"We want this speciman to be just like this 500 years from now."

Now, cataloguing is done digitally, but the museum still has logs from as long as 100 years ago.

"Now we can get DNA from little snips of skin-a square millimeter-from specimens collected in Oklahoma Indian territory in the 1800s. The person who collected the specimens and preserved them had no idea what DNA was or what it could be used for," Stanley says.