Alaska Beacon · Fairbanks, AK
Museum swap brings bones of hero dog back to Alaska
More than 100 years after he ran the longest stretches in a heroic dogsled mission to bring lifesaving medicine to snowbound Nome, Togo has returned to Alaska. Or, to be more precise, Togo’s bones have returned. The skeleton of the famous dog that led legendary musher Leonhard Seppala’s team for 261 miles of the 674-mile Serum Run in 1925, which delivered lifesaving medicine to a diphtheria-stricken Nome, is now at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks. It is a fitting resting place for Togo’s remains, said Link Olson, the museum’s curator of mammals. “He’s probably one of the most beloved dogs in the history of humankind,” Olson said. Togo’s bones, which arrived at the museum on Sept. 1, were sent as part of a trade with the Peabody Museum at Yale University. While the Alaska museum gained the remains of the famous dog, the Peabody Museum gained more than 1,000 specimens of small mammals from Cambodia, including treeshrews, a bamboo rat and microbats.