MADISON, Wis. — Tucked away in a building on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison is a vast collection of preserved animals, bugs and species that roamed our earth hundreds of years ago. It’s UW’s Zoological Museum.

Students, researchers and instructors use it for learning and teaching.

Mason Polencheck is studying microbiology and zoology. He said he’s fascinated by mud puppies, a type of salamander, and is getting ready to launch a big research project on them.

“I kind of formulated the idea of testing them for a certain disease called the chytrid fungus,” Polencheck said. “It’s detrimental to all amphibians, not just mud puppies or salamanders.”

For him, the Zoological Museum is a research jackpot. It has tons of amphibians to analyze.

The museum has cabinets and drawers filled with bones, skins and preserved animals of all kinds.

But not a lot of people know this place exists. It’s not open to the public.

“It took a matter of finding it out myself,” Polencheck said. “It’s not very widely known. It’s like an untapped and unused resource.”

Laura Monahan, the associate director of UW’s Zoological Museum, keeps track of the more than 750,000 specimens. They come from wildlife rehabilitation centers, the Department of Natural Resources and zoos.

“We partner often with the Henry Vilas Zoo because it’s right down the road, and then the Milwaukee County Zoo and the Racine Zoo,” Monahan said.

Everything in the museum is a learning tool for many fields, such as biology and history. Veterinarians from all over often request to visit in person or borrow certain specimens.

“They have vets that work on exotic animals, but they might only work on that animal one time in their whole life,” Monahan said. “So, they want to look at that skull before they go in so that they know what they’re up against.”

Monahan also teaches Introduction to Museum Studies, preparing the next generation of museum directors.

“It’s not a stuffy place where we’re just kind of sitting here with our stuff,” she said. “We want to make it available to researchers and the public as much as we can. We do have limitations because of our staff.”

The museum only has three full-time employees. They are in charge of organizing the hundreds of thousands of species in the museum, some of which are extinct. They also do some of the animal preservation themselves.

They rely on retired faculty volunteers and students to help.

“They can participate in specimen preparation, they can catalog specimens, they can label specimens,” Monahan said.

Monahan said she believes everything in UW’s Zoological Museum will be important to scientists in the future.

“I think there’s great potential for use of the museum’s specimens, and the tissue collection, to provide access to researchers for DNA and other work that they want to do,” she said.

Polencheck said he hopes to uncover new information and make a difference in the future.

“Just being able to utilize the collection, it’s opened up so many avenues for me anyway, and I think that has solidified what I want to do,” he said.