Helen FieldsScience Writer

The National Building Museum is currently hosting an exhibit of Lego models of famous works of architecture. I haven’t been yet, because it costs $5, and I’m waiting for a time when I’m in the neighborhood with one of my parents – they’re members of the museum and can get in the exhibit for free. I swear when they first posted that exhibit, there was one day a month when it was free, but that information disappeared from the webpage long ago.

Anyway, I was cutting through the museum on the way to my bank the other day and saw this:

I didn’t look that closely – I just saw a big red box. It was only on the way back I realized it’s a Lego model of the museum itself!

The museum is in a beautiful building, which is used for inaugural balls and lots of other fancy events. It was built in the 1880s to house the U.S. Pension Bureau. It’s definitely worth a visit. The space itself is stunning, even more so because it’s tucked in a big square brick building, and they have exhibits about things you wouldn’t necessarily think were all that cool, like parking garages, or rest stops along Norwegian highways.

Here’s the inside:

Here’s what the actual inside of the museum looks like, for comparison:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

My own personal Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef now has four pieces:

I’m pleased that I haven’t bought any new yarn for this. The caution tape is recycled, of course, and the bright orange and red acrylic yarns came from the great-aunt of a fellow science writer. They gave me the dark blue at the coral reef workshop, and the light edging on that piece came from the yarn stash of another fellow science writer. Good times!

A friend brought me a box of cassette tapes that she was about to throw out, so I may see what I can do with that next. When all this is done, I’ll drop it off at a local yarn store or take it to the museum, and it’ll all be on display starting in October! It’ll be fun to see if I can find my pieces on the community reef.

Read about the Smithsonian’s display of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef here.

The National Geographic Museum used to have a permanent collection. I remember going in high school, looking at the nifty globe and various exploration-related things. (Ok, I admit, my memory is pretty shaky on what was actually in it. But it was cool.) A while back they took all that stuff out and switched to only doing special exhibits. Right now, there’s a fabulous display of Joel Sartore’s photographs of rare animals around the outside of the building, but I really don’t think my pictures of someone else’ pictures would add up to a very good blog post. See some of them here or – hey, Joel is a good guy – buy the book.

Anyway. The other day I stopped in to see a traveling exhibit called “Da Vinci-The Genius.” It consisted mostly of models of devices Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks. He was a creative guy.

Like this one, the aerial screw:

The idea is that four guys would stand on the platform and push on the bars to make the screw turn and lift you through the air. (An actual one would have been much larger.) This is the thing that led to the stories that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter.

I think “invented” is a pretty strong term, considering this would never have worked and was also, as far as anyone knows, never built. “Dreamed up something helicopter-like” is more like it.

Here’s a diving suit he dreamed up:

And a tank – one of many, many military machines in his notebooks:

Yes, a real one would be a lot bigger – presumably there’d be guys inside, firing those guns that stick out in every direction. He also came up with that bridge in the background. The idea was that soldiers could put it together in the field; the logs are notched in such a way that it doesn’t need any nails or pegs or rope or anything. So they could build it with logs, cross a stream, and dismantle it again.

One of the irritating things about the exhibit was the absence of actual artifacts…and presence of fake artifacts. I’m not talking about the models, which are obviously modern, and the point of the show. But right near the entrance, they had glass cases with reproductions of a couple of his notebooks, only you’d have to read the entire text next to them to realize they were reproductions. Yes, logic suggests they would be reproductions, since an actual Leonardo notebook would require a major security force, but still. I thought it was a little tacky.

Then there were also reproductions of paintings. It’s fine that they didn’t have any – he didn’t do very many, and it’s hard to get hold of them. But the wall text tells you, “Leonardo’s original works are considered too priceless to move from their permanent locations.” Right. So, explain to me why I saw the Lady with an Ermine, which belongs in Krakow, in San Francisco in 2003? It’s fine not to have them, but don’t make up reasons.

Also, having seen the Lady with an Ermine in person – in San Francisco and then, five years later, in Krakow – the digital reproduction is so lame as to not really be worth displaying. The original practically glows. It’s stunning. That Leonardo knew how to handle paint. The digital version? Not so much. It’s just, you know, a flat copy of a painting.

So, I’d say the exhibit is worth dropping by if you’re in the neighborhood, because the models are neat, and you can play with some of them, but not worth a special trip to D.C. The exhibit is created by “Grande Exhibitions – Creators of museum quality traveling exhibitions.” Here’s their website for this exhibit.

I actually was much more excited about the exhibit across the hall, Design for the Other 90%. It’s about products designed to solve problems for poor people, mostly in the developing world. Like a cheap water pump that brings up clean water from the aquifer, or an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble shelter. One of my favorites was a water barrel shaped like a very wide tire, so you could put a rope through the center and roll it home instead of having to lug it. But the exhibit didn’t allow photography, and I am a rule-follower, so you’ll have to go see these things yourself. It’s put together by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

In the last 24 hours, two friends have sent me a link to the same gig. And I have to say, they’re right. It’s made for me. You know how I love museums? Particularly sciencey ones? So much that I have a whole blog feature devoted to them? And I like adventures? And blogging?

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is looking for some adventuresome soul to spend a month living in the museum and blogging about it. And I mean living. One of the requirements is “sleeping in confined or ‘untraditional’ spaces,” and if you know me, you know that sleeping in any space at all has never been a problem. The person would hang out, learn about science, go to outside events, talk to visitors, all that stuff.

There are, of course, reasons why I should not apply. I have stuff to do at home. They want someone super outgoing, and I’m not sure I could be outgoing for a month straight. Also, it’s kind of weird that they frame the $10,000 payment as a prize at the end – if I’m going to live in a freaking museum for a month, I want to be pretty darn confident there’s some money coming my way. But I have to say, it sounds cool.

Here’s the info. Intriguing, isn’t it? Maybe someone I know should apply and tell me all about it. Anyone?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

I took the occasion of a visit to Colorado last week to drop in on the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The building opened in 1908, which is positively ancient for Colorado. And like any self-respecting natural history museum, it is chock full of dead animals. As a special bonus, though, they extend this to the human animal. Not only because one of those dead-modern-humans exhibits was on when I was there (this one – I skipped it). The museum also has a nifty little exhibit of Egyptian mummies.

First: A dead reptile of the Mesozoic Era. Or what’s left of it. I thought this Stegosaurus was particularly lovely. I don’t remember seeing those scutes below the neck before. Aren’t they pretty?

This fossil was found in 1937 near Cañon City, Colorado by a high school teacher. They redid the pose after discovering another Stegosaurus skeleton in 1992 – that showed them things like how the back plates and tail spikes were arranged.

You know how birds eat grit to help them digest their food? Dinosaurs did that, too:

They’re called gastroliths.

Check out how tough this fish is. It’s a big predator from the sea that covered Kansas late in the dinosaur era.

See how tough it is? It died with a whole fish in its belly. You can see the tail at left and the vertebrae scattered along toward the right. (The head and everything were there, too.)

On to the dead humans!

In the old days, visiting Egypt was a lot like it is today in some ways. People marveled at the pyramids and the Sphinx. It was really hot. They bought souvenirs. The souvenirs were just a little different, that’s all. Until 1946, a visitor to Egypt could pick up a mummy to show the folks back home. In 1904, a wealthy businessman from Colorado went to Egypt and came home with a couple of mummies. They were displayed in a museum in Pueblo until the last 15 years or so; they’re on long-term loan to Denver now.

In the late 90s, the scientists in Denver took the mummies to get CT scans at a university medical center. (They rode in an ambulance.) This is much less destructive than the old way of figuring out what’s inside a mummy – unwrapping it. Without messing with the linen at all, they could look inside and learn about the people inside. First, this lady:

At some point in her history, somebody thought it was a good idea to unwrap her head. She’s in a very simple sarcophagus, so they had a good bet she was poor to start with. When they did the CT scan, they learned that the mummifiers hadn’t even bothered to remove her internal organs – they just shriveled in place. Her linen covering is only a few layers thick, and there are no charms or amulets wrapped into it.

Another mummy was also in a poor person’s coffin – a poor man’s coffin, from the way it was done. But the CT scan showed that the innards were a wealthy woman.

See the two white things – I think the top one is the heart, wrapped in linen and ready to go for the afterlife. So that’s part of what shows you she’s wealthy. The other part is the thing below that – a scarab tucked into her wrappings. They don’t know how she wound up in the wrong coffin – it could’ve happened in ancient times, or it could’ve been done by the souvenir seller in 1904.

Amazing preparations, aren’t they? The Egyptians took the afterlife seriously. The museum also displayed some of the tools and ornaments people had buried with them. It seems like a waste of effort, but what do I know? I’ll sure feel dumb if I die and get to the afterlife and find out I was supposed to bring my stuff with me.

The museum also has a lovely set of dioramas. There’s a whole room showing all the environments of Colorado, from low-ish desert, through the plains, to the alpine tundra. And a whole section of Botswana – the trip I was planning last year to Namibia and Botswana fell through, so I was able to imagine just a bit of what it would be like by looking at this:

I’m inclined to be a little disdainful of dioramas, but I guess they’re good for imaginary vacations.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The other day I was at the National Museum of Natural History and thought the elephant was looking particularly fine:

This enormous bull elephant was shot in Angola in 1955 by Hungarian big game hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Read all about it on the museum’s website. It took 16 months to mount the skin for exhibition. Fun fact: the tusks are fiberglass casts. The real ones are in storage because they’re too heavy for this mount.

If you want a serious taste of a bygone era – you know, an era when someone sees the biggest elephant track ever and thinks, “I should shoot that” – read the account of the hunt Fénykövi wrote for Sports Illustrated.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

And, finally, an extra-cool feature of the American Museum of Natural History: It connects right up to a subway station. So if you’re going on a rainy day, you don’t even have to go outside. Unless you’re me, you fail to locate the underground entrance to the museum, and you go out the wrong exit of the subway station into the rain. That’s ok – it feels a little more impressive to go in through the big doors on Central Park West.

It’s a cool subway station, with decorations that relate to its location. The downtown platform has bronze casts of fossils, and the uptown platform has beautiful mosaics. The definitive blogging about this subway station has been done by Grrlscientist. She wrote about the history of the station (here) and then took pictures of most of the art (here). But here are some of my pictures.

You can’t really tell on this picture, but that whale tail connects to a whale body on the floor.

On the stairs up to the uptown platform:

And the other set of stairs:

I missed a train because I was trying to get a good picture of people going down those stairs.

And, finally, lookit this cute snail:

Aww. Snail.

Well, I think that is now all I have to say about AMNH for now. I’m ready to go back – I never got to a lot of the museum.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Today I went on an outing of the D.C. Science Writers Association to Patuxent River Park – a local park along the Patuxent River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We got a little archaeology tour and a boat trip. And a baby bird. Oh yes – a baby bird. That’s the part that’s supposed to keep you reading to the end.

My half of the group started with an archaeology tour of a place called Mount Calvert. “Mount” is, of course, a completely silly term in that part of the world. Yes, it is higher than the water. It’s even higher than some of the nearby land. But not by much.

It has a long and cool history. American Indians lived there thousands of years ago. In 1684, it became an English colonial town; in 1699, it was made the county seat of Prince George’s County, a position it held for just a few decades, but enough to litter the ground with colonial trash. Hardly anybody lived there; it was basically the place where you went because the court was in session. (The bars were also in session.) After the county seat was moved, Mount Calvert reverted to agriculture and was a tobacco plantation, worked by slave labor.

The plantation house from 1789 is still standing, with a little display inside on some of the items archaeologists have found there. It’s a lovely brick Federalist house. Being on a little rise does give them a bit of a view down the Patuxent toward the Bay.

Archaeologists were at work outside. The whole area is divided into a grid (with giant nails marking the corners). As they dig down, they dump shovelfuls of soil into a sieve to see what’s in them – the occasional bit of pipestem or a nail, but mostly rocks. In this pit, they’ve gotten through the loose soil and are now poking around trying to find the postholes from some old buildings.

Someone asked what they do when they’re done with one of the holes. They fill it in, but first, they often go to the bank, get a roll of 2010 pennies, and scatter them around so future generations of archaeologists will know they’ve been there. How cute is that?

Here’s some of the stuff they’ve dug up – presumably thrown away by residents, not buried by jokester archaeologists:

That’s a couple of pipestem fragments, a hand-forged nail, and a chunk of prehistoric pottery.

For the next stage of the trip, we left archaeology and turned to nature, with a boat tour of a little creek that feeds into the Patuxent. It’s a lovely place – all that water and all that sky, with a strip of green in between.

We saw a beaver lodge, lots of herons, and quite a crop of ospreys.

The guy who lead the boat tour, naturalist Greg Kearns, has been working at this park for decades. His job is park stuff – renting out kayaks and driving the boat and whatnot – but he’s also spent a lot of time making the area welcoming to ospreys. Ospreys are eagles that fish. They’re big. They have a wing span on the order of five feet. They’re supposed to nest in trees, but these days, they mostly nest on handy little nest platforms that humans build for them. So this creek is full of this guy’s platforms. At this time of year, the moms are sitting on the eggs. Both parents take care of the babies. This nest had two adults sitting on it:

Can you see their two heads sticking up? Actually, you can see a lot of the body of the one on the right; the other head is just to the left of that. (The thing poking up on the left is part of the nest.) Kearns is involved in bigger osprey-saving programs, too; he’s sent osprey chicks off to other states to help get populations back. Ospreys, like all birds of prey, were in a lot of trouble for a while there because of DDT. But now they’re back. I saw one fishing in the Tidal Basin when I went to look at the cherry blossoms.

So we’re going along, seeing all these ospreys sitting on their nests. With binoculars, I could see their big yellow eyes up close. But then we came up to this one nest, and he said, oh, that one’s got eggs – he checks them all regularly. Since it was high tide, he could take the pontoon boat right up to the nest. He stopped the boat, climbed up on a bench, reached his arm in, and pulled out…this:

It’s a baby osprey! Hatching!! Saying “peep”! It’s been living off the yolk its whole life. It just has to do that for a little longer – tomorrow it should finish hatching and be ready for fish. You can see its little white egg tooth, the spot on the beak that birds use to break out of its shell. The mother flew around being annoyed while we were checking out her baby, but Kearns said they aren’t particularly bothered about people. Indeed, she landed on the nest again right after we left.

UPDATE: I added the naturalist’s name.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York: Way too much museum to fit in one blog post. Here’s my first post about the visit.

Next topic: Butterflies. This is a trend at natural history museums these days, apparently, or at least the two big natural history museums I’m familiar with. They set up a shed in an unpopular gallery (poor unpopular galleries) and fit it out for butterflies. It costs extra on top of museum admission, and it’s one of the things I got into free because the communications office set me up with an admission voucher.

You go in through double doors and discover: people. And also butterflies. They do timed entries so it can’t get too crowded. I was nervous the whole time about stepping on a butterfly. I mean, what’s to stop them from landing in the path? You also see heat and humidity, or you would if they were visible. This place is set up for tropical bugs.

My favorite was the blue morpho, a butterfly I saw in Costa Rica many years ago. I took a picture but it doesn’t really do it justice – they’re these enormous insects, the size of your hand when the wings are open. The undersides of the wings are brown, but when they fly, they flash a beautiful shiny iridescent blue. It’s a wonderful sight when a blue morpho flits by in the rainforest.

Butterfly exhibits cost extra because they’re a lot of work to maintain. Butterflies don’t live long, so the museum has to keep getting new pupae. These are raised from eggs at butterfly farms in Florida, Costa Rica, and other tropical places. As soon as the caterpillars hit the pupal stage, the farmers pack them up and ship them off.

Insect development is the most amazing thing. That little white butterfly there used to be a caterpillar. It made a chrysalis, then it sat inside, broke itself down, and grew its adult body. It made *wings* for goodness’ sake. And little spindly legs. Think how different that is from a caterpillar. That is wild.

Look, you can see the butterflies’ mouthparts sucking the juice out of the orange:

The mouthpiece is the second long skinny thing from the left on the front butterfly. When a butterfly isn’t using its mouth, it keeps it rolled up in a neat spiral.

I think this is a monarch butterfly. I like how it’s posing against the background of a classic museum floor.

This sign by the exit made me paranoid:

I mean, I didn’t have anyone with me who could check the back of my head. It turned out they had a big mirror and a butterfly net between the two sets of exit doors, so I could determine that I didn’t have any hitchhikers.

I’m not sure the butterfly exhibit would be worth the extra cost of admission. It’s just a bunch of bugs flying around. And I say that as a person who loves bugs. Once I got in there and established that there were butterflies, there wasn’t really much to do other than go around trying to take pictures of them, and the fluorescent lighting made the pictures come out with strange colors. Kids seemed to be pretty excited about the exhibit, though.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

A few weeks ago when I went to the National Aquarium in Washington, I got quite a surprise: this guy, staring me down from inside his tank.

He’s a northern snakehead, a kind of invasive fish who made quite a splash when they showed up in the Potomac River a few years back. Such a big splash that Smithsonian magazine went looking for someone funny and local to write a story about snakeheads for them, and ended up with me. Here’s the story.

You should go read it, but, to summarize, I went looking for snakeheads with the Virginia fish and game folks, a professional bass fisherman (sponsored by “Team Spouse”), and some guys with a boat, and the only snakeheads I saw were dead at the natural history museum. It was the summer of 2004, and they just weren’t that established in the Potomac yet.

So I was excited to see one in the flesh at the aquarium. They’re pretty well settled into the river now. This one was collected from the river when the Virginia fish and game folks were out on one of their sampling expeditions. Ok, ok, if you insist, here’s another picture:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.