Helen FieldsScience Writer

I stuck around in Los Angeles for an extra night to see the Getty Center. It’s an art museum. It’s on a hill. It didn’t rock my world, maybe because of the sporadic rain, or maybe because nothing could measure up to the La Brea tar pits. I was also vaguely irritated that the introductory film didn’t tell you anything about Mr. Getty, other than that he liked art and thought everybody should be able to see it for free. I was interested in such questions as: Who was he? Why did he put his museum here? Was he alive when the museum opened? How did he make his money? (Oil, which I was probably supposed to know already, but still.)

Anyway. It’s got a heck of a location. You pay $15 to park in a garage by the freeway and take a tram up the hill. It’s a nice effect – transporting you up and out of the world, as the cars on the freeway below get smaller and smaller.

Then you wander around, marveling at the giant white buildings. It’s a very white complex. It was very bright on a cloudy day – I can’t imagine what it would be like when the sun is out. The buildings are mostly covered in travertine, the kind of rock in the Colisseum. It’s the stuff that forms the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone.

The museum has lovely gardens. This cactus garden even comes with a view of Los Angeles.

My lunch was both tasty and surprisingly affordable for a museum cafe. This ridiculous quantity of local vegetables (beets and a kale & kohlrabi dish) and a cup of cauliflower-potato curry soup were well under $10.

There were lots of school groups….ok, maybe you can’t tell in this picture, but those people are kids:

The highlight of the museum for me was a temporary exhibit of drawings by Rembrandt and his students. The drawings were displayed in pairs, with a Rembrandt drawing on the left and a student drawing on the right – often with the same or similar subjects. Then for each one, there was an explanation of why the Rembrandt drawing was better. They pointed out how he used the heaviness of the line, or how specific he was about the light, or how he used hatching. It was really helpful for figuring out what made him so good.

But the drawings were borrowed from all over and photography wasn’t allowed, so you’ll just have to go to Los Angeles by the end of February to see it yourself…or check out the online exhibit here.

I’ve been hearing about the La Brea tar pits forever, so I was pretty darn excited when a friend suggested we go see them while I was in Los Angeles. The tar pits were – are – naturally-occurring tar seeps in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. Animals would wander up, see the tasty water, walk in to take a drink, get sucked in by the tar, and die. Which means there’s a truly incredible number of bones down there. And a museum to show them: the Page Museum.

First of all, let’s get straight what kind of animals we’re seeing:

Definitely no dinosaurs. You got that? No. Dinosaurs. They must get this question a lot – the sign is right at the desk where you buy the tickets. The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, but Los Angeles was under water until about 100,000 years ago. Animals fell into the tar pits pretty recently, when there were already people in the area. (Ok, I think people turned up sometime during the period they refer to – between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago.)

So, this museum is mostly about prehistoric mammals, like American lions and short-faced bears and dwarf pronghorns, all of which used to roam Los Angeles. Most of what the museum has is bones, which, if you like bones, is awesome. My friend and I spent most of the time wandering around talking about evolution (she did her PhD thesis on it, it still confuses me) and talking about comparative anatomy (quite easy to do when you have so many bones to look at).

For example, we talked a lot about elbows and knees:

This is the front part of a California sabertooth. They don’t call them sabertooth tigers anymore, because they aren’t particularly closely related to tigers.

In mammals, anyway, elbows and knees all seemed to bend the same way – elbows point backward when they bend, knees point forward when they bend. These are elbows, at the bottom left. They bend like ours. But mammals vary a lot in where they put these joints.

Cats and dogs keep elbows where we do – in the middle of the leg. Arm. Whatever. But horses keep them way up by the shoulder:

Sorry, there are a lot of bones in that picture. The horse leg is in the foreground. It’s standing on its toes, or fingers; its heel – or the heel of its hand – is about halfway up the leg; and the elbow is up by its ribcage, just below the shoulder

This may not seem particularly earth-shattering, but it kept us entertained the whole time at the museum, figuring out which bones on different animals corresponded.

There were lots of mammoths in the museum, including this 12-foot-tall Columbian Mammoth, the most common mammoth in North America at that time:

So, I asked, why did all these go extinct? Humans killed them, right? My friend (who prefers to be anonymous on the internet, sorry to be all cloak-and-dagger) said, actually, nobody knows. There was climate change, and it looks like there was an asteroid impact and giant forest fires, and maybe human hunters helped, too. But nobody knows for sure.

The museum is arranged around a lovely green atrium, with this lovely great blue heron:

Ok, that’s a fake great blue heron. A sign explained that they’re trying to discourage a real great blue heron from using the pond as his cafeteria (see the orange koi?), so the decoy is there to think somebody’s already claimed it. And if you do see a real one, you’re supposed to tell the staff so they can shoo him off.

And if you go outside, the tar pits are still there, burbling away in the park that contains the Page Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art.

They really do burble – little bubbles of methane gas come up to the surface and pop. Note that they are fenced off, so you don’t turn into a fossil yourself. And excavations are still going on – in 2006, the art museum started digging to build an underground garage and came across 16 new areas of fossil deposits. They brought up 23 big crates of asphalt (absolutely stuffed with bones), which are now being excavated in the park.

UPDATE, later: I forgot to say, the tar pits smell like tar! Ok, maybe that’s not surprising, but it’s cool.

Every year during the AAAS meeting, there’s an evening reception where some big science journalism awards are presented. This year, the reception was Friday night at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.

I caught the first shuttle bus to the museum. When they opened the doors and let in the flood of science writers, a guy was standing near the entrance telling us there was food on the second floor. I thought, this guy knows what he’s talking about, and asked him what exhibit I must not miss. He told me to go see the fossils on the second floor. Fossils and food? Clearly that’s where I needed to be.

First: I was impressed that all the signs are in both English and Spanish.

Way to reach out to your population, San Diego. I am delighted to report that the Spanish for “Extinct giant sea cow” is “Vaca marina gigante extinta.”

All the fossils in the museum’s fossil exhibit -are local. So as you go through the exhibit, it goes back in time, telling you what San Diego was like in that era and what kinds of critters walked or swam here. This is a walrus from the Pliocene, when San Diego was under water.

It’s head-down, sucking up clams like it would in real life. (The label says modern Arctic walruses feed this way, too.)

The fossil section continued backward, to a section on San Diego’s Eocene rainforest, with funky-looking mammals in the trees. All along, there were cool interactive things – and physical things to do, not just computer screens to poke at. This one lets you sift sand for tiny fossils:

You tilt the sifter thingy back and forth and back and forth until the sediment all runs through the grate and some fragments of bone appear.

Nerd moment: I saw this and said, “Ohmygod, K-T boundary.” The rock above the pale stripe in the middle is Tertiary (T) and the rock below it is Cretaceous (K – from the German “Kreide” for chalk). That pale stripe is the remnants of the event that killed the dinosaurs.

So, below the line, dinosaurs; above the line, no dinosaurs, and a lot more mammals. There’s also lots of neat stuff in the K-T boundary that point toward an asteroid impact as the thing that killed the dinosaurs, like a high concentration of iridium, an element that is a lot more common in asteroids and comets than it is on Earth.

I sat down to eat some tasty, tasty dinner with two strangers who turned out to be highly entertaining. After a while, someone else came and sat with us – and I realized he was the guy who’d told me to go look at the fossils. He turns out to be the museum’s executive director, a job he’s had for 18 years. One of our first questions was why the pendulum wasn’t going. “It should be,” he said.

(It turns out you actually start it by standing outside with a long stick, but this is more fun.)

He also showed off this totally cool globe-shaped screen thing – you can choose from a bunch of different programs, like a plate tectonics one, and it shows you how the planet changed over time. I think in this picture, it’s showing how glaciers advanced and receded during the last ice age (and, correspondingly, how sea levels changed all over the world).

He was clearly proud of his museum’s cool exhibits.

When I was in Kansas last weekend, we skipped over the border to Missouri to see a nice exhibit of rare books from the History of Science Collection at the Linda Hall Library. This library is kind of a surprise – when we were there, I assumed it was part of a university, but it’s actually an independent public library of science, engineering and technology. Herbert and Linda Hall had a lot of money, and this is what they left it to: a public library.

The exhibit shows the tradition of natural history that Darwin came from. His theory of natural selection was based on years of careful study of different kinds of animals – he knew more than anyone about barnacles, for example, and of course there were his famous Galápagos finches. Natural history is a darn good way to learn about nature.

Most of the displays were illustrations from books back to the 15th century. Back then, people were sort of conflicted between relying on classical texts – it was the Renaissance, they were really into that stuff – and observing plants and animals in nature.Some of the pictures had clearly been done by people who had never seen the animal in question, and the texts often came from the ancient Greeks. But eventually they started figuring out that they should actually be observing the animals they were writing about. (Whoa! Crazy talk!)

This adorable hedgehog was in a 1551 book, Historia Animalium:

Isn’t it spunky? (The label says “bristling with charm.”)

Here are some copepods from a book published in 1820 in Geneva. Copepods are teeny crustaceans – relatives of crabs and shrimp.

I was excited to see these guys because I saw a lot of copepods in the Bering Sea last spring. I wrote stories about copepods on at least four days, but see this day for some really nice copepod portraits. (My fingers got really, really cold while Chris was taking the pictures of the glow-in-the-dark copepods, so be sure to go appreciate the beauty.)

This Portuguese Man O’ War was collected in the deep sea in the 1820s.

That is one pretty jellyfish.

From a book published around 1860, a gorilla:

The gorilla was only scientifically described in 1847. Doesn’t that seem late? I mean, gorillas are really big! And that scientific description was just based on bones; apparently no Westerner saw a live gorilla until the 1850s. Chimps and orangutans were already pretty well known by then. (You can read a little gorilla history in this 1988 newsletter – it’s the first story.)

The library had a copy of On the Origin of Species on display, but I failed to take a picture of it because, um, it was just words, see. There were no pretty pictures of animals. Oops.

So, instead, I will leave you with a picture of my best Scrabble play ever, that night at my aunt and uncle’s house:

I played “EQUINELY” for 239 points. This was made possible by two factors: (1) my uncle doesn’t play defensively, so he put that Q right up there by that triple word score, and (2) in our rules, you can look up words before you play them. I wouldn’t have taken a chance on “equinely” if this had been a challenge game, but I thought it might be a word, and I checked the scrabble dictionary, and it was. Woo. Hoo.

photos: me, and they aren’t that good, are they? books behind glass. kind of a rough subject.

This weekend I was in Lawrence, Kansas, where my dad grew up, and stopped by the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. It’s in a great old building atop a hill on the KU campus.

In olden times (the Cretaceous, if you want to get technical – late in the dinosaur times), Kansas was underwater. The west coast and the eastern U.S. were separated by the Western Interior Sea. I love that it has a name, even if it isn’t a very poetic name – like it’s got a name waiting for it, in case the Rockies decide to go back down.

All that water means Kansas is rich in fossils of wacky sea creatures like this guy:

He’s a Xiphactinus molossus, a kind of bony fish. Doesn’t he look mean?

Also awesome: crinoids.

Crinoids are echinoderms, relatives of starfish and sea urchins that leave behind a lot of hard bits. They make beautiful fossils (a couple of these have been colored to show you what you’re looking at.) There are actually still crinoids, but they’re not nearly as diverse as they used to be.

One of the prized possessions of the museum is Comanche the horse. Dead horse! In a glass case!

Comanche survived the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, with several arrow and bullet wounds. After he recovered, he became a mascot for the Seventh Cavalry. He did parades and wandered around Fort Riley, about 100 miles west of Lawrence. When he died in 1891, he was sent off to the University of Kansas to be preserved. In 1893 he – or his skin, anyway – helped represent Kansas at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Here’s a great slide show on his restoration a few years ago. They had to build a full-size model to make sure he’d make the corners on the way to his new exhibit space. I love the pictures of him wrapped in plastic for the move. His head’s sticking out, which is reassuring – you wouldn’t want the dead horse to suffocate.

My dad remembered going to the museum on Cub Scout outings to see the snakes. I checked and, yep, they’ve still got snakes. (Probably not the same snakes as in 1950. No word if Cub Scouts still come look at them, but I can’t imagine they’d miss the chance.) They have fifteen species that are found in Kansas, each in its own cheerfully painted case.

I feel like the common garter snake, at right, got the nicest room. All those cheerful Kansas sunflowers.

The cottonmouth seemed particularly mean.

For one thing, it’s got the triangular head that screams, “I AM VENOMOUS.” Also, there were little furry gray things floating in the water that looked a heck of a lot like bits of mouse. I thought snakes swallowed their food whole, but I don’t know, maybe that one put up a fight.

photos: me, of course

About a month ago, I wrote about a visit to Harvard’s Museum of Natural History. Friend, fellow science writer, and Bostonian Lila Guterman asked me why I hadn’t written about the glass flowers. Because they’re so awesome they deserve their own post, that’s why.

In the late 19th century, father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were making glass models of invertebrate sea creatures. There wasn’t a good way to preserve jellyfish and such, so they made lifelike, detailed models out of glass. The head of Harvard’s Botanical Museum found out about them and hired them to make glass models of plants.

So I’m at the museum. I know the glass flowers are famous. I walk into the glass flower room. I look at the first display case:

And I’m like, well, ok, that’s a perfectly nice specimen of a grass, so where are the glass flowers?

It took me a while to catch on that, no, really, everything was glass. I expected it to look like…glass. Shiny. A little translucent. But that’s not what the Blaschkas were doing; they were making something that looked exactly like the real thing, for study purposes.

See? Just looks like a cactus. A real pretty one, with a flower. The card in front of it tells you it’s an Echinocereus engelmannii modeled on a specimen collected in Tempe, Arizona in June.

An advantage of working in glass (as opposed to working in, uh, plants) is that you can magnify the specimens. A lot of the plants were shown with blown-up sexual organs:

Other than the magnifications, they just look like plants in cases. If you don’t know they’re made of glass, it’s not a very impressive room. But if you do know? Wow!

photos: me. allllll me.

Tonight I went on a tour of the fossil labs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, organized by the DC Science Writer’s Association. I learned many exciting things and took pictures with my cell phone camera, ’cause that’s all I had. Sorry.

Sample fun fact: When they find little fossils in the field, they wrap them up in toilet paper and tape.

I like the one that says “Chunk-o-Bone.” And the other one that says “Bone?” Might be a bone. Might not. We also learned that you can sometimes tell the difference between bone and petrified plant material by licking it – bone is porous, so it wicks liquid away from your tongue and your tongue sticks to it. Petrified wood is solid and doesn’t do that. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of this demonstration.)

We learned a lot about preparing fossils. When fossils come back from the field, they’re often stuck in rock. So, you want to cut away the rock. The preparators have jackhammers as small as a dentist’s drill. Some rock is just too hard for chipping away, though. These vats are for dissolving fossils in acid:

These fossils are in limestone, which apparently is really hard. If you chipped bits of it away, it would take forever. So instead they bathe them in really weak acetic acid, over and over and over and over. After every overnight bath, someone has to coat the bones with a plastic solution so the acid won’t dissolve them, too. With weekly baths, dissolving the bones out of a rock takes…forever. Like a year. Acid won’t dissolve plant fossils, so if that’s what you’re trying to get out of the rock, you can just throw in the rocks, put mesh over the drain, add some super-strong acid, and wait.

The vertebrate paleontology folks are in the process of making custom-fit foam and plaster jackets for all their fossils. Big fossils are heavy. REALLY heavy. They’re basically rocks, and think how big a dinosaur leg bone is – that’s a big rock. Until someone dug them up, these fossils were happily ensconced in some kind of rock formation. So if you have a big old bone sitting on a shelf, and it’s just resting on three or so points, it’s really likely to break. Here’s a fossil getting its cast made:

The sand supports the weight of the fossil while it’s being worked on. My favorite fact: That sand is made of crushed garnets. It’s cleaner than regular sand, apparently. Also, red. And so pretty!

Our last stop was in a big room with big stuff. Example: That white thing in the back is a fossil branch of some kind of ancient tree fern. It’s so big, for years it leaned against the wall outside in the parking lot. They were afraid it would break the floor if they brought it inside. Note that it is inside now. They cut a lot of rock off the back before they brought it in.

At left is some dinosaur whose name I’ve forgotten. This is actually a cast; the original has been on display, but they’re trying to take their type specimens down. (I think he said there are seven in the dinosaur hall right now.) A type specimen is the specimen that defines a species, so paleontologists want to be able to study them. The museum is replacing them with casts so scientists can work with the type specimens.

The Natural History has redone two of its major halls recently – mammals and oceans – and a third is opening this spring. The dinosaur hall is next on the list. Apparently a lot of the skeletons are mounted based on antiquated ideas about how dinosaurs stood. Some date to shortly after the museum opened – which was in 1910. So if you know anyone with a few million dollars to throw around, the Smithsonian would love to hear from them.

UPDATE, 2/1/10: Here’s some more info about that giant tree fossil. It was a “scale tree” and it came from a coal mine in Iowa. The museum received it in 2005.

photos: me.

There is nothing I love like a good old-school museum. And Harvard’s Museum of Natural History? It is OLD school. Ok, it has many excellent modern displays teaching scientific concepts. And it also has:

Boxes of rocks!

(Excuse me: cabinets of minerals. I learned today that a mineral is not a rock; rocks are made up of minerals. I’m still working out this whole geology thing, and I thank the museum people of the world for helping to teach me.)

Also: Cases of birds!

(SO MANY cases of birds. I love birds. Although, I must say, you don’t learn a lot when you just look at a couple hundred birds in a case. Pretty, but…not that informative.)

And also:

South American vertebrates! Thank goodness it’s only selected representatives. There are a lot of vertebrates in South America. (Not to worry – the museum has vertebrates from everywhere else, too.) (There is one black rhinoceros that is crying out for a wealthy alum to fund its retaxidermying, if that is a word, and it should be.)

But by far my favorite room is this one:

Several whale skeletons, a taxidermied giraffe, SO MANY BIRDS, deer, apes – this gallery has a little of everything. It was built in 1872 and restored to its early-20th-century glory a few years ago. It’s not really how people do museums today, but wow, is it beautiful.

photos: me