I Contributed to Science!

At the end of June I blogged about having "Adventures on the Mountain" and mentioned the endangered Boreal Toad. The pictures that I took are now in the Monty L. Bean science museum collection!

The yellow card goes in a filing cabinet as a physical record of the specimen. There is also a computer program with all the information available to anyone with internet access. It hasn't been updated since my specimen was entered but should be sooner than later. I'll post a link when it's available.

Normally when specimens are collected they get preserved in ethanol and placed in the jars. You can see some of them in the background of the picture. It's really gory to see all those dead reptile and amphibian bodies. Our photos were safely wrapped in paper towels and stored in the same kind of jar. In a hundred years when some herpetologist studies bufo boreas he or she will know that on June 27, 2012 there were some on Manning Meadow. Yay! I helped science!