These flesh-eating insects offer a gruesome but important service to museums
Oct 28, 2015, 23:04 IST
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Hoards of flesh-eating beetles have been multiplying there for nearly 100 years with a gruesome but necessary task: to delicately chew the flesh off of hundreds of dead animal carcasses so that museum scientists can preserve them for their collections.
KQED took a look inside the museum's "Library of Life" collection and recorded highly detailed time-lapse photography of Dermestes vulpinus, or to the lay (or dead person), flesh-eating beetles, carefully stripping animal carcasses to the bone.