Curator’s Choice: An Invertebrate “Candy Drawer”

Most museum drawers don’t look anything like this. To help researchers find the specimens they need to consult, a typical drawer of specimens is organized based on how organisms are related to each other, and therefore contains specimens that look similar. This feast for the eyes represents a slice of the mollusk marine diversity preserved in the Invertebrate Zoology Collections at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Several drawers in this particular cabinet have been curated to be an all-you-can-eat buffet of shape and color, so curators giving tours can open the eye candy cabinet and astound you with the variety of mollusks.