Here at the MVZ Archives, I’ve just uploaded the finding aid to the Ward C. Russell papers onto the Online Archive of California (OAC). Russell began his employment with the MVZ in 1929 as a temporary fill-in. He would go on to stay for roughly 40 years as a preparator and collector. He is credited as being responsible for bringing the Dermestid beetle approach to cleaning specimen bones to the Museum, a practice that continues to this day. Indeed, this site notes: “One of the first references to the use of Dermestid beetles in the preparation of skeletons for scientific study was by Ward Russell in the Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 28, pp. 284-87, 1947.”
You can access the finding aid to the Ward C. Russell papers here. We now have 25 finding aids that you can access on OAC’s site to aid you with your research.
Ward C. Russell’s tool cabinet, recently discovered in MVZ’s prep lab