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The Decline of the Natural History Museum, by “Thomas H. Benton” (pseudonym for “an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal arts college”), has sparked a bit of discussion lately on the NHCOLL listserve.
Benton, apparently, aspired to become a scientist, until physics defeated him in high school (I am glad no one ever told me being a physics whiz was a requirement for being a paleontologist, biologist, or geologist, or I’d never had made it past my sophomore year of college and I’d probably be blogging about Asian history right now). As a child he loved the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, particularly the dinosaurs:
Dinosaur Hall was a temple dedicated to the wonder of creation, the aspirations of science, and the smallness of humanity in the context of geologic time.
I can identify with this myself, of course: as a child, I was a museum fanatic, although I gravitated more towards the mineral collections (so rarely displayed these days, with their “boring” displays of neatly labelled minerals) and the taxidermied dioramas (which do little for my adult eye, although I love the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s dinosaur dioramas).
This Hadrosaurus foulkii specimen at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia was the most complete dinosaur skeleton in the world when it was found in 1858, and the first to be mounted. Photo © 2006 Melissa Barton
Echoing similar sentiments to Stephen J. Gould 13 years ago in “Dinomania,” Benton continues:
I think natural-history museums have changed for the worse in the last 30 years. The solitude, silence, and quasi-religious awe that I remember have been banished by throngs of screaming, barely supervised children on school trips, who pay less attention to the exhibits than they do to the gift shops and food courts.
But I don’t know. I was one of those quiet, quasi-religious kids in museums, and I do think museums play a vital role for the introvert and the future scientist (or future museum worker). But should the kids who want to touch and interact and who like the bright colors be ignored by our attempts to communicate science? I think some scientists have elitist tendencies, which are all very well for those in the club, but ultimately detrimental to the goal of reaching out to all of the public and trying to improve scientific literacy.
Benton observes, petulantly, that the Academy has redesigned Dinosaur Hall to be more colorful: “Never mind that Dinosaur Hall was one of the most important sites in the institutional history of paleontology. Discovered in 1858, the academy’s Hadrosaurus was the first mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world.”
The sessions I should have gone to at the Geological Society of America annual meeting, but didn’t: Chicxulub impact and the K/T mass extinction, presented by Gerta Keller, a professor at Princeton (co-authored by Thierry Adate and Zsolt Berner), or perhaps Keller’s solo paper, K/T mass extinction and the Lilliput Effect: consequences of impact, volcanism and climate change.
Keller made the Philadelphia Inquirer in a story titled Still bucking theory of how dinosaurs died: Princeton geoscientist calls Mexican meteor idea flat-out wrong. To the writer’s credit, he hedges its language almost as much as as scientist would, and does quote some of the many scientists who disagree with Keller. He also notes that this is a continuation of her previous research.
Conferences, in general, are not the place for breaking news. They’re the place to report on smaller studies and progress in ongoing work. Most real breakthroughs get sat upon until publication in one of the most prestigious journals, Science or Nature.
And honestly, this isn’t a breakthrough story, either. Keller has claimed for years that the Chicxulub impact may not have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Geotimes had a story about an earlier study of hers (published, not just presented at a conference) in March of 2004, which looked at cores from Chicxalub and came to similar conclusions as her more recent study in Texas.
Keller doesn’t go so far as to support non-meteor extinction hypotheses, such as the now out-of-favor Indian volcanism hypothesis. I’m not sure I would have devoted such a long article (for a newspaper) to a continuation of what is essentially a fringe theory (most mass extinction folks have switched their focus to the much bigger, if dinosaur-free and less popularly charismatic, Permo-Triassic extinction). Conferences, while great places for scientists to network, get feedback on their work, and share findings of interest to other scientists, aren’t usually the most fertile ground for journalists. Sometimes I even think that science and “breaking news” are fundamentally incompatible.
Edit 28 October 2006: To clarify my point, I do think the Inquirer article is a good feature article about the process of science. But the illustrative story isn’t “breaking news,” and very little science is, although it is too often portrayed as such. And I think I would probably have chosen a more widely accepted ongoing study as my illustrative story, personally.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:
Adatte, T., and Keller, G. October 2006. Stratigraphy, age, nature and origin of the KT breccia from North American to Argentina, in Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 38, No. 7, p. 58.
Keller, G. October 2006. K/T mass extinction and the Lilliput Effect: consequences of impact, volcanism and climate change, in Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 38, No. 7, p. 474.
Keller, G., Adatte, T., and Berner, Z. October 2006. Chicxulub impact and the K/T mass extinction, in Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Vol. 38, No. 7, p. 401.
Avril, T. 25 October 2006. Still bucking theory of how dinosaurs died: Princeton geoscientist calls Mexican meteor idea flat-out wrong, in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Hansen, K. 26 October 2006. Debate continues over dinosaur demise, in Geotimes.
I just found out that Ralph Maughan’s Wildlife News, a digest of wildlife and conservation news focusing primarily on Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, is now in blog form on WordPress. Maughan is a professor of natural resource and environmental politics at Idaho State University, and he has some fascination things to say about the politics and psychology of wildlife management in the West.
Yesterday’s post is about mountain lions and trophic cascades in Zion National Park. I’ve been following the research on wolves and trophic cascades (ecological dependencies that cascade from keystone species) for a couple years now, so I think it’s interesting that mountain lions, which have a very different lifestyle ecology, show a similar keystone effect.
This just might be the best Onion article ever (for some reason they don’t want you quoting their headlines, which makes me wonder just how they expect people to recommend specific articles).
I believe fair use does allow me to quote a brief portion for the purpose of recommending the article, however:
PASADENA, CA—NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists overseeing the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission said Monday that the Spirit’s latest transmissions could indicate a growing resentment of the Red Planet.
After various airline fiascos, I made it to Philadelphia late last night for the Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting. I did sit in on part of one of the history of geology sessions, but mostly I worked on my presentation today. At the opening reception I bought a couple hardback copies (one for me, one as a gift) of Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, a fabulous collection of essays, poetry, and the occasional fiction excerpt on geology. The writers range from my personal hero, John McPhee,* to Barbara Kingsolver, N. Scott Momaday, Stephen J. Gould, and Pliny the Younger. The only thing I found frustrating was that some of the essays were excerpted from much longer pieces (understandable, since the full McPhee essay alone would have been half the book). I highly recommend this anthology.
Anyway, I had the copies signed, which was nice. At last year’s GSA meeting I bought a copy of fellow Colorado College alumna Sarah Andrews‘ Dead Dry (no new Em Hansen forensic geology mystery until next spring), and the previous year it was Herbert W. Meyer’s The Fossils of Florissant. I’m actually fairly ambivalent about the signed books themselves; it’s really an excuse to meet the author for me.
Tomorrow morning I’ll give my first professional talk. Afterwards I may sneak out for a while to see the Darwin exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. I’ve been wanting to see that exhibit since I saw it on the American Museum of Natural History website, but I didn’t expect to have the chance (it has live tortoises!). It probably says something about me that my first thought in a new city is “So, where are the science museums?”
Hmmm. No monogamy gene. No sports fan gene. No hyperactive remote control button pressing gene. Why, there isn’t any simple correspondence between any gene and stereotypical behaviors anywhere—it’s as if behavior is an emergent property of the interactions of many genes throughout the genome and the environment, rather than a facile mapping of a complex phenotype to a short stretch of nucleotides.
Oh, Professor Myers, you do know how to turn a phrase.
I’ve been working busily on my presentation for the Geological Society of America annual meeting. I’m presenting Monday, and I will be rather less busy after that.
A web project I’ve been working on for a local nonprofit will be unveiled soon. With any luck I have a new job as well, unconnected to either of the above.
At tonight’s ceremonies at Harvard, the 2006 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded. Check out the Annals of Improbable Research website for video, a list of the winners, and at least some of the papers, which should go up over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s the CNN article: Developer of rectal treatment for hiccups earns distinction. The mind, it boggles.
The Nature Conservancy is holding its first digital photography contest. Photographs must be taken by at least 3.0-megapixel cameras or scanned at high resolution from slides or prints, and can be entered in two categories: Best Nature Photo or Best Photo From a Conservancy Preserve (find preserves). Here’s what they want:
We’re looking for beautiful nature photography representing the diversity of life on Earth. Your own original digital images of our lands, waters, plants, animals and people in nature are all eligible for the competition.
And what they don’t want:
Please do not include photographs of pets or domestic animals. Images of captive animals photographed in game farms will be disqualified.
Ten finalists will be selected from each category, and the grand prize winner from the Best Nature Photo category will be featured on the nature.org website. The grand prize winner in the Best Photo From a Conservancy Preserve category will be featured in the 2008 Nature Conservancy calender. There are no cash or material prizes.
Entries can be submitted via the public group at Flickr or using an online form. Be sure to read the complete rules before submitting.
Deadlines: Deadline for submitting entries is December 31, 2006. Online entries can be uploaded starting October 1, 2006, and must be uploaded no later than 11:59 pm Pacific Standard Time on December 31, 2006.
American elk (Cervus elaphus), which once numbered 10 million in North America and which lived in grasslands from coast to coast, today are mostly confined to last remaining wild spaces in the mountains. In Colorado, according to park ranger Harv Burman, wildland is developed at a rate of 4 acres per hour. That doesn’t leave much space for the elk, but in September and early October Rocky Mountain residents and visitors can still hear the high-pitched, eerie wailing of bull elk in rut bugling.
During the rut, or mating season, cow elk focus on eating. They need the fuel to carry calves through the winter. The bulls, however, are often too busy to eat–the successful are busy gathering and keeping harems of 10-15 cows. They shed the velvet from their antlers in August, and polish them on trees. Struggles between males usually involve only pushing and shoving, and the antlers are more for display than combat. The bugling is also a warning to other males.
Seasonal Park Ranger Harv Burman displays a set of legally hunted elk antlers at an educational program. Photo © 2006 Melissa Barton
The Rocky Mountain elk (C. elaphus nelsoni) is the largest of the North American elk and the largest of the red deer species worldwide. In Europe, “elk” refers to the American moose (Alces alces), and “red deer” to C. elaphus, although European and Asian red deer are much smaller than American elk. There has been a largely unsuccessful push in North America to call C. elaphus by its Shawnee name, “wapiti,” meaning “white rump.” Like “buffalo” for the American bison (Bison bison), the name “elk” has centuries of inertia behind it.
Signs of elk–tracks, scat, scarred aspens, and broken ponderosa saplings–are common sights in the Front Range, but elk themselves are more elusive. Hundreds of elk graze and mate in the park in fall. In September and early October, park rangers at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument lead evening programs to listen and look for elk. The chances of hearing the elk are very good, but elk sightings occur less often.
Schmap, which offers a Windows freeware player and free downloadable dynamic travel guides to a variety of U.S. and international locations, just released a guide to Colorado Springs, which you can download here.
I have one photo in it, of Palmer Park, a pleasant little city park in the middle of Colorado Springs. I was a little surprised by the request–they don’t pay, so they can’t get photographs from top professional photographers, but it wasn’t a photo I was particularly thrilled with. Low-light photography is not something I’ve worked with much yet.
Photo © 2006 Melissa Barton
Palmer Park is actually one of my favorite places in the Springs. It’s home to a few mountain lions (which I’ve never seen) and lots of deer. In my first geology class as an undergraduate, when we were familiarizing ourselves with the local rock column, Palmer Park was one of our stops. Palmer Park has also, in the past, hosted the medieval “fighter practices” of the local Society for Creative Anachronism group, as well as a Saturday morning English longsword study group.
I can’t use Schmap guides myself, being a Mac user, but free publicity is useful and I’m now one of their blog partners. You can download Schmap guides for yourself using the new widget at the bottom of my sidebar.
