The study of animal life—the ceaseless urge to classify, understand, and master the myriad forms that animate the surface and depths of the Earth—traces its ancestry to ancient philosophers, whose quills etched the first schema into the darkness of natural ignorance. At Miskatonic University, the Department of Zoology continues this heavy inheritance, attending not only to the visible parade of invertebrate and vertebrate creatures, but to the eternal tension between what may be dissected beneath our lamps and what can never be fully revealed to human intellect.
Within these halls, students are initiated into the rigors of zoological science, receiving instruction that ranges from the most minute anatomical analysis to broader investigations that prepare them for the solemn and challenging disciplines of medicine and pharmacy. The department’s laboratories—spacious chambers steeped in the faint, immutable odor of preservation and inquiry—are devoted chiefly to vivisection and dissection, their instruments arranged with an order that belies the true uncertainty of what each study may uncover.