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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.
