Museum animals are distinct from others because they receive the beautifully severe honor of becoming specimens after biological death. For each taxidermy animal on display in museums, thousands of others hide away in storage facilities. The reconstruction of the lives of individual animals in museums is daunting and often impossible to chart fully. But many animal bodies that survive or once existed in museums deserve biogeographies.

Some museum scholars are studying individual animal specimens. The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (Alberti 2011), for instance, examines the individual material lives and afterlives of seven museum animals. Some of them had names, such as Alfred the gorilla. Others had none. One study in The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie examines the biogeography of a bird species commonly known as the hen harrier. “The Biogeogeographies of a Hollow-Eyed Harrier” is inspired by a desiccated specimen of a harrier found in the Hunterian Zoological Museum in Edinburgh and retells the fascinating story of the life of the harrier specimen through images of the bird (drawings and photos) and other forms of interdisciplinary research (Patchett, Foster, and Lorimer 2011; Foster and Lorimer 2012).