Have you ever looked at a bison from inches away, marveled at the strange shape of an echidna, or seen what a wallaby really looks like?

Those opportunities are right here on the Iowa State campus, but few take advantage.

The newly remodeled zoology and entomology teaching museum in the basement of the Science Hall I has been home to a collection of bird and animal specimens for longer than most people on campus can remember, with one exception. James Dinsmore, the “unofficial spokesman” for the museum, is an animal ecology professor here.

Dinsmore said he has had an interest in the museum and its history since he was a student here.

“I can remember working on it when I was an undergrad back in the early 60s,” he said. “Some of the stuff was old back then.”

Tropical birds and penguins, a giant anteater, a duck-billed platypus and a bison that dwarfs a woodchuck at his feet are all part of the collection. The collection contains species that are only found in Africa, South America or Australia and native Iowa creatures.

The bulk of the donated collection came in 1944 from Oscar “Mike” P. Allert.

Allert, an amateur hobbyist, collector and taxidermist, spent 30 years building up his bird collection.

He showed his works in a private museum attached to his house in Giard, and would give impromptu lectures to hundreds of students, teachers and passerbys, not to mention the professional ornithologists who came to study or exchange rare specimens.

One of the most interesting museum stories concerns the white pelican identified with a quill-inked sign that says “William T. Hornaday, 1878.” Though Hornaday only attended ISU for a short time, he went on to become one of the foremost conservationists of the early 1900s.

Dinsmore said the collection is still used today. Biological illustrators use the mounted animals as models, he said, and the museum is used as a resource for students and teachers, as well as for the occasional grade school class.

“It provides a very valuable resource for all students to see some diversity of life,” he said.

The museum has been renovated a couple of times. The Animal Ecology Department recently finished a remodeling project that “shook up” the museum.

“Some of the stuff was moved, given away or thrown out,” Dinsmore said. “A lot of the primate stuff — skeletons of gorillas, orangutans and others — went to the anthropology department in Curtiss Hall when they expressed an interest in it.”

Many of the specimens date from the late 1800s. Dinsmore said it’s hard to see them gradually disappear, but it’s probably inevitable.

For endangered animals like the river otter or the extinct passenger pigeons, he said, the museum provides a last vestige for the preservation of knowledge about these animals.

“A lot of this stuff is irreplaceable, but there is always going to be change, and things get phased out,” he said. “It would be a shame if all the knowledge and work gathered here just fades onto memory.”