The Frozen Zoo

As species disappear, natural history’s future is put on ice
By Megan Ogilvie
· Photographs courtesy of Craig Chesek, American Museum of Natural History
Field Notes · From the November 2006 magazine
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Feinstein thinks of the lab as an ark. In her imagination, the bar-coded vials contain more than frozen cells. Entire animals are preserved inside, protect­ed for the future. But this ark is no wooden boat — it’s a gleaming space-­craft. “In science fiction, there’s a popular setting called a generation ship,” she explains. To escape annihilation, a society dispatches a representative crew on a long journey to a safer world. “But they’re not the people who get there, and they’re not the people who benefit. In the end, it’s the future generations who land on a distant planet, and everything is fine.”
Ogilvie is a health reporter at the Toronto
Star. This is her first piece for The Walrus.
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