Critter People

With a total of 13 students this must be the smallest graduate schools in the U.S.

From the NYT...

Beyond the noisy throngs marveling at the dinosaurs, the dioramas and the immense blue whale, up on the fifth floor where visitors are not allowed, the American Museum of Natural History takes on an entirely different character.

The neatly labeled metal lockers that line the hallway are much like the stacks of a research library, except that instead of books there are many of the museum’s millions of specimens, from ants in amber to dry-mounted birds. Signs point the way to invertebrates, entomology, ornithology. Here, it is the quiet home of the Richard Gilder Graduate School, whose 13 students are earning doctorates in the specialized field of comparative biology, teasing out what fossils from the Gobi Desert and leeches and frogs have to reveal about the evolutionary tree of life. The museum is the first in the nation accredited to offer a doctorate in its own name.