Cougar pelt among secrets prowling nature museum warehouse

This is part of aseries called Hidden Treasures that will run for several more weeks this summer, taking a look at what museums in the National Capital Region have in storage. We'll post a new story every Wednesday, and you can find themby visiting the CBC Ottawa website.

Long before Canada was a country, before the U.S. civil war broke out, and before Queen Victoria began her rule, an eastern cougar stalked its prey around Trois-Rivires, Que.

Today its thick pelt and skull are housed in a grey steel cabinet inside a Gatineau, Que., storage facility, along with the rest ofthe Canadian Museum of Nature's vast collection of itemsthe public rarelygetsto see.

The eastern cougar specimen was collected in 1828 by a long defunct organization called the National History Society of Montreal, whichlater donated it to the Ottawamuseumin 1913.

Curator offers peek at rare cougar pelt not currently on display

8 years ago

Duration 1:40

Curator Kamal Khidas shows off a rare cougar pelt that's kept in the museum's vast storage facility.

Kamal Khidas, the nature museum's curator of vertebrate zoology, saysthere's a lot of present-day science that can be done with the decades-oldspecimen.

Cougars sometimes called mountain lions or pumas are virtually extinct in eastern Canada, though isolated reports of eastern cougar sightings persist.

If one is ever found, the 190-year-oldpelt and skull couldprovide a useful comparison.

"It has a historical value and a scientific value," Khidassays. "It was used for DNA analysis. That is why it has a very high scientific value."

But the cougar is just the tip of an enormous iceberg. The museum's storage facility has row after row afterrowof steel cabinets and shelves housing fossils, bones and pelts from a wide variety of creatures.

"We have about 14 to 15 million specimens here that we preserve in this facility," Khidas says. "From this collection we select a very tiny fraction to display downtown."

The Gatineau facility is opened once a year for an open house, but the rest of the time the collection sits in the dark, waiting forthe researchers who needit.

While the museum is an important educational tool, a lot of people don't know it operatesan essential research facility, which is why they hold onto such a large collection.

"We have a good facility here that helps in preserving for many centuries," Khidas says.