My thesis research:
• A tale of two lakes…
• More mountain mahogany?
• Exploring South Park

Driving the Gold Belt Byway:
• Dome Rock and the Shelf Road
• Garden Park and Skyline Drive Fossil Sites
• Indian Springs Trace Fossil Site and Phantom Canyon

I’ve been very busy with graduate school between class, two assistantships (in completely different sections), and working on my poster for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting. We’re in the process of getting a loan of some material for my thesis (not a huge loan, but at least it contains macrofossils other than mountain mahogany!), so I’m excited about that. For one of my classes, I’ve actually had to start another blog (yeah, I need that like a hole in my head). Since I probably should have focused on museum/resource management issues here, I’m probably going to focus most of my future blogging there at the The Magic Word. (Hey, “Plagiopodopsis” isn’t any harder to spell than “Pharyngula,” although I’m not half as interesting as PZ Myers.)

Another factor is that I wasn’t very good at choosing a focus for Rosetta Stones–if I do revisit it in the future, I will probably focus on national park and resource management issues, with a side of paleontology. For now, I’m blogging pretty extensively over at the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc. website, which is certainly teaching me about focus. I hope in the future to involve other park staff and volunteers in the Friends blog, but at the moment it’s mostly me.

This coming week, I’m hoping to post some photos and journals of my recent thesis fieldwork, pending supervisor approval. I will crosspost or at least link here–I’m very excited about this research, although it has significantly changed directions from original plans. In the meantime, here are some posts I’ve made there that I’m particularly fond of:

• Filling a Niche: Linkhart Studies Elusive Owls (July 2)
• Notes From the Field: Volcanic ash research at Florissant (June 27)
• Species Spotlight: Palaeovespa florissantia (June 19)
• Exhibit assembly progress (June 8)
• Seasonal training field trip (June 1)

I’ve been posting a combination of event announcements, park news, photo essays on research/field trips/events, and spotlights on fossil and modern species at the park.

I especially like Puppetry of the Face, by Tania Rabesandratana. Artnatomy is a fascinating application (available free online or 30 euros for the offline version) originally designed for art students to learn about the muscles behind facial expression. Since then it’s found other uses by neurologists, medical students, and plastic surgeons. I foresee hours of my time being sucked up by this in the future (and hey, when you’re strapped for an art student gift…).

So go read Inkling and make it a success! It’s the only science magazine with Science as a contributor (heh).

I wrote (and photographed) this month’s Travels in Geology article for Geotimes, which you can read online:

Dominica: The Caribbean “Nature Island”

While thinking about ideas for my next batch of queries, I realized that my geotraveling has been very volcano-centric for someone whose primary interest is paleontology. Volcanoes are certainly exciting to visit, though.

I’ve noticed that many feminist parents of daughters feel that they should push their daughters towards science–daughters who are passionate about history or art or writing. While I do think it’s important for everyone to be comfortable with basic science and math, I think it’s a fine line to walk when you have daughters who are interested in more “acceptable” areas: encouraging them to take more interest in science while also supporting their other interests. Gifts that combine science and art or science and history are always nice–too many people grow up thinking that disciplines are neatly segregated from each other, without any connections between them.

My favorite gift source kids is actually very focused on crafts and art supplies and traditional toys, although they do have a selection of science toys (not the best source for science toys, in my opinion): Hearthsong. Their products are very gender-neutral and encourage creativity, and there’s something there for almost every kid.

I will also be working on graduate school applications and moving in the next few weeks. I’d like to be able to give this blog a certain amount of daily attention, so I do intend to be back with regular posts when I’ve organized everything else more.

To anyone who missed my posts, I apologize. I’ll try to make up for it next year.

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.”

On my first visit to the Academy Wednesday morning, I found that message to come through loud and clear. That hadrosaur awed me–but there is nothing you could do to make a dozen or so partial bones awe a public that has now seen complete mounted skeletons and casts, mounted using the most modern and invisible mounts. In 1858, that hadrosaur was the most complete dinosaur ever found. You can write that on the display labels–they did–but you can never truly convey the wonder of that to people with little concept of the history and science. But you can try, and the Academy has tried. They have updated their exhibits to reflect current research into dinosaur physiology and behavior (I won’t say it’s the best exhibit I’ve ever seen, but it’s also not the worst by far). But Benton, despite considering the old Dinosaur Hall to be a “temple” to the “aspirations of science” doesn’t like that they’ve done this:

Now the towering Hadrosaurus is hunched over — in deference to current theory — and banished to an inconspicuous corner to make room for a gathering of fossil replicas designed as photo-ops.

Isn’t redesigning your exhibits in deference to current theory recognizing that science is a process, not a dogma? And we’re not just talking about theory here, we’re talking about concrete, mathematically calculable biophysics in many cases.

Benton echoes the oft-quoted view that it’s unfortunate that museums are choosing administrators from the ranks of M.B.A.s rather than Ph.D.s. Perhaps I am in a minority of museum professionals in thinking that’s actually a good thing. Museums all over the world are struggling for funding in a world full of home entertainment centers, computers, and video games. Good scientists are rare, and good administrators and fundraisers are also rare. Individuals who are both are nearly nonexistant. A museum can have the best scientists in the world and close down due to lack of funding. What’s important is that the curators and the administrators communicate about how best to make the museum serve both science and the public.

As one NHCOLL member pointed out, Benton also gets some important details wrong. The Wagner Free Institute (which I wish I had known about this week) was not preserved by “benign neglect” but by a conscious decision to preserve Joseph Leidy’s vision.

Benton is right that “Natural-history [sic] museums are not just about science,” but they are foremost about science. I remember reading a paper about an exhibit of African art that was actually an exhibit of exhibits–similar artifacts displayed in formats ranging from modern art museum to natural history diorama (where tribal peoples are treated just like the lions) to Victorian “cabinet of curiosities.”

There is a place for the cabinet of curiosities, as Gould pointed out in “Cabinet museums revisited” (reprinted as “Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!” in Dinosaur in a Haystack), for the children like me and Benton and Gould. But the remaining cabinet museums are an exhibit of exhibits, an exhibit of a vanished time. They are not and should not be the only way of reaching out to the public–a great deal of research has been done on what makes an effective museum exhibit for the majority of the public, and it is not the cabinet museum.

So while I can sympathize with Benton, I can’t agree with him. His language feels too much like religion to me, putting “public art” over science in museums that are ostensibly to teach the public about science, even as he decries museums that “expunge evolution” from their exhibits. Please, name me a major natural history museum that has “expunged evolution” from its exhibits. I find myself glad he didn’t become a scientist.

I don’t want to see cabinet museums die out entirely. But more importantly, I do not want to see all museums die out. The world needs cabinet museums and dioramas and interactivity; it needs collections and exhibits. The wonder of natural history museums is the diversity they preserve, both of objects and of modes of thought.

FURTHER READING:

Benton, Thomas H. 9 October 2006. The Decline of the Natural History Museum, in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Gould, Stephen J. 12 August 1993. Dinomania, in The New York Review of Books, vol. 40, no. 14. (also reprinted in Dinosaur in a Haystack)

Gould, Stephen J. 1996. Cabinet Museums Revisited, rpt. as Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O! in Dinosaur in a Haystack: Three Rivers Press.

Lienhard, John H. Natural History Museum, in The Engines of Our Ingenuity. (audio available)

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.

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.