NEW YORK (AP) – It’s not your average library collection: Bits of scorpions and snakes. Tissue from jaguars. Leeches from a hippopotamus.

And on Tuesday, officials of the American Museum of Natural History and the U.S. National Park Service signed an agreement for samples from endangered species in America’s parks to be added to the museum’s existing DNA collection.

The frozen samples provide researchers with genetic materials to study and help protect hundreds of species. The first new submissions will be blood samples from foxes in California’s Channel Islands National Park, followed by specimens from the American crocodile and the Hawaiian goose.

Underground in the laboratories of the museum, which was featured in the 2006 Ben Stiller movie “Night at the Museum,” a half-dozen metal vats cooled with liquid nitrogen can store up to 1 million frozen tissue samples. They’re stored on racks in bar-coded boxes that are linked to a computer database so they can be located in seconds.

The park service doesn’t have such a state-of-the-art facility. With this kind of DNA analysis it can better manage existing animal populations, using genetic relationships among the samples to trace animals’ movements on land and estimate population sizes.

The samples will provide researchers “with a uniform method to collect, analyze and store genetic material collected in parks,” acting National Park Service Director Dan Wenk said.