Credit Gretchen Henrich
The Buffalo Bill Center of the West s Youth advisory board has received a grant from the Smithsonian Institute for sage grouse conservation.
The museum youth advisory group consists of Cody high schoolers. As a Smithsonian affiliate, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West was asked to participate in the Earth Optimism Teen event. The event, which usually takes place in person, focuses on global conservation movements and identifies a problem and tries to create a solution.
Instead of participating in the event, Nathan Doerr, the Draper Natural History Museum curator, said youth were asked to come up with a project that looks at climate change, habitat and wildlife conservation. Doerr said they came across a project that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is working on in northwest Wyoming.
3:57
Early one morning, eight volunteers surrounded a table with a 400 pound grizzly bear carcass in its center. Draper Natural History Museum Assistant curator Corey Anco said they are defleshing the animal. They are removing all of the meat around the bones, all the meat around the ribs, all the meat around the vertebrae, said Anco. And they re trying to get this as clean as we can reasonably so.
Anco said once the bones are cleaned as well as possible without hurting them, the bones are then given to flesh eating beetles. They will then clean those bones to the best of their ability, he said. And they do a remarkable job with minimal or no damage at all to the skeletons as opposed to boiling it, which can really kind of break down the integrity of the skeleton.