I had a wonderful visit, perhaps even pilgrimage, to see the skeleton of a camel named Topsy in the Mammalogy Collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
My sincere thanks to Dr. Shannen Robson, manager of the Mammalogy Collection, who was incredibly responsive to my interest in Topsy. She generously spent an entire morning with Chris and me, showing us not only Topsy, but giving us an epic tour of the specimen preparation and storage areas at the museum. Dr. Robson’s interest in connecting with artists around the collection was more than I could have ever hoped for.
The museum has a super post about Topsy’s probably sensationalized but nonetheless imagination-capturing biography that includes being one of the original camels imported by the Army in the 1850’s, time spent in circuses, zoos and early motion pictures as the 19th century turned to the 20th, before finally expiring at 100 years-old in the Griffith Park Zoo in the early 1930’s and being sent to the NHMLAC. Regardless of the veracity of the details, it's clear she had a difficult life, as revealed in serious spinal injuries to her skeleton. Also, as Dr. Robson put it, she has been working hard as a specimen in the collection for nearly 100 years, waiting patiently for the needs of science following her death in 1934. Dr. Robson explained that due to the La Brea Tarpits, the museum’s focus has always been on paleontology. As such, modern animals like Topsy appear infrequently in the collection, and are mostly used as references for prehistoric finds from the Tarpits.
This project has been in large part about the vital role of repositories in preserving evidence, and the different modes of evidence contained within the story—from the living evidence of the ancient creosote rings in the Lucerne Valley, to the 1863 photographs of Rudolph D’Heureuse.
Pulling out the five wooden boxes in a cabinet holding Topsy’s skeleton and getting to hold those remains was a tangible experience of the forms of physical evidence conserved in natural history museums, and the truly wondrous evolutionary history revealed in an “ordinary but extraordinary” camel like Topsy.
All photographs in the post are of the specimen Topsy made in June, 2025 at the Natural History Museum Los Angeles County’s Mammalogy Collection. Special thanks to the museum and to Collections Manager, Mammalogy, Dr. Shannen Robson.