on top of its nest,

probably brooding it or taking care of it

just in the same way modern birds do today.

- [Narrator] Mark's discovery refuted the old conclusions

about oviraptor behavior.

And proved that the museum had been wrong

about who laid the eggs.

One new piece of evidence had unlocked a secret,

and completely changed the story.

And as to how the mother oviraptor died,

researchers now believe she was killed

by one of the region's frequent sandstorms.

Today, the latest evidence leads Mark to believe

that two-legged dinosaurs evolved directly

into modern birds.

So it may be that if you're out birdwatching,

you're dinosaur watching too.

Next, on Museum Secrets, an encrypted message

from a once proud civilization.

(upbeat music)

In the American Museum of Natural History,

the diversity of nature includes

the diversity of human nature,

especially the civilizations that have vanished

from the Earth.

We know these ancient cultures by their works,

but we understand them through their words.

Egyptian hieroglyphics that tell how

to keep a Pharaoh safe as he journeys to the afterlife.

Or Athenian inscriptions that reveal

their love of freedom and how they fought to keep it.

But there is one vanished civilization

that is silent as the grave.

At the beginning of the 16th century,

a vast region surrounding what is now Peru

was dominated by a people called the Inca.

Their ruins suggest a mastery of architecture

and how they hauled these massive stones is unknown.

Their golden temples reveal their wealth,

but we don't know their prayers.

We do know the Incas were the undisputed rulers

of the Andes.

The Spaniards arrived in 1532 amazed by Incan gold

and determined to take it all.

But today, many historians believe Incan society

was missing something.

- Only with respect to the Inca do we not have

their view of their world in their own words.

And that's because they did not develop

a system of writing in a form that we've identified.

The Incas have never been able to speak

purely for themselves.

- [Narrator] Gary Urton is an anthropologist

from Harvard University.

He's looking for the secret that will

give the Inca back their voice.

It may be locked in these Incan artifacts called khipu.

They look like humble skeans of knotted string.

But the Spanish Conquistadors believed

they were much more than that.

- When the Spanish took material out of a storehouse,

there was a man there keeping records,

and he had knotted string devices,

and he untied knots from one section of the khipu

and tied knots in another section.

So he was working with a debit and credit

type accounting system.

- [Narrator] When the Inca refused to reveal

the knot secret code, the Spaniards burned

every khipu they could find.

Their meaning was soon forgotten.

Today, only 850 khipus are known to exist.

Gary Urton has spent the last 10 years

personally examining khipu all over the world.

- This is a classic Inca khipu here.

- [Narrator] A lover of puzzles, he's determined

to break the code.

- Down here, they tied the units, the ones to nines.

Up here, the tens, the hundreds, the thousands.

We're pretty sure they were recording censuses

and tribute data.

All of the sort of nuts and bolts of the business

of the Inca state.

- [Narrator] But why, when other ancients wrote on stone

did the Inca choose string?

Their empire was held together by a system of roads

traversed by messengers called chasquis.

Stone tablets would've slowed them down.

Khipus were much more runner-friendly.

So is this just a lightweight ledger?

Urton doesn't think so.

- On the khipu that we see here,

its knots are not distributed in tiers like decimal levels

as with those other khipus.

But the knots are spread all over, almost at random,

all over the face, over the surface of the khipu.

And we think that these knots had semantic value.

- [Narrator] Urton believes that these strings

may contain words and stories encoded

through color and the choice of knots.

Today, Gary and his colleague Amanda Ganaway

hope to prove that knots really can tell stories

starting with a simple story called, What's for Lunch?

- White's chicken, blue is seafood, green is vegetables.

- And to have perhaps one single knot refer to baked,

two to boiled.

- Can we communicate this all the way across New York City?

- I think we can.

- [Narrator] A subway ride later, Gary arrives

at the next best thing to an Incan restaurant,

a Peruvian one.

He orders a traditional meal of chicken, fish, potatoes.

- Two knots at the top for boiled.

So when that's white, we know it's chicken.

So it's caldo de pollo.

Then I want (speaking in foreign language),

that was a long knot of five turns.

- [Narrator] To transmit his message,

Gary employs a chasqui runner.

- Take that to Amanda, please.

- [Narrator] He's not really Incan, he lives in Brooklyn.

But as a runner, he might be a match for a real chasqui.

Though, to be fair, the Inca had to run

up and down mountains, and Manhattan is nearly flat.

Following Inca tradition, we've made

our message service a relay.

Chasquis would spell each other off every few kilometers,

allowing them to cover 240 kilometers a day.

Today's distance is much shorter.

- So, he's eating boiled chicken in soup.

He's eating a potato dish.

Two knots, a boiled potato dish.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Narrator] The experiment worked,

but relied on made up code.

With the Incan khipus, Gary has only half of the secret.

- We can say that this given string records

the number 146, but the question is, 146 what?

- [Narrator] Gary needs something like this,

the famous hieroglyphic to Greek dictionary

known as the Rosetta Stone.

Old Spanish documents come tantalizingly close.

We have a string of numbers and then each

with its identity.

So, 40 fanegas, which is a measure.

40 fanegas of potatoes, 30 fanegas of corn.

Now, we can't read the identities yet,

but we're hoping that one day, if we can find a match

to those strings of numbers,

then that's our Rosetta Khipu.

- [Narrator] Gary believes he needs just one match

to begin to read the Inca story.

And for their long silence to be broken.

- Hopefully, we'll just have that amazing,

serendipitous convergence of a transcription and a khipu.

- [Narrator] Gary Urton may be a dreamer,

but sometimes you just have to untangle one knot

to make the whole string unravel.

Next, on Museum Secrets,

how to catch a shooting star.

Some of the world's oldest fossils can be found

at the American Museum of Natural History.

But the oldest specimens aren't fossils at all.

These rocks are over 4.5 billion years old,

older than the Earth itself.

Some are made of metal, some of stone,

and they all have one thing in common,

they are all chunks of asteroids

that fell to Earth as meteorites.

For the curator in charge of this collection,

Denton Abel, they are clues to a cosmic mystery.

- Learning about the Solar System

is intrinsically valuable to humans.

In this case, we're learning about

how the Solar System actually formed.

- [Narrator] Scientists believe that

in the beginning, there was light from our new sun,

and there were rocks, asteroids that collided

and melted, forming new worlds like Earth.

And there was ice, from comets.

Rocky ice balls, they formed at the cold edge

of the Solar System.

Comets may have brought their ice to the young Earth,

creating our oceans.

Comets are too large to fit in a hall like this,

but Denton Abel would still like to get his hands on one.

- What we'd really like is a piece of a comet

so we can understand better the earliest Solar System

and how the planets formed and got their water.

- [Narrator] So scientists need to unlock a cosmic secret.

How do you catch a shooting star?

(suspenseful music)

In 1996, NASA scientists decided to try.

They named their mission Stardust.

They planned to send a probe to a comet called Wild-2,

collect some comet dust, and bring it back to Earth.

For mission leader Joe Valenga,

there was one fundamental challenge.

- The trick for Stardust was to find some way

to capture hypervelocity particles.

We're traveling through the coma at 13,000 miles an hour.

So how do you do that?

How do you capture particles and bring them back?

- [Narrator] To capture particles,

Stardust would need to rendezvous with a comet

and enter its volatile tail.

A comet's tail forms when it approaches the sun

as ice vaporizes and erupts from the surface.

- Some particles that come off of comets

can be larger and some smaller.

We don't really know even a piece this big

could come off of a comet.

- [Narrator] Comet grains are six times faster than bullets,

and they will heat up when brought to a sudden stop.

Conventional materials used for catching bullets

aren't strong enough.

Steel would be too heavy.

And then someone thought of this.

It's a material called aerogel.

- Aerogel is the least dense solid known to humans.

And it was invented and perfected

over the second half of the 20th century.

- [Narrator] On the atomic level, its nearly random

structure gives aerogel foam exotic properties.

- One thing that's very important to know about aerogel

is what a good insulator it is.

You can see we're melting the aluminum,

but the wax is just fine.

- [Narrator] Since it can stop heat,

engineers wondered if it might also stop comet dust.

- Turned out, through tests, that aerogel

could stop particles traveling at velocities

even somewhat higher than 13,000 miles per hour.

You can capture very fine particles

similar to what would be in a comet coma.

We had confidence that the aerogel

was really going to work.

- [Narrator] Joe also knew that no material is perfect.

- This is about a half a pound meteorite.

- [Narrator] Aerogel can stand up to significant force,

but it's not invulnerable.

- [Joe] This is about two pounds.

- [Narrator] And this supermaterial has its own

form of kryptonite.

- [Joe] This is ordinary distilled water.

What happens is the water collapses the structure

of the aerogel form itself.

- [Narrator] Even with these downsides,

Joe's team made the collector tiles from aerogel.

In all space missions, risk comes with the territory.

On February 7th, 1999, Stardust blasted off.

- [Engineer] Four, three, two, we have main engine start.

Zero, and liftoff of the Stardust spacecraft.

(cheering)

- [Narrator] On a curving trajectory,

it would take five years to reach its target.

- The body of the spacecraft is about the size

of a telephone booth.

The aerogel was hidden in here, and it folds out.

First, an arm folds out, and then expose

the aerogel grid so it can collect the cometary particles.

Prior to actual encounter, what we had

was test data that indicated that yes,

we'd probably be able to stop the particles,

but you never know for sure what you're gonna get.

I remember the day we were getting ready

for the encounter with comet Wild-2.

I was in this room when we deployed the aerogel grid,

and we watched the telemetry data coming back.

We could not tell though what happened

with the collection of the particles,

so it was a two year long wait.

- [Narrator] On January 15th, 2006, the Stardust

sample capsule reentered Earth's atmosphere

at seven miles per second,

becoming the fastest human-made object to return to Earth.

No one was sure if the aerogel could withstand

the force of rapid deceleration.

- Would it, in fact, shatter when we landed?

- [Narrator] Recent rains had flooded the Utah landing site.

- There was also the danger that the capsule itself

would be penetrated by water upon landing.

- [Narrator] The recovery team retrieved the capsule

with its sample canister.

But did the aerogel catch part of a comet?

To find out, samples of the aerogel were distributed

to scientists around the world, including Denton Abel

of the American Museum of Natural History.

- This is an actual sample of the Stardust

return sample suite.

- [Narrator] Under high magnification, the sample reveals

the microscopic trail of a comet particle.

- You see here where its been fractured.

The actual fracture in the aerogel

due to the effect of the impact.

- The fascinating thing about some of the results

from Stardust, high temperature materials

have been found in the particles.

- High temperature solids would be the kinds

of minerals and magmas you'd see

in terrestrial volcanoes, for instance.

- [Narrator] So at least some comets didn't start out

as rock and ice at the edge of the Solar System,

but much nearer the sun,

colliding and melting like asteroids.

And the aerogel samples contain another surprise,

organic molecules needed for the creation of life.

So when comets came to Earth,

they may have brought more than just water.

- One of the possibilities is that comets

seeded organic material that started the evolution

of life on Earth, because the Earth was too hot

to support organic compounds

in the beginning as it cooled.

So where did they come from, possibly from comets.

- [Narrator] The American Museum of Natural History

now has one more tiny rock from outer space.

And as far as curator Denton Abel is concerned,

there will always be room for more.

- [Narrator] Next, on Museum Secrets.

From the museum's past to its future hidden underground.

Since the American Museum of Natural History opened in 1877,

its primary mission has been collection and preservation.

Seven generations of curators have collected

over 20 million specimens on expeditions around the world.

The museum's taxidermists pioneered methods

to preserve them for the ages.

Thanks to their efforts, visitors experience

the scope of biodiversity.

It's a kind of ark.

Though, of course, the animals here only look alive.

Far below the public galleries in a room visitors never see,

is something completely different,

seven vats of stainless steel.

When they're opened, this happens.

You might be thinking witches and cauldrons.

They are not magic, but as we'll see, they're pretty close.

What they're doing here is our final museum secret.

Today, Ph.D student, Linda Gormazano,

hunts for a new specimen.

She could be on one of the museum's current

expeditions to the forests of Peru

or the mountains of Mexico.

But in fact, she's in upstate New York.

Linda and her faithful dog are

on the trail of canis latrans, better known as the coyote.

- Good boy.

So, this is a sample of coyote scat.

- [Narrator] She doesn't carry a hunting rifle

just a plastic sample bag.

Not far away, fellow graduate student, Chris Nagy,

ascends to the nest of a screech owl.

He knows the daylight hours are the best time

to find her at home.

He doesn't collect the whole owl.

- [Chris] Okay, there's some feathers in here.

- [Narrator] And by a nearby lake, curator, Mark Sidall,

is after something even smaller, a freshwater leech.

Today's specimens won't be featured in a diorama

or preserved by the taxidermists' art.

- Take it back to the lab.

Great, let's put it in the jar.

- [Narrator] Sidall and his colleagues

are only interested in one thing, their specimens' DNA.

- The technological advances in the last 15 to 20 years

have allowed museums to become

more than straightforward libraries of biodiversity.

- [Narrator] Recently, the museum embarked on a new mission

to collect the DNA of every lifeform on Earth.

But why did today's curators need

to collect DNA in the field?

Why don't they extract DNA

from the museum's 20 million specimens?

The reason is that stuffed animals do not retain their DNA.

The DNA dries out and falls apart.

And other traditional preservation methods

aren't much better.

- Standard procedures of preserving animals or plants

in formalin, or even in alcohol

are not suitable for holding on to that kind

of genetic information for a long period of time.

- [Narrator] To preserve DNA,

requires something completely different.

- Well, welcome to our frozen tissue collection.

As you can see here, we have seven large cryo vats here

which actually contain the liquid nitrogen

that keeps our samples secure and safe.

- [Narrator] DNA stored in these supercooled vats

should remain viable for a thousand years.

Project leader, George Amato, likes to discourage

curious curators from discovering

what absolute cold feels like.

- If someone were to put their unprotected hands

or arms inside the container, we'd like to say,

they then become part of the collection.

- [Narrator] Everyday, the museum's expeditions

send back more DNA samples to add to the new collection.

And unlike traditional expeditions,

these DNA hunters don't need to bring back

the entire animal.

Feces will do, and even feathers.

- The part I'm interested in is the very, very tip

of the feather where hopefully there's a few skin cells

of the owl that left on there.

I'll scrape those off and extract the DNA.

- In some ways, the frozen tissue collection

is continuing the tradition of the other collections

here at the museum.

That is, we want to have archived here

a record of the diversity of life on the planet.

Having those tissues available under liquid nitrogen

will greatly facilitate the scope of work

that can happen here even 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now.

- [Narrator] Currently, the vats preserve the DNA

of several species that are nearing extinction.

Their number will continue to grow.

And as it does, the American Museum of Natural History

moves a step closer to becoming a real ark,

preserving the blueprint of every lifeform for the future.

(suspenseful music)

For every mystery we reveal, far more must remain unspoken.

Secrets of the human spirit and of the human heart

hidden in plain sight inside

the American Museum of Natural History.

(dramatic orchestral music)