The basement of Castetter Hall is home to several dead animals, whose heads hang from the walls and lie in piles on the floor.
All of the animals are stuffed, and all of them are part of the mammal collection of the Museum of Southwestern Biology.
Bill Gannon, manager of the collection, said most of the large specimens were wild animals killed by game hunters and later donated.
"All of them basically have come from people who just want to get them out of their house, and want to give them to someplace where they would be useful," he said.
Gannon said the mammal collection is one of the top 10 largest collections in the world, and the fifth largest in the Western hemisphere.
Jason Malaney, a graduate student who works in the museum, said the collection has about 140,000 animals. He said the collection has a specimen of every mammal in New Mexico - except a human.
One specimen in the collection is the rare skin of an Asian cat. Although Gannon could not remember the name of the cat, he remembered how the museum came across it.
A woman was going through her attic when she came across the skin, which her husband had collected or had traded for during WWII, he said. She took it to the museum to have it identified.
Gannon said by using photographs, a member of the museum identified the skin as one belonging to a species that had since gone extinct, and acquired the skin for the mammal collection.
Joe Cook, a curator, said the animals are an archive of information for biologists.
"It's like a library, and each one of these specimens is a book," he said.
Cook said the collection is used for research and to teach students about diversity in species and between species.
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He said one of his favorite examples of how useful the mammal collection has been is the role it played when hantavirus appeared in 1993. One of the questions that arose once the virus was traced back to deer mice was whether it was a new virus or if it had existed before.
He said biologists used samples from the mammal collection to trace the disease back to deer mice in 1978.
Gannon said the collection has individual specimens from the 1890s, and small series of specimens from as early as 1935.
Cook said the collection, and others like it, plays a critical role in researching past changes in animal populations, measuring changes that are happening, and predicting future changes.
In order to detect changes in a species, a base measurement for that species must be established, which cannot be done without large collections of specimens, he said.
Samples from the mammal collection are being used for research in 20 doctoral dissertations around the country, Cook said.
The animals in the basement of Castetter Hall are in the process of being moved to the Center of Environmental Research and Art, where the bulk of the collection is stored.
Malaney said the public can only see the collection if they are doing research.
"Random people can't just walk in and start looking through specimens," he said.
Anyone who wants to see animals in a museum should go to the Natural History Museum in Old Town, he said.
