The Royal Ontario Museum has setup a new web cam that allows you to watch flesh eating bugs ravage a dead carcass! Granted it's in a controlled environment, so you shouldn't feel weirded out or anything, but some people do freak out at the sight of bugs gnawing on flesh.

This web cam is an interesting way to give people a behind-the-scenes look at how they clean up the skeletons that end up on display. Here's a couple of paragraphs from their press release:

For those who might wonder just how the skeletal remains of birds, squirrels and other vertebrate skeletons on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) acquire their gleam, a live webcam will for the first time allow a special glimpse into the Museum’s bug room. Not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, and only open to curatorial staff, the bug room is the area in which animal specimens are placed and where a colony of beetles eat their way through animal flesh, revealing clean bones and performing a vital task in the preparation of artifacts for display or storage. ROM website visitors are invited to watch nature in action via live webcam footage of the bug room at www.rom.on.ca/insects.php from Thursday, May 14, 2009.

The bug room is a sealed, metal-lined, climate controlled room where a series of bug species make light work of cleaning skeleton bones. This month the live webcam will show Skin Beetles (Family Dermestidae) making their way through the flesh of a Golden Eagle discovered in Ontario’s Nipissing District and donated to the ROM by the Ministry of Natural Resources. As the room must remain in total darkness to mimic the natural habitat and behavioural patterns of the bugs, the webcam that is being used to capture the bugs in action has infrared capability, resulting in a black and white image.