A California natural history museum has a unique lending library where visitors can borrow taxidermied animals and fossils, including a whale rib, leopard pelt, and dinosaur poop. The "Nature to You" program allows members of the public to check out up to 50 specimens for two weeks at a time. According to Elizabeth Merritt, a trends expert at the American Alliance of Museums, this program is the only one of its kind in the US, but it could be easily replicated by other museums due to the commonality of certain natural history specimens. The program's manager, Haylie Priest, oversees 1,400 specimens in total, including birds, reptiles, and fossils.
Written by the local model on 2026-09-08,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
On a hot afternoon in August, I walked out of the San Diego Natural History Museum carrying a whale rib, a leopard pelt, a taxidermized weasel and a small piece of fossilized dinosaur poop.
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I → walk → poop
It felt like a heist.
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It → feel → heist
These were real specimens that belonged to the museum, not gift shop replicas.
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that → belong → museum
But for two weeks, they were mine to take home, display in my living room, even bring to events with my friends.
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they → take → friends
San Diego, California, has the only natural history museum in the US with a collection of nature specimens that they allow members of the general public to check out and take home, just like checking out books from a library.
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members → have → library
Inside the museum, metal shelves of taxidermy fill the space floor to ceiling.
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shelves → fill → ceiling
Light glints off rows of plexiglass boxes: alert bobcats, their ears perked; birds posed on branches; a jackrabbit suspended in air as if in mid-leap.
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ears → glint → leap
Haylie Priest, the loan program’s manager, guided me through the room’s wonders: 1,400 specimens in total, from a megalodon tooth fossil to a king cobra head in a jar.
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Priest → guide → jar
“We have birds of prey up front – large bones and fossils on the left – reptiles are all the way at the back,” she explained.
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she → have → back
At the end of one aisle, on the lowest shelf, I found a small, stuffed alligator.
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I → find → alligator
“He’s missing a few toes,” Priest warned me.
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Priest → miss → me
The natural history museum’s taxidermy library grew out of a loan program that started in the 1920s, to bring “nature cabinets” to local schools around San Diego.
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that → grow → Diego
Some of these old kits are still on display – like a wooden box filled with mineral samples, with a type-written guide inside that looks like it’s from the 1940s.
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it → fill → 1940s
Sometime in the early 2000s, the museum opened up the program so that anyone who was interested could borrow the museum’s collection of specimens.
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who → open → specimens
While it’s common for American natural history museums to offer scientific kits for schoolteachers, having a specimen loan program open to the general public is unique, said Elizabeth Merritt, a trends expert at the American Alliance of Museums.
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Merritt → ’ → Museums
The San Diego program appears to be the only one of its kind in the United States.
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program → appear → States
It would be easy for museums to offer a similar program, Merritt noted: “There are lots of kinds of natural history specimens that are incredibly common, and quite often natural history museums will have a bucket of them around.”
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museums → offer → them
A spokesperson for the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, which has a collection of 145.8m specimens and objects, called the San Diego program “certainly intriguing”.
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which → have → program
The “Nature to You” program does fit into a larger pattern, Merritt said: many American museums are trying to open their collections to the public in new and untraditional ways, she said, a trend she calls the “distributed museum”, which started around 2014, at the same time as the rise of the tech “sharing economy”.
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which → fit → economy
The San Diego library’s customer experience is seamless: a cluster of sturdy plastic carts waits near the door, so that members can wheel them up and down the aisles, “grocery style”, as Priest put it, taking bats or bones or bobcats off the shelf and adding them to their cart.
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Priest → wait → cart
“And then we check you out,” she said.
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she → check → you
Priest readily identifies the predator mammals as the most coveted species: a large coyote is No 1, followed by bobcats and foxes, and then a stuffed sea otter reclining on her back with a sea urchin in her paws.
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coyote → identify → paws
“We call her Ophelia,” Priest said.
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Priest → call → her
Like a parent, Priest does not like to pick her own personal favorites among her taxidermy children, though she is particularly fond of a stuffed kākāpō, a flightless nocturnal parrot from New Zealand.
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she → like → Zealand
She refused to identify any of the specimens as the “least popular”, even the dead snakes coiled in jars of formaldehyde.
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She → refuse → formaldehyde
“I feel like there’s a niche or a reason for someone to check out everything,” she said.
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she → feel → everything
One of the biggest differences is that the specimens on loan have much less data associated with them.
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specimens → have → them
Their ages and origins, even their precise species, are sometimes unclear, making them much less valuable for science.
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them → make → science
When children ask whether the museum killed the taxidermized animals, Priest reassures them the animals died of natural causes.
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animals → ask → causes
“We like to say we gave them a second life,” she said.
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she → like → life
An animal in the wild might live only 10 or 20 years: “These animals have been educating kids like you for 80 to 100 years.”
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animals → live → years
While the library is open year-round, it has two major seasons, Priest told me: Halloween, when people turn to the library for holiday decor (“a lot of bats, ravens, skeletons, owls … spiders and scorpions”); and spring (
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people → have → bats
“everyone wants life cycles, baby things, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds”).
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everyone → want → cycles
In the past year, the library had 186 members, who borrowed a total of 3,807 specimens.
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who → have → specimens
Priest estimates that about 60% of the members are schoolteachers, and another 30% are educators who work for non-profits or community organizations.
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who → estimate → profits
The last 10% are “private artists, families, and individuals who just have an interest”.
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who → have → interest
Specimens have been checked out as decor for a university theater production and models for sculpture classes.
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Specimens → check → classes
One woman who works from home visited the library every two weeks to get new taxidermy to put in the background of her video calls.
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who → work → calls
“She was like: ‘It was so fun! Because my workers were always thinking, what is she going to pick out next?’” Priest said.
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Priest → think → what
During my visit, I met a series of local park rangers, all in uniform, who borrow birds and small mammals for the local nature courses they teach.
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they → meet → courses
…and 27 more, not listed.
