Tucked away in the Osborne Center at UCCS lies a wildlife museum filled with stuffed mammals, bones, photos and other relics of wildlife history.

On the fourth floor of the Osborne Center for Science and Engineering lurks a wild kingdom.

Only this wild kingdom at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs is no longer so wild. Its inhabitants are rather dead. And stuffed.

The eyes of the long-stuffed mammals gaze stoically into your soul from their perch on the walls. There’s the bison from Ted Turner’s Montana ranch who fell in a chute during vaccination and broke its neck. The female mountain lion found on the side of the road. A beaver deemed a nuisance animal. A caribou donated by a student’s grandmother. A stillborn elk calf. A 2-yearold black bear who climbed a telephone pole at the Air Force Academy and touched two wires at the same time. A

peccary sporting longer fur than its domesticated pig relative. An elusive, fuzzy, white albino muskrat.

And then there are the drawers of small, stiff creatures. Lineups of mice and bat species. Study skins — the dried and preserved remains of skin and fur — of a wolverine and spotted and striped skunks. Dozens of coyote, marten and wolf skulls. Skull replicas, which you can identify due to their yellowish cast, of a giraffe, okapi and cave bear. Also the real skull of Maggie the hippo from Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. Suffering from kidney failure and other medical issues, she was euthanized at age 34, her skull donated to the museum after being cleaned and left to sit for a year.

They’ve found their final resting grounds here, the Jon C. Pigage Museum of Natural History and Wildlife Laboratory, a fluorescent-lit room filled with lab tables, where the specimens serve as a teaching collection for biology majors and other students, as well as community outreach. School teachers are welcome to bring their classes, or the specimens can be brought to classrooms. The public also is welcome to visit. The museum doesn’t have scheduled hours, but people can call and set up a time to stop by.

“They’re (mammals) so fascinating and diverse, and we could spend days studying and learning about their lives,” said UCCS assistant professor of biology and mammalogist Aaron Corcoran. “Being able to see them in person, hold them and look at their skulls and their body forms, it lets you connect with them. It lets you be really intimate.”

When the building opened in 2009, adjunct associate professor of biology Helen Pigage boxed up and schlepped specimens across campus from Centennial Hall with her husband, the man the museum is named after, who died in 2018. There were many fewer specimens back then, while the current number stands at 136 species and almost 650 specimens, including photos.

The museum was a passion project for Jon, who spent many nights searching websites, such as Skulls Unlimited International, for new specimens to purchase and add to the collection, or reaching out to organizations for donations, such as a black-footed ferret breeding center in Fort Collins. He was able to obtain three of the endangered creatures that appear poised in action on a countertop.

Skulls can run a couple of hundred bucks, depending on the quality.

“And the demand,” Corcoran said. “Certain things like wolf skulls are much more highly sought after than marten skulls. Some people just want to have a wolf skull, not necessarily a mammalogist. They just have an interest.”

Throughout the school year, groups of students hunker around the lab tables, where they peer at the taxidermied animals and skulls. They compare subtle features, such as fur on the tips of mice tails or the size of a foot. Having a specimen to learn from is important, versus only seeing an animal in a textbook.

“You can read about what does a furry ear look like. What does a light belly look like compared to a darker belly?” Corcoran said. “They’re very subtle features, but once you see them you can identify them in the field.”

The ability to come face to face with the mammals is important not only to students, but to humans in general.

“People don’t seem to have a connection with nature,” Pigage said. “People didn’t grow up on farms as they did 40, 50 or 60 years ago. If it isn’t concrete and steel walls, people don’t interact with it in many instances.”