When the Division of Entomology moved its offices and over a million insects in 2001 into state-of-the-art collection storage in Yale’s Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center , it also transferred uncurated specimens—those that had yet to be formally incorporated into the main collection. Entomologists will use anything available to store and ship insects, and many of the uncurated specimens were still in the original containers used to send them to the Peabody by collectors across the world.
Among the unique containers were:
- British Players cigarette tins from Uganda
- 1940s wooden boxes from Iraq inscribed with the logo of the “Lion of Baghdad Date Co.”
- Film canisters
- Pill boxes
- Underarm dress shield containers
- British cookie and biscuit tins from colonial Africa
- Bright red boxes of Lion Brand mosquito incense coils from Canton, China
- Helmar Turkish and Egyptian cigarette boxes with pithy Arabic quotes (interestingly enough, the cigarettes were manufactured in New Jersey in the United States)
- Lipton tea containers from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)
- And all manner of small ingenious wooden boxes
By far the most common container was the cigar box. Illustrated subjects on this collection of over 450 boxes range from whiskered gentlemen of industrial fame to bonneted ladies, Shakespearean plays, and pastoral scenes. There are many boxes from several New Haven cigar manufacturers.
The largest group of uncurated specimens from these containers was that of the papered Lepidoptera. Papering is the technique of wrapping butterfly and moth specimens flat in folded sheets of paper, typically as a triangle. This method keeps the specimen intact for laterpinning and preparation. Field pinning and the use of alcohol and freezing have replaced papering as a technique to manage collecting at scale in modern entomology.