NC Museum of Life Sciences

Roy Campbell, the Director of Exhibits, took a group of science bloggers behind the scenes at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. and up front among the exhibits. This right whale is one of several whale skeletons mounted at the museum, suspended over another hall. The museum has a friendly and accessible air and gives off a sense of wonder.

Long necks

These fellows from the Toronto hydroelectric company are way up in a "cherrypicker" crane. They are attaching some cross-connections between power lines.

Below is a look at the new barosaurus at the Royal Ontario Museum.

New California Academy of Sciences building

The California Academy of Sciences is starting to install exhibits in its new science building. The science museum is in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California, U.S. Follow the link for a photo gallery.

• Most of the pictures are of the new Rain Forest building, which will have a living roof.
• There will also be a planetarium.
• An aquarium will hold the deepest coral reef in the world.
• Architectural elements of the old building are being preserved in the new building.

To me, it looks like an interior designed by Raymond Moriyama.

Squidmas ornaments

After learning of "Squidmas trees" from Scienceblogs, I've been on the lookout for unusual ornaments. I found some at the Gardiner Ceramic Museum in Toronto, across the street from the Royal Ontario Museum.


This tree has some seasonal ornaments, such as the ice skates up near the top, snowball, etc. Then there are the surreal or merely hospitable, such as the floating pink teacup and teapot. There are some animals: the golden columns are a totem pole of proverbial monkeys (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil); and there's a silver elephant and a dog. (An elephant in a tree? Sounds like a joke!)

My favourite is probably the old-fashioned red telephone booths, which remind me of Dr. Who's Tardis. But the weirdest are the dill pickles.

Barosaurus in ROM's new dinosaur gallery

The Royal Ontario Museum* in Toronto has opened its new dinosaur gallery. On display is their skeleton from the attic, the giant diplodocoid Barosaurus.

The Barosaurus was restored by Peter May.

*The designation "Royal" indicates a significant resource in the British Commonwealth.

ROM photo diary

The Royal Ontario Museum has a "photo of the day" on its Web site. The photo for November 15 is a small Euryptid, about 6 cm long. I'm showing a reduced version, just to whet your appetite. Go to the ROM Web site for a full-resolution image.

ROM finds skeleton in its closet

You have to admit this is funny - and a real warning about the loss of "folklore" information in organizations. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has a new display hall for its dinosaur fossils. The new curator of dinos, who just started this year, was told that he could go out and get a big one. While researching in the U.S.,he found a reference to a really big skeleton that the ROM already had -- but nobody back home knew about it.

The museum traded for a large dinosaur skeleton thirty years ago - but there was no room to put it up. Over the years, the bones were stored separately and everyone forgot about it -- except for the old curator, but he retired and eventually died. I think that there's a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment for the museum in finding that they have a large Barosaurus specimen that is more complete than most. It is being lovingly assembled, the missing parts duplicated if left-right or copied from other specimens, and will be mounted at the museum by December 15 It's particularly nice since the museum has a tyrannosauroid, has a duckbilled dinosaur, and has a stegosaurus - but no diplodocoid until now. That they knew of.

The picture of Barosaurus is from Wikipedia commons.

Lawnmower dinosaur

A living lawnmower, Nigersaurus taqueti, has been reconstructed from fossil bones discovered in the Sahara desert. The dinosaur is on exhibit in Washington, D.C. so we will plan on seeing it during our winter trip to the U.S.

A CAT scan of the skull reveals that more narrow teeth are lined up behind the ones in use, ready to drop into their sockets like the leads in a mechanical pencil.

Minnesota's Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

I was watching TV Ontario, and it was showing failed military and medical devices. Did you know that there's a a Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minnesota?

Friday cephalopod: glass invertebrates

Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka, a father-and-son team, are famous for creating the glass flowers at Harvard mentioned by Marianne Moore in a poem. They also created about 800 glass sculptures of marine invertebrates both large and small. The octopus above is one of the Blaschka's glass sculptures of marine life. Their techniques have been lost and their work can not now be duplicated.

Links to more information:

• Glass animals collected and cleaned
• Blaschka glass model project
  
• Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka
  
• Dublin Blaschka Congress in 2006
  
• glass marine invertebrates at Harvard
  
• glass marine invertebrates at Cornell
  
• William Warmus, photographer, has photographed the Blaschka marine invertebrates
  
• glass flowers at Harvard Museum of Natural History--more than 3,000 glass models of plants made over fifty years

Glass jellyfish

From the "Monday funnies" of CEOexpress.com:

When is a jellyfish not a jellyfish?

When it's actually a glass sculpture���, part of a collection of amazingly lifelike glass sea creatures created by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka in the 1880's.

In that era, aquaria and natural history museums were opening all over the world. And as the techniques for preserving real plants or creatures were so rudimentary, they needed life-like replicas to exhibit and turned to Leopold Blaschka to provide them.

During the 1860s, Leopold supplied glass sea-anemones to museums, aquaria and private collectors all over Europe. He then added snails and jellyfish to his repertoire and in 1876 received a large order from London's South Kensington Museum. Some of the Blaschkas' replicas were based on illustrations in natural history books, such as Philip Gosse's 1853 A Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, all the early sea-anemones, for instance, were modeled on such illustrations.

Other replicas were inspired either by the Blaschkas' own memories of seeing the real creatures - like the first jellyfish which Leopold remembered from a trip to North America - or by copying preserved specimens. In later years, as the Blaschkas became wealthier, they acquired live specimens to work from. These were kept in a specially built aquarium at their Dresden home.

Hat tip to Road of Iron

Hall of Human Origins at AMNH

The American Museum of Natural History has opened a new permanent exhibit. Here's what they say:

The newly opened Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins presents the remarkable history of human evolution from our earliest ancestors millions of years ago to modern Homo sapiens. The innovative Spitzer Hall combines the most up-to-date discoveries in the fossil record with the latest in genomic science to explore the most profound mysteries of humankind: who we are, where we came from, and what is in store for the future of our species.

DNA! Fossils! Migrations! Comparative Genomics! Dioramas! Creativity!
It looks beeeyootiful! Take that, Dr. Dino!

The museum is at Central Park West at 79th Street in New York City. If you can't drop in, visit the Web site for lots and lots of virtual tours, images, and online resources.

I always spoil things

Years ago, when I visited the Museum of Nature in Ottawa, there was a fascinating "humanoid" dinosaur sculpture, life-size I guess. It had green skin, big yellow eyes, and dinosaurian haunches with an upright posture. Clearly it was someone's guess at how dinosaurs might have looked had they evolved into something intelligent. You could tell because of the shoulders. Intelligent critters in fictional images almost always have human-like shoulders to show that they're "people." So did this fascinating critter.



I turned to someone in a museum uniform. "Shouldn't this have narrow shoulders like a cat? We have flattened shoulders because we went through a period of brachiating, but this one never did. It's not built for it."

And you know, the next time I went in, some years later, that pretty sculpture wasn't on display. I hope they just wanted to rotate something else into view and it wasn't my fault!

Giant squid captured and filmed for the first time

National Geographic wrote:

Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan's National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo.

The squid was lured with by a line baited with smaller squid. Unfortunately, the squid died on injuries sustained as researchers tried to capture her and she tried to fight her way free.

Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre

Hat tip to P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula for the link to the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre—and the image.

Darwin exhibit at American Museum of Natural History

Go! See it! You have until August 20th. See, I'm giving you much more warning than you got for the Feathered Dinosaurs exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. So no excuses!

It gets high marks from P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula:

...how good it was.

It follows the development of Darwin's thought and demonstrates the evidence that led to his conclusions. It is completely uncompromising. It makes a few nods to the modern evidence at the end, and does mention the creationist objections briefly, as the nonsense they are…but it's amazing how solidly the case can be made for evolution using just the 19th century data.

And then, or course, there are the artifacts. Darwin's microscope. Annie's box. Bits of his notebooks. Darwin's walking stick. It was glorious stuff.

150 Years Without Darwin are More Than Enough

P. Z. Myers of Pharyngula notes that the U.S. national museum, the Smithsonian, is not planning anything special for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publishing of The Origin of Species, both of which come up in 2009.

Tags: science evolution, Darwin, Charles Darwin, science education, Stephen Jay Gould, creationism, intelligent design, Darwin Bicentennial

"Understanding Evolution" Web site survives a frivolous lawsuit

The Understanding Evolution Web site by the University of California at Berkeley has been in the news lately or I would not have heard of it. It provides a good overview of evolution for teachers and the general public.

And why are they in the news? One Jeanne E. Caldwell decided to file a suit claiming that this information about evolution used taxpayer funds and constitutes religious proseletizing--by endorsing, among other things, "The religious doctrine that religion and religious beliefs are limited to the spiritual and supernatural world." (The italics are mine.) What planet is she from? In my opinion, that statement would be an opinion, not a doctrine—if, in fact, the Web site said such a thing, which I doubt. It currently says, "In science, only natural causes are used to explain natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world." It does not say that religion deals only with the supernatural, but it does say that science is limited to natural phenomena. Either of those statements is very different from the plaintiff's interpretation. In any case, to have the force of doctrine, a statement must be uttered by the religious organization itself—opinions by a third party describing religions in general do not count. The case was aided by a "public interest" group that ought to have had better advice.

Ms. Caldwell asked for damages because the Web pages offended her and made her feel like an outsider. The suit was dismissed by a judge in California on March 13th. Follow the link to read Ed Brayton's article at Dispatches from the Culture Wars and find a PDF version of the judgement on Science Blogs. The case is also analyzed by Timothy Sandefur at The Panda's Thumb.

It seems that Larry and Jean Caldwell make a habit of filing frivolous lawsuits in creationist causes. In this case, Jeanne Caldwell was represented by her lawyer husband, Larry Caldwell, and two other lawyers, Kevin T. Snider and Matthew McReynolds. Ironically, one of the defendants is also named Caldwell: Roy L. Caldwell is the Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. The other, David Lindberg (which the judgement renders as both "Lindberg" and "Linburg"), is Chair of the Integrative Biology Department of the University of California at Berkeley. A third defendant, Michael Piburn, Program Director for the National Science Foundation, was not a party to the motion to dismiss the suit.

Biomedia on Biological Sciences Web site

For an online virtual museum, look for "Biomedia" either under Zoology on the left side or in the main list.

On-demand science Webcasts at HHMI

Follow the link for interactive science education from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They offer animations, virtual labs, DVDs, "Ask a Scientist," lectures, video clips, a virtual museum, and a link to DNA interactive.