Watch As Taxonomists Painstakingly Clean And Assemble a Bat Skeleton

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This video, from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology, shows how a jar of bat bodies go from dish to display. Featuring some awesomely gross moments—a plastic jar full of bat corpses, flesh-eating beetles and the bat’s final, fabulous pose—the entire video is set to cheery indie music. This is basically an Apple commercial for bat preservation.

Bonus image: if you turn bats upside down, they look like they’re having a Thriller dance party.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How taxonomy helps us make sense out of the natural world
Bat Killer Confirmed

Anatomy of Preservation

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