Shortly after the institution opened in 1895, founder Andrew Carnegie noted that the Carnegie Museum of Natural History already had begun to outgrow its three exhibition rooms.
Today, the museum has 22 million objects -- fossils, dinosaur bones, insect specimens, American-Indian beadwork -- in its collection. Fifty thousand of those are on display at its Oakland facility.
The Edward O'Neil Research Center houses 55,000 objects on the top floor alone, including major research collections from Central Africa, China and Japan, Australia, South America and North America. The latter includes the Arctic, Southwest Plains and Pacific Northwest Coast.
Three major collections from South America were each gathered by research associates at Pitt as part of their graduate work. Italian missionary and anthropologist Giovanni Saffirio, who lived among the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon Basin of Brazil, brought back 500 artifacts and another 800 drawings done in the early '80s. He used the money from the transaction to buy medicine for the tribe.
Some items in the collection have been returned to American Indian tribes under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
One such case, in 2000, involved 326 "unassociated funerary objects" that were believed to have been removed from Indian graves in Cayuga tribal lands in New York.
Other prizes in the collections include:
"The Civil War aged him terribly," says Deborah Harding, collection manager of the Section of Anthropology. "They would have slapped plaster of Paris right on his face, put some grease on it."
"He was in the artillery," Harding says. "These are calipers for determining elevation."
