Hidden right in Wilmington, Delaware, the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science houses a true treasure: one of North America’s largest and most important mollusk collections. What started with the curiosity of founder John E. du Pont and legendary malacologist R. Tucker Abbott has grown into a research powerhouse with more than 2.3 million shells from every corner of the globe. From deep-sea cephalopods to bright, delicate land snails, each specimen tells a story of exploration, discovery, and decades of scientific passion.
Thanks to the dedication of curators, researchers, and volunteers, this collection has become an incredible resource for science. Generous donations, global expeditions, and careful cataloging have brought in treasures from the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, South America, and beyond. Digitization projects supported by the National Science Foundation have made thousands of records searchable online, putting Delaware on the map as a key player in global biodiversity research.
What makes this collection truly extraordinary is its connection to people. Museum staff have shared their love of mollusks through exhibits, programs, shell clubs, and partnerships with students and researchers for decades. From the original “Hall of Shells” to today’s Oceans and Delaware ecosystems galleries, visitors get unforgettable views of the beauty and diversity of mollusks.
Mollusk Curators at the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science. 2. R. Tucker Abbott. 3. Rüdiger Bieler. 4. Paula M. Mikkelsen. 5. Timothy A. Pearce. 6. Kevin J. Roe. 7. Elizabeth K. Shea
6,000 Birds to the Scientific Collections from Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research
There are many wildlife rehabilitation centers across the United States that care for sick, orphaned, and injured wildlife with the goal of returning them to the wild once healed. Licensed rehabilitators are highly skilled, but the reality is that not all patients are able to survive their injuries. Vertebrates like birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are often hit by cars, attacked by pets, and collide with windows.
The Delaware Museum of Nature and Science (DelMNS) has a wonderful, long-standing partnership with Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research (Tri-State), a local powerhouse in avian rehabilitation serving the Mid-Atlantic region. Tri-State donated their first bird to the museum in 1982, a few years after they opened their full-time clinic — and the partnership has never waned. Over the last 40 years, about 6,000 birds admitted to Tri-State, but that did not survive their ailments — including birds found injured outside of Delaware, in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, and New York — have been prepared as specimens for the museum’s scientific collections.
Tri-State staff visiting scientific collections, December 2024Tri-State staff visiting scientific collections, December 2024
Many of the DelMNS specimens donated by Tri-State have fascinating and unique histories. For example, in 2013, a federally-banded American Goshawk (Astur atricapillus) was brought to Tri-State after it was wounded in an altercation with another hawk at Little Creek Wildlife Area, Kent County, Delaware. The museum’s Collections Manager of Birds, Ashley Kempken, learned from the USGS Bird Banding Lab that the goshawk had been banded the previous fall in Cape May, New Jersey, by the Cape May Raptor Banding Project, and was apparently overwintering in Delaware.
In 2022, a Masked Booby (Sula dactylatra) was brought to Tri-State after it was found on the beach at Fenwick Island, Sussex County, Delaware, but soon succumbed to its illness. This was Delaware’s first state record and the first specimen of this species from the northeastern United States. The study skin, spread wing, frozen tissues, and parasites (feather lice) are now preserved in the museum’s scientific collection and available to researchers (Halley, 2022). Thanks to our historic partnership with Tri-State, sick and injured birds that were unable to return to the wild are given a second “life” in the DelMNS collection, where they provide benefits to science and education.
“Tri-State Bird Rescue is deeply grateful for the incredible long-standing partnership with the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science,” says Autumn Reiter, Executive Director, Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research. “This collaboration has been instrumental in advancing our shared mission of wildlife conservation. Together, we have made significant strides in bird rescue and rehabilitation as well as public education, teaching a diverse audience about the integral role birds play in the ecosystem. We extend our heartfelt thanks to the museum for their unwavering support, commitment, and dedication over the years, and we look forward to continuing this vital partnership for many more years to come.”
Tri-State staff visiting scientific collections, December 2024Tri-State staff visiting scientific collections, December 2024
In September 2018, staff from the Delaware Museum of Natural History brought the skull of a juvenile humpback whale, as well as several other pieces of the skeleton, to the museum for exhibit and educational use. The bones were all that remained of a young humpback whale that died at sea and washed ashore in April 2017 at Port Mahon, DE. Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control moved the corpse to coastal state land near Pickering Beach, where it could decompose undisturbed.
When museum staff heard about the whale, they thought it would make an interesting addition to the reimagined museum. Bringing a piece of this size to the museum was a task with equally large challenges, which many of the staff never imagined they would undertake. Starting in mid-2017, museum staff kept an eye on the whale, secured permits, and starting in June 2018 began bringing a portion of the skeleton back to the Museum as new additions to the exhibit collection.
“We are holding the bones in trust for the public,” says Shea. “If we decide in the future not to interpret them or to not do whale programming, then we have to give them back. They go back to NOAA.”
Museum scientists inspected and measured the whale’s bones in June 2018.
The Logistics of Moving a Whale
Deciding to bring the whale to the museum raised a series of questions. How would the staff move a several hundred pound skull? How would they clean the bones? And how would the bones be exhibited?
Most of the whale’s vertebrae were easy for them to obtain because these bones hadn’t sunk very deep into the sand near Pickering Beach over the course of the year. However, in order to obtain the skull, the staff would need to leverage it out of the sand. How much flesh would still be attached to underside of the skull when they did so was something Shea says they couldn’t predict.
Over the course of many weeks and multiple site visits, the staff developed a plan to move the skull, including wedging pieces of wood under the skull to lift it out of the sand and onto its side. Then, they used a pressure washer powered by a generator to wash the skull’s underside before moving it to a clean location on the beach where it could finish decaying. Chris Hayden, the Museum’s Director of Maintenance and the key architect behind the plan to move the skull, set up a pump system to draw water from the Delaware Bay into a filtration system to supply the pressure washer. Once the skull was free of the sand and clean, it was carried across the beach to a wood palette where the skull sat while waiting to be finally moved to the museum.
Chris Hayden, the museum’s Director of Facilities, created a system using bay water to clean the skull.
At 8 by 11 feet, the skull was too large to fit in an ordinary pickup truck. To bring it the sixty miles to the museum, Hayden and his team moved the skull onto a flat trailer pulled by a truck. On the way north, the team stopped at the Cartanza Grain Elevator to weigh the skull: 280 lbs., not counting the jawbones.
We wanted to know how much the skull weighed, but our scales weren’t big enough. On the way back from Pickering Beach, we took it to Cartanza Farms to weigh. The result: 280 lbs.
The bones needed to be cleaned and prepared before being used for exhibits, educational programs, or storage within the collections. While museum staff had experience cleaning and treating smaller bones, none of them had worked with a whale skeleton before. “We have learned that whale bones can leak oils for many, many years,” said Elizabeth Shea, Ph.D., the museum’s Director of Collections and Curator of Mollusks. “So we need to do what we can to minimize that.”
To help make these challenges more manageable, the staff decided to only obtain a portion of the skeleton, including the skull, the right jawbone, vertebrae from three different sections of the spine, and several pieces from the flipper. Shea says they chose pieces that could be used for education and what would captivate visitors.
The smaller bones, such as the vertebrae, were stored in freezers to rid them of insects that could damage the collections and later cleaned by museum staff.
The jawbone and skull were too large to fit in either the freezers or the bug room and were temporarily stored in a shed built specifically to hold the bones. In March 2021, the museum brought in an expert, Dan DenDanto from Whales and Nails, who took both pieces back to his facility in Maine to clean and prepare them for exhibit. Whales and Nails articulates whale skeletons for museums and educational institutions.
Telling a Whale’s Story…and a Delaware Story
Bringing the whale to the museum involved more than just physically transporting it to its new home. Museum staff wanted to tell the whale’s story through exhibits and interpretation.
“My hope is that we can have a story to go with the whale,” says Helen Bilinski, the museum’s Director of Exhibits. The museum’s humpback whale was one of five that washed ashore in Delaware between 2016 and 2017. Understanding how it died is one place for the staff to start in uncovering the whale’s story. Shea says they’ve requested the whale’s autopsy from the Marine Education, Research, and Rehabilitation Institute (MERR), who attended to the whale when it washed ashore.
When NOAA designates an “unusual mortality event,” they organize a group of outside scientists to help NOAA’s Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events research the cause for the event. The Atlantic humpback whale study is still ongoing. Our whale is one of eight in Delaware who died during this UME.
Beyond a closer look at these deaths, Bilinski says the whale can also tell a story of “life happening off the coast of Delaware that few people know about.”
Populations of humpback whales from Maine and Canada pass offshore the entire east coast as they migrate to the West Indies to breed and give birth and back north to feed. However, in a 2002 study published in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management, a group of scientists suggested that the Mid-Atlantic could also act as an additional feeding ground for humpback whales.
The museum staff hopes the whale will help them better tell the story of Delaware’s coastal waterways. “The estuary we live on—the Delaware Bay—is a really important estuary,” says Shea. “The land masses we all live on are a third of what the world has to offer. So there’s a lot out there in the oceans we need to be talking about.”
Take a look at the Oceans exhibits, featuring our juvenile humpback whale skull, in the Alison K. Bradford Global Journey Gallery. The whale exhibit is sponsored by M&T Bank.
This is an updated version of an article written by Lindsay Townsend, originally published on the Delaware Museum of Natural History website in October 2018.
