'One Of A Kind' Collection Of Animal Eyeballs Aids Research On Vision Problems

"There is a little room at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that is filled with the eyeballs of animals — everything from the duck-billed platypus to the two-toed sloth to the boa constrictor."

"'We think we're the largest collection of animal eyeballs,' says Dick Dubielzig, who founded the Comparative Ocular Pathology Laboratory of Wisconsin in 1983, but he admits that this is hard to prove. 'Maybe we should go to the Guinness people and see if they have an answer to that.'"

"If there's a bigger collection out there, though, he has never heard of it. And every day, the mail brings about 20 more specimens to the lab. 'About two-thirds of what we get are globes,' Dubielzig says. 'That means the whole eyeball.'"

"The collection now has more than 56,000 eye specimens. Most are from dogs, cats and horses — sent in by vets who wanted help diagnosing eye disease. But the lab also has about 6,000 specimens from more exotic species."