Keeping creature company
José Rosado has spent the past three decades in the basement of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology with more than 300,000 formerly crawling, slithering, snaking, swimming specimens. And he couldn’t be happier. “It’s interesting to get paid to do something you love so much,” said the museum’s longtime curatorial associate in herpetology, who oversees its collection of amphibian and reptile samples, as well as two live lizards and a boa. As a child growing up in East Harlem, N.Y., Rosado loved animals and spent his free time in New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He admired the museum’s scientific staffers clad in white lab coats, and determined to become one of them. And he did. After studying biology at City University of New York, Rosado went to work in the Museum of Natural History’s herpetology department. When a job opened up at Harvard three years later, he applied, was offered the spot,...