A train of llamas and a team of researchers trudge up the cold, rainy slopes of the Olympic Mountains. The llamas carry 300 traps and one week of camping and rain gear. The hikers’ destination is beyond the reach of any vehicle, and their purpose is study.

Once they have caught their specimens, they bring them back to the Burke museum to study and preserve them. First, they skin them and remove most of the outer layers of flesh. Next, the specimens are put into a tank containing a flesh-eating beetle colony, where they are nibbled down to the bone. Finally, after a last bit of cleaning, the specimens are ready to become a part of the mammalogy collection at the Burke.

The collection is stored in a room decorated with the mounted heads of everything from gazelles to lions. There, I met Jeff Bradley, the mammalogy collections manager, who told me it houses about 54,000 species of mammals and is used mainly for research purposes.

A mounted wolverine stands crouched and snarling in one corner, and a whale skull about two or three times my size sits on a counter.

Not far away is the room where these animals are skinned and prepared to be fed to the beetles. A man was skinning a dead seal, his hands encrusted with its blood, and the metal tray he was working on full of the chunks of flesh and skin he had cut away with a small knife.

Next, I saw the flesh-eating beetle colony. The little black beetles and their larvae were scurrying around boxes full of tissue and various carcasses. The metal container where they were housed reeked with their stench. Bradley told me that only the larvae eat flesh, and that the adults live only to lay more eggs. The doors, and various other areas in the collection, had sticky traps to contain the beetles.

The mammalogy collection will be displaying some of its specimens Nov. 22, and it is definitely worth checking out. Although flesh-eating beetles and a graveyard’s worth of skulls just sound scary, the mammals of this collection are truly an educational eye-opener.

Reach columnist Chaitra Sriram at features@dailyuw.com.