Greg Schneider scans rows upon rows of liquid-filled glass jars containing coiled snake specimens, just a portion of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology's reptile and amphibian collection believed to be the largest held by any research institution in the U.S. thanks to a recent donation. The museum this fall acquired tens of thousands of reptile and amphibian specimens from Oregon State University, many of which are snakes.
Schneider has yet to complete the painstaking process of cataloging the new material, but estimates it contains around 30,000 snakes. He said that would give Michigan a total of between 65,000 to 70,000 of the slithering vertebrates, surpassing collections at the Smithsonian in Washington, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the University of Kansas. Some of the specimens housed at the museum prior to the Oregon State donation predate the Civil War.