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These flesh-eating insects offer a gruesome but important service to museums

Julia Calderone   

These flesh-eating insects offer a gruesome but important service to museums

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley is like a real-life horror flick.

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.

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