On a hot afternoon in August, I walked out of the San Diego Natural History Museum carrying a whale rib, a leopard pelt, a taxidermized weasel and a small piece of fossilized dinosaur poop.

It felt like a heist. These were real specimens that belonged to the museum, not gift shop replicas. But for two weeks, they were mine to take home, display in my living room, even bring to events with my friends.

San Diego, California, has the only natural history museum in the US with a collection of nature specimens that they allow members of the general public to check out and take home, just like checking out books from a library.

Inside the museum, metal shelves of taxidermy fill the space floor to ceiling. Light glints off rows of plexiglass boxes: alert bobcats, their ears perked; birds posed on branches; a jackrabbit suspended in air as if in mid-leap. There are Riker cabinets filled with beetles and butterflies, shelves of pickled sea creatures and snakes in jars, and plastic bins of exotic animal pelts.

Haylie Priest, the loan program’s manager, guided me through the room’s wonders: 1,400 specimens in total, from a megalodon tooth fossil to a king cobra head in a jar.

Haylie Priest, the loan program manager at Nature to You. Photograph: Courtesy of San Diego Natural History Museum

“We have birds of prey up front – large bones and fossils on the left – reptiles are all the way at the back,” she explained.

At the end of one aisle, on the lowest shelf, I found a small, stuffed alligator. “He’s missing a few toes,” Priest warned me.

The natural history museum’s taxidermy library grew out of a loan program that started in the 1920s, to bring “nature cabinets” to local schools around San Diego. Some of these old kits are still on display – like a wooden box filled with mineral samples, with a type-written guide inside that looks like it’s from the 1940s. Sometime in the early 2000s, the museum opened up the program so that anyone who was interested could borrow the museum’s collection of specimens.

While it’s common for American natural history museums to offer scientific kits for schoolteachers, having a specimen loan program open to the general public is unique, said Elizabeth Merritt, a trends expert at the American Alliance of Museums. The San Diego program appears to be the only one of its kind in the United States.

George Lindsay, then director of the San Diego Museum of Natural History, with a young scholar, circa 1950s. The bird seen here can be checked out today. Photograph: Courtesy of San Diego Natural History Museum

It would be easy for museums to offer a similar program, Merritt noted: “There are lots of kinds of natural history specimens that are incredibly common, and quite often natural history museums will have a bucket of them around.”

A spokesperson for the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian, which has a collection of 145.8m specimens and objects, called the San Diego program “certainly intriguing”.

The “Nature to You” program does fit into a larger pattern, Merritt said: many American museums are trying to open their collections to the public in new and untraditional ways, she said, a trend she calls the “distributed museum”, which started around 2014, at the same time as the rise of the tech “sharing economy”.

The San Diego library’s customer experience is seamless: a cluster of sturdy plastic carts waits near the door, so that members can wheel them up and down the aisles, “grocery style”, as Priest put it, taking bats or bones or bobcats off the shelf and adding them to their cart. “And then we check you out,” she said. Priest readily identifies the predator mammals as the most coveted species: a large coyote is No 1, followed by bobcats and foxes, and then a stuffed sea otter reclining on her back with a sea urchin in her paws. “We call her Ophelia,” Priest said.

Like a parent, Priest does not like to pick her own personal favorites among her taxidermy children, though she is particularly fond of a stuffed kākāpō, a flightless nocturnal parrot from New Zealand.

She refused to identify any of the specimens as the “least popular”, even the dead snakes coiled in jars of formaldehyde.

“I feel like there’s a niche or a reason for someone to check out everything,” she said.

The specimens that are part of the “Nature to You” loan program are not in the same category as the museum’s 9m-specimen research collection. One of the biggest differences is that the specimens on loan have much less data associated with them. Their ages and origins, even their precise species, are sometimes unclear, making them much less valuable for science.

A young participant of the loan library’s summer camp. Photograph: Courtesy of San Diego Natural History Museum

When children ask whether the museum killed the taxidermized animals, Priest reassures them the animals died of natural causes. “We like to say we gave them a second life,” she said. An animal in the wild might live only 10 or 20 years: “These animals have been educating kids like you for 80 to 100 years.”

While the library is open year-round, it has two major seasons, Priest told me: Halloween, when people turn to the library for holiday decor (“a lot of bats, ravens, skeletons, owls … spiders and scorpions”); and spring (“everyone wants life cycles, baby things, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds”).

In the past year, the library had 186 members, who borrowed a total of 3,807 specimens. Priest estimates that about 60% of the members are schoolteachers, and another 30% are educators who work for non-profits or community organizations. The last 10% are “private artists, families, and individuals who just have an interest”.

Specimens have been checked out as decor for a university theater production and models for sculpture classes. One woman who works from home visited the library every two weeks to get new taxidermy to put in the background of her video calls. “She was like: ‘It was so fun! Because my workers were always thinking, what is she going to pick out next?’” Priest said.

Haylie Priest displays the head of a juvenile leopard, with pelt attached. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian

During my visit, I met a series of local park rangers, all in uniform, who borrow birds and small mammals for the local nature courses they teach.

“I was blown away with how many specimens that they offered to check out,” said Monica Demetry, a ranger who works at Mission Trails regional park. “I was like a kid in a candy store trying to pick out which ones.”

The taxidermy library is not a moneymaker for the museum, Priest and Eowyn Bates, a museum executive, told me. The museum fundraises to help expand the library collection: new taxidermy isn’t cheap – a coyote might cost $5,000. One of the most recent additions, a tiny raccoon, was roadkill meticulously staged by a local taxidermist.

The collection occasionally grows in other ways. People attempt to leave taxidermy to the museum in their wills, Bates said. Sometimes, people show up at the library, or even the front desk of the museum, with dead animals they think might be of use, forcing employees to politely tell them that the museum does not accept carcasses without prior arrangement.

Other times, Priest said, people call or email the loan library to say that a bird flew into their windows, and now they have its dead body in their freezer. Can the museum use it?

I was surprised to hear Priest say that she sometimes does accept offers like this, depending on the animal’s species and condition.

I kept delaying making my own taxidermy selection, because I did not want to leave. I definitely wanted a weasel, poised coyly on its toes. Priest told me it was most likely a specimen that had been on display in the museum sometime from the 1930s to the 1950s, when taxidermized animals had been displayed in large cabinets. I also wanted a modest fossil: the coprolite, millions-of-years-old dung.

As far as birds, I wanted something classy. There weren’t any pheasants, but a glass box of California quail caught my eye, which might help add a bit of “country estate” aesthetic to my minuscule California bedroom.

Visitors to the loan library collection. Photograph: Courtesy of San Diego Natural History Museum

I grabbed a massive whale rib off the bone shelf – it looked sturdy – and then went with Priest to a back corner full of dull-looking plastic bins. These were the exotic animal pelts. The elephant skin was already checked out. I bypassed the python skin, which was terrifying-looking and smelly, and marveled at the African lioness pelt, but was sold on a juvenile leopard skin, which had a full three-dimensional head and glass eyes, its mouth open in a snarl. I had to have it.

Faced with my own overloaded cart, I realized I could not fit this quantity of taxidermy in my car. I decided to put back the quail. Who was I trying to impress? A duke?

After that, checkout was smooth. Priest handed me information on how to care for the specimens (don’t seatbelt them into your car, don’t Windex the plexiglass) and when they were due back. Though the library can charge $2 per day in taxidermy late fees, they’re generally flexible if members communicate why they’re behind. In her 21 years at the museum, Bates said, she could not remember a single theft.