Richard Fortey’s Dry Storeroom No. 1 begins by telling us what we’ve always known and yet never quite realized, that great museums are more than simply a series of public rooms filled with display cases. Fortey, senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, opens doors marked “Staff Only” and gives us a fascinating tour of what’s usually off limits.

Here, in the museum’s “secret hinterland,” curators and scientists — Fortey’s “invisible people” — study bones and bugs, fish and fossils. Based on this laborious work in the bowels of the building, they write monographs and publish papers that lead us all to a clearer understanding of what life on this planet is really all about.

We learn something about how natural history museums were established, how they’re run, about financial imperatives, stewardship of collections, boards of trustees, benefactors, donors, and the sometimes Dickensian crew of administrators and scientists who labor away in windowless rooms and labs lined with wooden cases containing long, wide drawers.

To our great delight, Fortey opens those drawers one after the other, revealing specimens at once ordinary and bizarre — larval screw worms with their little tusks, artifacts central to the Piltdown controversy, a Martian meteorite — as we crane our necks like 4th graders on a field trip. In a tone of voice that mixes the professional and the informal (think Brian Greene or Stephen Jay Gould), Fortey makes the facts of nature thrilling, and only occasionally lets his exuberance take us too far, into the “serious stuff” of taxonomy or “cladistic phylogenies.”

These more arcane discussions, few and far between, are brief interludes in what is a remarkably global and exciting look at how a natural history museum works. We learn about Darwin’s contributions to Fortey’s institution, Captain Cook’s specimens, about some of the oldest fossils ever collected, about the Koh-i-noor diamond and its curse, about thieves, wars, threats to collections from within and without. Fortey brings us up to speed on the challenges such museums face today from a generation that knows only Jurassic Park and animatronic dinosaurs, and about how museums walk a tightrope between serving its visitors and serving the culture at large.

One of the more entertaining aspects of Fortey’s approach is his admiration for his predecessors and colleagues, some of whom are pictured standing behind extinct animals or costumed as butterflies. These stalwarts may look like Uriah Heep and work on intricate cases reminiscent of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but without their dedication, we would know — and have — a great deal less to observe and study. After all, in those hidden rooms, “the natural habitat of the curator,” where more than 50 percent of the collection never sees the light of day, specimens must be preserved from “the degradations of time” in a world where change is the strongest of all enemies.

antjlewis@yahoo.com