Ice Baby (Orang-utan)

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Museum freezers are common places of temporary storage for Natural History collections. Often, specimens come into the Museum far faster than they can be prepared, so domestic deep freezers play an important part in preserving valuable but perishable items until funds and staff time permit more formal treatment.

Never one to turn down an endangered species, the museum was asked if we could use a baby orang-utan. The small orange bundle of plastic sat in the freezer flanked by tuis, seabirds and other miscellaneous frosted fauna. Incidentally, these freezers emit a very particular organic odour; slightly sweet, mildly metallic and distinctly dead.