In the belly of the Natural History Museum (NHM) Vienna, where the flow of visitors stops, a different order of things begins. One that is designed to last longer than a lifetime. Feathers, needles and glass eyes lie on work tables. Bacon beetles are crawling in a box. Gal Shalev reaches in with his bare hands and digs through the insects. “Cleaning out bacon beetles” is apprentice work. The larvae gnaw every scrap of the bones until they are clean. “The beetles are like our pets,” says Shalev’s colleague Melina Haring. Shalev takes out the white bones, then they are cooked, processed, perhaps assembled into a skeleton. Fear or disgust have no place here.
