Dr. Billy Hankins who is the museum's founder, former director, chief preparator, and curator of vertebrate zoology was quite the visionary! I met him a few months ago and he toured me around the museum and told me in very specific detail how and where he sourced each specimen in his museum's vertebrate zoology collection. Dr. Hankins also has surplus specimens off exhibit on the museum's second story and at his house as well. If you have further questions about anything at the World Museum of Natural History, please feel free to ask, and if there is anything I cant answer personally, send me a PM and maybe I can put you in touch with Dr. Hankins himself.
Regarding the displays, one of the reasons that I say he was quite a visionary was because for a majority of the specimens in his collection, he used freeze dry taxidermy instead of traditional taxidermy.
