I’m a museum technician at a natural history museum and stuff has been going missing

Something’s been happening at work lately that’s just made me feel really uneasy and I know it sounds crazy but I need to talk about it. I work as a museum technician at a natural history museum. We’re not huge, but we’ve got a pretty nice collection of objects, from a wide range of periods. We get a decent amount of visitors, mostly local school groups on compulsory field trips or tourists, but we’re no Smithsonian.

I’m one of two museum technicians on staff who are in charge of caring for the collection pieces and exhibition spaces: which sounds very impressive but really I’m a glorified cleaner. I spend majority of my time swabbing dust off pottery, updating collection files, checking pest traps and trying to negotiate with curators about their latest crazy exhibition idea and how to not totally destroy the objects in the pursuit of that. It may not be the most glamorous job, but I do enjoy it.

What I enjoy most is spending time with the different artefacts – when I get a bigger project or the museum gets a new acquisition, and I get to spend the week locked in our little labs just carefully tending to it: inputting measurements, careful cleaning, even some minor repair work if necessary. I love the physicality of getting to touch something that’s decades, sometimes even centuries old than me and wonder about the stories behind it. Wonder who the last person was to use it. Call me sentimental, but that’s my favourite part of the gig.

Anyway, this all started several weeks ago. My colleague is currently gone for a research trip and it was a pretty slow day at the end of the week – most of the regular maintenance had been completed and truthfully I was mostly trying to kill time. I was a couple of posts deep on a Museum Tech forum discussing best practices for cleaning HVAC systems when one of the floor staff poked their head into the lab.

She said there was something weird going on with one of the items in the ‘cave man’ exhibit. I bit my tongue; it was actually Middle Paleolithic, but ok. The issue lay with one of the items in a tool display: a bone knife from an early hominin excavation site in Africa. It looked like it was crumbling.

I didn’t panic immediately – it was unusual but not unheard of for pests to eat organic material, despite the fact that our museum was usually kept in immaculate condition and I had just checked this display earlier in the week.

I pulled the object out for examination – found no evidence of insect bore holes or other pest activity. I did find that any handling of the bone left imprints on the surface. Definitely weird, but not a problem for a Friday night.

I left it on my work table to tackle first thing on Monday, and when I returned to it, I found nothing but a pile of dust.

This is almost impossible: there’s nothing short of mechanical smashing that could reduce bone in the span of two days. I even checked the security camera to make sure it wasn’t a case of vandalism or some awful prank.

The weird thing is that when I looked at some of the dust underneath a microscope, I found no presence of active biodeterioration. It’s like the object just started to decay apropos of nothing. To put this in perspective, this item is one of the oldest in the museum: it’s survived for more than a million years just to what? Suddenly turn to dust? It didn’t make sense to me.

I collected as much of the bone dust as I could into a petri dish and sealed it for further study before returning to the tool exhibit to see if there might be a problem with the conditions in the exhibition space.

Two other bone tools were starting to crumble.

I informed the museum board and we’ve pulled them out of exhibit. I’ve been trying everything to stabilise them: disinfecting surfaces for any possible bacterium, consolidation using resin and animal glues, microclimate spaces but nothing is working.

I’ve been in touch with other museum techs as well, and the problem doesn’t seem to be just me: a lot of other techs are reporting issues with crumbling of bone artefacts. What’s even weirder is that it all seems to be material associated with the Paleolithic period – but not all of them. Most of my bone tools were still in tact, it was just those three.

It doesn’t make sense: how can several museums across the globe, in different climates suddenly be having the same issue?

I went to pull the original sample out to see if that would hold any answers, only to find the petri dish completely empty.

I can’t scientifically explain why any of this is happening, but amongst all of this I’ve started to notice other objects starting to crumble as well. But it’s not just the Paleo objects anymore. The other day a museum tech colleague of mine working in Egypt posted on our forum. Some of their older mummies were starting to crumble.

The bone knife isn’t just one of our oldest exhibited objects. It’s our oldest object made out of material from homo sapiens. It’s our oldest item made out of human bone. And for some reason it seems like these objects are literally crumbling into nothing.

I don’t know what’s going on but I’m freaked out and other museums around the world are as well.

Will keep you updated if I learn more