Holiday lights at the American Museum of Natural History

In addition to lighting outside, the AMNH yearly decorates an Origami Holiday Tree, complete with paper renditions of fossils, rockets, and galaxies.

Revisiting Rehousing

Here's another entry I wrote for the AMNH paleontology interns blog. To follow our progress over the course of the rehousing project, visit: perissodactyl.blogspot.com

After grueling semesters at various universities, several of the Summer 2009 interns living in the New York/New Jersey area are back at the AMNH lending a hand in the final stretch of the NSF Type Rehousing Project that’s terminating in March 2010. There is rarely a day when we don't encounter an interesting or sometimes mysterious issue associated with a specimen.

Too many mandibles:

One of the types we came across contained a terse note reading “too many mandibles” and quick inspection revealed three mandibles housed with the rest of the specimen. A veritable scavenger hunt for information ensued and it was discovered that while all three mandibles belonged to different individuals, they all had a link to the type. One jaw was figured in the publication of the type, one was labeled with the type’s specimen number, and one was a perfect fit for the maxilla of the type. Since none could be eliminated, all were rehoused with the specimen.

While there may be excitement in the future when a researcher comes across this specimen and believes that she/he is looking at a fossil of Cerberus, there won’t be any need to spend time hunting down the publication and other relevant information, since all the evidence has now been thoroughly documented and included with the specimen in storage, in the card catalogue and in PaleoCat.


Traveling the Silk Road Exhibit:

For those of you who have been following our blog entries, you may recall the week of our tour in the Department of Exhibition. During the summer we were given a sneak preview of the Traveling the Silk Road Exhibit, where we were able to see a model designed down to the smallest detail by their team of preparators.

Fortunately the Silk Road Exhibit is now open to the public! ​As you enter the exhibit you are greeted by a caravan of camels, which happen to be the same camels that we saw in their preliminary stages during the summer.

© Traveling the Silk Road, AMNH/D. Finnin

As you wander through the four cities starting in Xi’an and ending in Baghdad, you learn about the different technologies and cultures associated with the Silk Road. The exhibit highlighted key techniques used in the tedious process of silk making, and the harvesting of silk worm cocoons. Each caterpillar cocoon is made of one continuous strand of silk which is then transferred onto a loom and woven together. These looms were so sophisticated that they could be used to create intricate designs and patterns. It was amazing to have seen the beginning stages of this exhibit, and then to have had the opportunity to enjoy the incredible final result.

(This entry from the AMNH Paleontology Interns blog was written by K. Fleming, M. Blanton, and H. Moots)

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology recreated the 1950's game show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? using the museum's artifacts and pitting a team of three professors versus three students. The goal of the show is to correctly identify the what, when, and where of artifacts given to the team. The team with more correct answers wins. The trickiest artifact of the evening, given to the professors, was a bowl from the Pacific Northwest of North America made of whale baleen.

The team of Professors deliberates over an artifact. Despite a strong performance, the students came out victorious.

Happy 800th Birthday, Cambridge!

The University of Cambridge celebrated its 800th birthday in 2009 and the longer I'm here the more it seems every building and bridge in the city has a story behind it. There's the bar where Watson and Crick celebrated their discovery of the double helix, there are haunted dormatories, and there's the courtyard from Chariots of Fire that I've been dying to run around. Here are a few pics.

The Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge spans the River Cam and is part of St. John's College.

Flag Fen Field Trip

Our class took a field trip to Flag Fen, where Professor Charly French had worked on the excavation of a Bronze Age wooden walkway, which connected an island in the fens to higher ground nearby. The timbers of the walkway were preserved for around 3,000 years because a rise in sea level has kept the timbers in a wet environment where bacteria (and other organisms which would decay the wood) could not grow in the absence of oxygen. A portion of the walkway is on display in a room without sunlight and treated with silver ions to prevent to the growth of bacteria.

A reconstructed Bronze Age Roundhouse at Flag Fen

Grad School, Go!

I've just arrived in England (for the first time ever) to start a Master's of Philosophy (MPhil) degree in Archaeological Sciences. There are two of us in the program and we will have 3 terms of coursework in  archaeobotany, soil science, zooarchaeology, and biomolecular archaeology, followed by one term to complete a thesis. After meeting with our advisers, Dr. Charly French and Dr. Tamsin O'Connell, it sounds like we'll have lots of lab work and field trips to break up the coursework.

Below is the view from my room in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Hope the rainbow is a good sign!

Wrapping up the 2009 paleo internship

Here's another entry I wrote for the AMNH paleontology interns blog. To follow our progress over the course of the rehousing project, visit: perissodactyl.blogspot.com

We're in the 4th week of the post season here at the American Museum of Natural History and with less than two week remaining we're looking at the 5th floor (the only floor with fossils still in need of rehousing) as a sort of bowl game - an extra chance at the end of a great season to take on one more challenger. Will the 2009 summer paleontology interns come out victorious or will entropy still lay claim to some of the types on the 5th floor?

While the floor has plenty of type specimens in need of rehousing, we've been making quick work of them due to their small size. Most of the fossils we've pulled so far have been rodents or small feline and canine relatives, but then came Eudinoceras - an Coryphydont from Mongolia, closely related to Uintatherium, pictured here. We welcomed the challenge and gave it a great new rehousing, but we are keeping our fingers crossed that we don't come across any of its relatives, as specimens that large (think 50+ pounds just for the skull) take about 5 times as a long as a small specimen.

We've also been working with volunteer Alyssia to train her into rehousing. She'll be at the museum once a week throughout the coming year and will be continuing the type rehousing project. Even if we interns reach our goal of finishing the 5th floor, other type specimens, either ones that are returned from a loan or found in future inventorying of the fossil mammal collections, will be in need of rehousing. She's already helped us with a challenging in-drawer rehousing, so more manageably sized fossils will seem like a piece of cake.

PaleoCat

A few weeks ago we received a comment on the blog asking for more details about PaleoCat. As we mentioned before, PaleoCat was developed specifically for the needs of the Paleontology department of the AMNH and is a great tool for research and collections management alike. It can be used to locate a specimen in the collections, identify all the fossils from a given locality, or print specimen labels. While information is still being added to the database, when complete it will contain data ranging from a fossil's storage location to its taxonomic information to a list of publications on the specimen.


The georeferencing work that the interns have been doing all summer is part of this process to enhance PaleoCat. Once we upload our work, a researcher will be able to find the country, state, county, and even the exact coordinates where the fossil was excavated. It can't be underestimated how important it is that locality information be easy to access when studying a fossil - it puts the animal in context relative to the climate it lived in and the plants and animals it lived with.

Take, for example, fossils from the "Telegraph Line Camp" in China. If you haven't heard of it before, its not the sort of place you can look up in an atlas or type into Googlemaps. Since China is such a large country there are plenty of regions it could have come from - perhaps the coast, or the desert, or maybe the mountains. After our georeferencing is uploaded to PaleoCat, you'd be able to find out that the Telegraph Line Camp is in the Xilin Gol Province of Inner Mongolia, a place that isn't so hard to find on the map. When searched on GoogleEarth, pictures from the province helped locate the areas where major fossil expeditions had visited. The one pictured below which is marked by a monument to fossils found in the region and is located only a few miles from the Telegraph Line Camp.

Behind the Scenes

On Wednesday we visited the Anthropology Department and were guided by Paul Beelitz through the various collections in the department. At the start of the tour Paul gave us a quick breakdown of the field of Anthropology into its components, Physical Anthropology, Ethnology, and Archaeology – for a link to those definition click here. The AMNH has collections of material from each of these three subject areas, primarily from the New World: North, Central and South America.

Some of our favorite artifacts on the tour were the Hopi dolls, known as kachina, which the museum has been collecting since the late 1800’s. It was fascinating to see what has changed and what has remained the same in the making of kachina dolls in over that period of time.

Other highlights of the tour included a teepee liner with a story depicted across it, a painting of the Buddha currently being researched for the untraditional location of texts on it, and a hand-made, life-sized, paper replica of a Peugeot bike from Vietnam.

Finally, all of us were very impressed with the Smudge Room – an area for people with a personal (i.e. ancestral, spiritual, cultural, etc.) connection to artifacts in the collections to interact with them. Paul, who designed the room, said it is most commonly, but not only, used by delegations from American Indian tribes and is equipped with a ventilation system for smoke from incense, sweetgrass, and the likes. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that the objects in the museum are not alienated from their people and vise versa.

Fossil Halls Tour
We also had the privilege of a pre-work tour led by Doc Carl Mehling of the Fossil Halls (Hall of Vertebrate Origins, Saurischian Dinosaurs, Ornithischian Dinosaurs, and Fossil Mammals and Their Relatives). Carl worked on the most recent renovation of the Fossil Halls in the 1990's and told us the stories behind making the exhibits what they are today. It’s safe to say none of us will ever see that, or any other, fossil hall the same way again.

© American Museum of Natural History

Firstly, Carl explained layout of the hall – instead of taking a chronological approach to the organization of the fossils there, as many museums do, the designers took a phylogenetic approach, recreating the cladistics of vertebrate evolution in the layout of the exhibits. This strategy focuses on evolutionary relatedness as opposed to shared time periods.

Since many of the fossils (and footprints and eggshells) on exhibit are real – the layout of parts of the Halls was finalized using life sized replicas made of cardboard so that they could be moved and repositioned often without fear of damaging them. Keeping in mind how big some of the fossils are, the replicas sound like they were masterpieces in themselves.

© American Museum of Natural History

One of the most impressive attractions in the dinosaur hall – the real trackway of Apatosaurus footprints – was also one of the most complicated parts of the renovation. The trackway had been found in limestone and excavated in large slabs. When these slabs were given to the museum, the were plastered together on the floor. When the 1990’s renovation of the Fossil Halls took place, moving them involved forcing large metal sheets underneath them (to create what amounted to an over-sized spatula), turning the floor into a giant slip-n-slide with ivory soap and dragging the tracks across with pulleys. Now they’ve stood the test of about 150 million years of the elements and one AMNH renovation. Here is a picture of the tracks taken in 1959 with a young boy sitting in one of the footprint - hope this gives you an idea of their scale.

The Real Deal

As part of the AMNH Paleontology internship, we are keeping a blog on the progress of the rehousing project. The interns are updating the blog weekly and taking turns writing entries. Below is this week's entry, penned by yours truly. For more updates from the Paleointerns, check out the entire blog here.

This past Monday we began our first post-training week and settled into the schedule we will have the rest of the summer - rehousing on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, georeferencing on Tuesday, and elements descriptions on Thursday.

Rehousing

As we become more familiar with rehousing and fossil handling techniques, we're settling into a solid pace of pulling, rehousing and returning a few cart-fulls of specimens to the collections each day. We completed nearly 50 rehousings during the past week.

One highlight was figuring out, with guidance from Carl and Ivy, what to do with the tray of bones set in a large plaster block that we'd mentioned in the previous blog post. Such an arrangement is known as a plaque mount and is intended for display. Since the plaster block is far too large to fit in any of the boxes we have (it takes up nearly the entire drawer), we used tri-rod to stabilize it in the drawer, and if we come across such a mount where parts of the fossil are raised above the top of the tray, we'll make a choroplast riser to protect the bones from other trays scraping on top of them.

A second challenge that arose came not from a fossil, but from a fossils' documentation. Some specimens had notes with them written on newspaper over 100 years old - the oldest so far is from 1898. To keep these notes - which have become pretty tattered - from further deteriorating, we used archival quality tape to mend rips and reinforce any part that seemed prone to tears.

We’re making a big dent in the type collection - or it certainly feels that way. The process is going much more smoothly and we’re continuing to find our niches.

Georeferencing: Where in the world?

On Tuesday we had a briefing with Chelsea about our first round of georeferencing from the week before. We got the chance to ask her about any problems we had run into and also share any helpful hints we'd figured out during our first batch of localities. Since the objective of georeferencing is to take information about the location of a specimen's origin given by the excavator and plot it on a current map - we need to find the country, state/region, and county/division of the excavation site.

One challenge we ran into is that some territorial boundaries have changed since the fossils were excavated. For example, we were working on a locality listed as "Bugti, India" - excavated in 1923 - and weren't making much progress until we figured out that the excavation took place in what is today Pakistan.

The card catalog turned out to be one of out greatest assets in narrowing down options for a given locality. Cards often contain additional notes about the site, such as nearby towns, major roadways or alternate spellings. The first card pictured here is a georeferencing dream come true, containing both a street map on the front and a geological map on the back. Others, like the one pictured below, provide less help, but in such cases we can turn to field notes and other sources.

We divided up the remainder of the master list of localities amongst ourselves. After filling in the territorial information, we'll go back and find the latitude and longitude - using field notes, shipping record, and Google Earth. We'll have plenty more questions for Chelsea when we get to that stage.

AMNH Paleontology & a blog inside a blog

Since moving to New York, I've been lucky enough to work in two departments at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; first in Anthropology in the South American artifact collection and now in the fossil mammal collection in Paleontology.

I'm working with 5 other interns on the final stages of a National Science Foundation grant to make all the of the fossil mammals that are "Type Specimens" - or fossils on which an entire species of prehistoric animals is based - easily accessible to scientists and researchers. This means making sure they are easy to locate, easy to move, and in good enough condition to be handled. Since the museum has over 2,000 such mammals, its a big job. For weekly updates on how the project is coming along, check out our type rehousing blog.