By JOSHUA HINTON, Senior Reporter
Up some concrete stairs and through a glass door, then up another flight of stairs, then down a flight of stairs and down a short and desolate hallway sits a pair of dark wooden doors.
Through the threshold and down two steps is the Natural History Museum in the Jesse Dunn Building at Northwestern.
Behind a desk sits Heather Negelein, a third-year English student and a volunteer museum guide. Thus begins an adventure through the museum.
The museum consists of mostly taxidermy animals with a few skeletons throughout the exhibits, Negelein said.
“Professors in the past have gone on exhibitions to procure some of these exhibits,” she said.
Walking further into the museum, there is a jawbone four to five feet long with teeth the size of a fist and what looks like a spade shovel protruding from the front.
“Personally, I really like some of the skeletons,” Negelein said. “We’ve got these jaws from a mastodon, and I always thought their shovel teeth were fun.”
Venturing farther in through stone columns and large stone arches, there sits a glass and wood showcase.
“This is one of the things I really like that we have, the skeleton of the two-headed snake,” Negelein said.
“Obviously, it didn’t live very long.”
At the bottom of the showcase in the foreground sits a small two-headed snake skeleton, coiled and heads raised, seemingly ready to strike the viewer.
At the very back of the room, in a bricked-over fireplace, sits a gray wolf.
The wolf seems small when compared to all the animals around.
“The gray wolf is my personal favorite,” Negelein said. “I just like wolves.”