What museum material is best suited for genomic analysis? Can the successful next-generation hair extraction/sequencing methods that have worked well with woolly mammoth, thylacine, and other extinct mammals be extended or adjusted to work on feathers or other integumental structures, extending these types of studies beyond mammals? Or how about structures in non-hairy mammals — maybe baleen (e.g. perhaps charting the genetics of historical whale collapses)? Answers to these questions are of extreme interest to the museum community. Museum curators and technicians want to know what works and what doesn't when specimens are sampled destructively, but they often hear nothing back from samplers and nobody seems to be approaching this experimentally. Can experiments be designed, using comparatively expendable museum specimens with varying documented histories of preservation, storage, etc., to allow future museum personnel to decide which sampling risks are more likely to pay off than others?