The scene

Bone thugs in harmony After the Roscoe Village cougar’s frightening 15 minutes of fame ended in April when police shot and killed the animal, its carcass was welcomed with open arms at the Field Museum. The cougar’s final resting place will be among more than 200,000 other mammal specimens kept in the Field’s expanding catalogue. But first the 150-pound beast needed to be skeletonized. After Field employees skinned the animal and picked off the majority of its flesh, they lowered the cougar into a giant fish tank full of thousands of the museum’s smallest employees—a 40-year-old dynasty of flesh-eating beetles able to polish off bones that researchers can’t clean by hand. “Get to work,” collections manager Bill Stanley (pictured) says to a stray beetle, batting it back into the tank. “The beetles never take a break, and we never have to pay them,” he says. The cougar’s skeleton will be removed from the beetle tank after a month and filed with its pelt for preservation; its tissue will be frozen for future research. “The cougar will still be here when we are long gone,” Stanley says. But don’t look in vain for the cougar’s bones out on the museum floor; less than 1 percent of the Field’s total collection is on display.