April 10, 2025 • 9 mins
There's a curious power in small things, as today's tour will prove.
Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of
time at museums, whether it's geology, science, arts, or general history.
There are few places like a good museum for immersing
yourself in the past. At their most cynical, they are
tax havens for rich donors, but at their best they
provide centers for culture, learning and research. If this show
(00:56):
has taught me anything over the years, it's that the
past is still very much alive in small, tangible ways,
because life leaves behind evidence from the fossils of the
dinosaurs to the footprints of small creatures walking through your backyard,
and all that evidence requires intensive cataloging and studying from many,
many people. But it's not just people who work at museums.
(01:18):
Some of their work is done by colleagues that aren't
exactly human. I'd like to introduce you to the strangest
employee of many natural history museums, a creature called the
dermisted beetle. These small bugs have been part of museum
preservation for over a century, and their function is a
delicate one. You see, animal bones can be incredibly fragile,
(01:39):
and cleaning them with man made tools would likely damage
or destroy precious specimens. It's possible to use boiling water
to clean individual bones, but it's a labor intensive process
and it contains many opportunities for human error. So what
museums do is unleash a small army of dermistids on
animal carcasses and let them do the work for them.
(02:00):
Both larvae and fully grown beetles eat the flesh from
the bones until they're spotless and ready to exhibit. It's
the larvae that are particularly effective, leaving even these smallest
bones without a scratch on them. It's not a perfect process,
and sometimes museum employees need to use tricks to entice
the creatures to feed on these animal parts, and these
(02:20):
tricks include drying out animal carcasses or painting less appetizing
meat with things like bacon grease. Now, it's not definitively
known where this practice started, but some theorized that the
first dermisted beetles used in a museum were in Kansas
University in eighteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
There they were.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Employed by a man named Charles Dean Bunker to clean
full skeletons for study. But given how widespread the practice
has become, it's very possible that Bunker was not the
first man to attempt using bugs to clean bones. What
makes dermisted beetles especially useful is that they're surprisingly picky
eaters for what they do. They won't touch anything that's
been preserved like fur, feathers or organs, and they also
(03:01):
don't touch anything that's been treated with formaldehyde. Therefore, the
chances of them damaging completed exhibit pieces is very low.
In the wild, Dermistid beetles are a little bit more problematic, though.
They appear wherever there is carrion, and sometimes they appear
in places where there is no carrion at all. Certain
strains of dermistids are fond of violin strings, causing stress
(03:23):
to musicians all over the world. They're called bow beetles,
nesting on the strings that are made with animal guts.
The regularity with which they appear on dead bodies left
in nature proves useful in forensics too. When a decomposing
human body is found in the wilderness, forensic analysts can
use the life cycle of the beetles as a way
of determining the time of death. It's easy to write
(03:45):
certain creatures off as parasites, particularly insects like dermisted beetles
that nest in rotten corpses, moldy wood, roadkill, and rank
animal flesh. But as we continue to study the ways
the natural world works, worth remembering that even the gross
little insects have a role to play, and sometimes they
(04:05):
can be the most curious of lab assistance. The three
British airmen had seen miracles in the past few days.
(04:26):
Their plane had been forced to land in Nazi occupied Belgium,
but they had narrowly avoided capture by the Germans. They
somehow lucked their way into a Belgian underground safehouse, and
now they were being told that a fearless secret operative
was coming to lead them home. As she entered the room,
though the tired airmen thought that she looked like one
miracle too many. They listened in stun silence as a diminutive,
(04:48):
dark haired young woman explained that she was now their mother,
and as their mother, it was her job to get
all three of them to safety in Spain. She left
and it was a while before one of the airmen
broke the silence. Our lives are going to depend on
a schoolgirl. Small and young as she was, Andre DeJong
was no schoolgirl. In fact, the twenty four year old
(05:09):
was the leader of the Comet Line, a secret five
hundred mile underground path from Nazi occupied Belgium to freedom
in Spain. Andrea was born in Belgium in nineteen sixteen,
and from a young age she knew that she wanted
to help her people. Her hero was Edith Cavell, a
nurse who had helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escaped German
camps during World War One. So it only followed that
(05:31):
when Germany began to invade Belgium in nineteen forty, Andre
jumped right in to help. She joined the Red Cross
as a nurse helping captured Allied soldiers, but her real
work was with the Belgian resistance. She started by bringing
British soldiers captured at Dunkirk to safe houses and getting
them disguises and fake IDs, while the soldiers were safe
for the time being, getting them back home was a
(05:53):
whole other challenge, but Andrea was determined to live up
to her hero Edith, and soon enough she and a
few like minded friends came up with the plan. They
would lead small groups of soldiers in disguise through the countryside,
taking trains, buses, even walking through fields. They'd identified sympathetic
citizens and they would use homes as safe houses, and
(06:13):
with extreme care, they would lead the soldiers five hundred
miles through France, cross the Pyrenees and get them to Spain.
They'd bring the soldiers to the British embassy in Bilbao,
and the British could get them to the British owned
Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain, and from there
they could safely be ferried or flown home. Through trial
and error, Andrea and her friends soon found that this
(06:34):
was easier said than done. To avoid German patrols, they
had to travel miles out of their way. Several conspirators
were captured, killed, or sent to concentration camps, including Andre's
own father, and it was a hard task to feed,
cloth and keep captured soldiers healthy on the long march
to Spain, Andre famously told many of the soldiers that
they would be lucky to get through it without being
(06:56):
captured or even dying. Despite all this, though, Andre's escape
route gained a reputation for being the quickest way home,
which gained the nickname the Comet Line. For two whole years,
Andre herself led dozens of expeditions to the British consulate
in Bilbao and personally saved one hundred and eighteen Allied
soldiers with each successful mission. Andre was also able to
(07:18):
smuggle information back to the Belgian resistance, but the Comet
Line came crashing to the ground in January of nineteen
forty three, when Andrea was betrayed. She had arrived in
a French Basque town just over the border from Spain.
She and three British airmen planned to spend the night
in a safe house and crossed the border in the morning,
but the group was spotted by a neighbor who alerted
(07:39):
the German authorities. Andrea and the soldiers were captured and
sent to concentration camps. But Andrea's small size and unassuming
looks saved her once again. While being questioned at Ravensbrook
concentration camp. The Gestapo refused to believe her when she
admitted that she was the organizer of the Comet Line.
They sent her into the general population of the camp,
(08:00):
where she mixed in with the other hundreds of small,
malnourished prisoners. By the time the Germans realized that she
had been telling the truth, they were unable to figure
out which of the prisoners was her. Even with their
leader captured, though the Commet Line continued to ferry another
seven hundred British soldiers to Spain. Andre DeJonge stayed at
Ravensbrook for two years until the Allies liberated the camp
(08:22):
in April of nineteen forty five. After the war, she
worked as a nurse at leper colonies in several African countries.
She passed away in two thousand and seven at the
age of ninety, after a long life spent helping other people.
While that British airmen may have worried about such a
young looking girl being the mastermind of an underground escape route,
Andrea's story is a reminder that looks can be deceiving.
(08:50):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosity's podcast. The show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
(09:12):
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
If you're anything like me, you spend a lot of
time at museums, whether it's geology, science, arts, or general history.
There are few places like a good museum for immersing
yourself in the past. At their most cynical, they are
tax havens for rich donors, but at their best they
provide centers for culture, learning and research. If this show
(00:56):
has taught me anything over the years, it's that the
past is still very much alive in small, tangible ways,
because life leaves behind evidence from the fossils of the
dinosaurs to the footprints of small creatures walking through your backyard,
and all that evidence requires intensive cataloging and studying from many,
many people. But it's not just people who work at museums.
(01:18):
Some of their work is done by colleagues that aren't
exactly human. I'd like to introduce you to the strangest
employee of many natural history museums, a creature called the
dermisted beetle. These small bugs have been part of museum
preservation for over a century, and their function is a
delicate one. You see, animal bones can be incredibly fragile,
(01:39):
and cleaning them with man made tools would likely damage
or destroy precious specimens. It's possible to use boiling water
to clean individual bones, but it's a labor intensive process
and it contains many opportunities for human error. So what
museums do is unleash a small army of dermistids on
animal carcasses and let them do the work for them.
(02:00):
Both larvae and fully grown beetles eat the flesh from
the bones until they're spotless and ready to exhibit. It's
the larvae that are particularly effective, leaving even these smallest
bones without a scratch on them. It's not a perfect process,
and sometimes museum employees need to use tricks to entice
the creatures to feed on these animal parts, and these
(02:20):
tricks include drying out animal carcasses or painting less appetizing
meat with things like bacon grease. Now, it's not definitively
known where this practice started, but some theorized that the
first dermisted beetles used in a museum were in Kansas
University in eighteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
There they were.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Employed by a man named Charles Dean Bunker to clean
full skeletons for study. But given how widespread the practice
has become, it's very possible that Bunker was not the
first man to attempt using bugs to clean bones. What
makes dermisted beetles especially useful is that they're surprisingly picky
eaters for what they do. They won't touch anything that's
been preserved like fur, feathers or organs, and they also
(03:01):
don't touch anything that's been treated with formaldehyde. Therefore, the
chances of them damaging completed exhibit pieces is very low.
In the wild, Dermistid beetles are a little bit more problematic, though.
They appear wherever there is carrion, and sometimes they appear
in places where there is no carrion at all. Certain
strains of dermistids are fond of violin strings, causing stress
(03:23):
to musicians all over the world. They're called bow beetles,
nesting on the strings that are made with animal guts.
The regularity with which they appear on dead bodies left
in nature proves useful in forensics too. When a decomposing
human body is found in the wilderness, forensic analysts can
use the life cycle of the beetles as a way
of determining the time of death. It's easy to write
(03:45):
certain creatures off as parasites, particularly insects like dermisted beetles
that nest in rotten corpses, moldy wood, roadkill, and rank
animal flesh. But as we continue to study the ways
the natural world works, worth remembering that even the gross
little insects have a role to play, and sometimes they
(04:05):
can be the most curious of lab assistance. The three
British airmen had seen miracles in the past few days.
(04:26):
Their plane had been forced to land in Nazi occupied Belgium,
but they had narrowly avoided capture by the Germans. They
somehow lucked their way into a Belgian underground safehouse, and
now they were being told that a fearless secret operative
was coming to lead them home. As she entered the room,
though the tired airmen thought that she looked like one
miracle too many. They listened in stun silence as a diminutive,
(04:48):
dark haired young woman explained that she was now their mother,
and as their mother, it was her job to get
all three of them to safety in Spain. She left
and it was a while before one of the airmen
broke the silence. Our lives are going to depend on
a schoolgirl. Small and young as she was, Andre DeJong
was no schoolgirl. In fact, the twenty four year old
(05:09):
was the leader of the Comet Line, a secret five
hundred mile underground path from Nazi occupied Belgium to freedom
in Spain. Andrea was born in Belgium in nineteen sixteen,
and from a young age she knew that she wanted
to help her people. Her hero was Edith Cavell, a
nurse who had helped hundreds of Allied soldiers escaped German
camps during World War One. So it only followed that
(05:31):
when Germany began to invade Belgium in nineteen forty, Andre
jumped right in to help. She joined the Red Cross
as a nurse helping captured Allied soldiers, but her real
work was with the Belgian resistance. She started by bringing
British soldiers captured at Dunkirk to safe houses and getting
them disguises and fake IDs, while the soldiers were safe
for the time being, getting them back home was a
(05:53):
whole other challenge, but Andrea was determined to live up
to her hero Edith, and soon enough she and a
few like minded friends came up with the plan. They
would lead small groups of soldiers in disguise through the countryside,
taking trains, buses, even walking through fields. They'd identified sympathetic
citizens and they would use homes as safe houses, and
(06:13):
with extreme care, they would lead the soldiers five hundred
miles through France, cross the Pyrenees and get them to Spain.
They'd bring the soldiers to the British embassy in Bilbao,
and the British could get them to the British owned
Gibraltar at the southern tip of Spain, and from there
they could safely be ferried or flown home. Through trial
and error, Andrea and her friends soon found that this
(06:34):
was easier said than done. To avoid German patrols, they
had to travel miles out of their way. Several conspirators
were captured, killed, or sent to concentration camps, including Andre's
own father, and it was a hard task to feed,
cloth and keep captured soldiers healthy on the long march
to Spain, Andre famously told many of the soldiers that
they would be lucky to get through it without being
(06:56):
captured or even dying. Despite all this, though, Andre's escape
route gained a reputation for being the quickest way home,
which gained the nickname the Comet Line. For two whole years,
Andre herself led dozens of expeditions to the British consulate
in Bilbao and personally saved one hundred and eighteen Allied
soldiers with each successful mission. Andre was also able to
(07:18):
smuggle information back to the Belgian resistance, but the Comet
Line came crashing to the ground in January of nineteen
forty three, when Andrea was betrayed. She had arrived in
a French Basque town just over the border from Spain.
She and three British airmen planned to spend the night
in a safe house and crossed the border in the morning,
but the group was spotted by a neighbor who alerted
(07:39):
the German authorities. Andrea and the soldiers were captured and
sent to concentration camps. But Andrea's small size and unassuming
looks saved her once again. While being questioned at Ravensbrook
concentration camp. The Gestapo refused to believe her when she
admitted that she was the organizer of the Comet Line.
They sent her into the general population of the camp,
(08:00):
where she mixed in with the other hundreds of small,
malnourished prisoners. By the time the Germans realized that she
had been telling the truth, they were unable to figure
out which of the prisoners was her. Even with their
leader captured, though the Commet Line continued to ferry another
seven hundred British soldiers to Spain. Andre DeJonge stayed at
Ravensbrook for two years until the Allies liberated the camp
(08:22):
in April of nineteen forty five. After the war, she
worked as a nurse at leper colonies in several African countries.
She passed away in two thousand and seven at the
age of ninety, after a long life spent helping other people.
While that British airmen may have worried about such a
young looking girl being the mastermind of an underground escape route,
Andrea's story is a reminder that looks can be deceiving.
(08:50):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosity's podcast. The show
was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how
Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,
which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and
(09:12):
you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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