While I was incapable of keeping up with RSS feeds through my computer’s web browser, I check the Google Reader app on my phone all the time.

One of the blogs I’ve come across is from the Field Book Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The museum owns a ton of field notes, and the project is about cataloging all those notebooks full of written observations and drawings. They’ve been posting pictures of interesting notebooks on their blog.

One recent entry was a set of drawings of fish in a Hawaiian fish market in the summer of 1901, with detailed notes on the colors. Fish colors change quickly, so you want to record them right away–and color photography wasn’t exactly an option.

And I loved reading about the different ways books can be flexible–I’d never thought about it, but bindings and papers have different amounts of bendiness, and you have to get the right combination if you want your book to open right. For the particular book in that blog post, they decided the pages were so brittle that it wasn’t worth trying to preserve it as a book, and now the pages live neatly stacked in a box (with the spine label and covers).

These books represent good old-fashioned natural history, where people go out in the field (dressed like this), look at things, describe them, and come up with hypotheses about how the world works. I love that kind of science.

In case you missed it, a highlight of last night’s State of the Union was this joke about salmon:

The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.

I saw an LA Times story about the joke (thanks to Naomi for the link), which included this piece of information:

Filmmaker and liberal political commentator Michael Moore wrote on his Twitter feed, referencing the president’s opening call for unity and respect between the parties: “Soon a fresh water salmon will sit next to a salt water salmon in the spirit of civility.”

A fresh water salmon? A salt water salmon? Oh dear. Let’s get back to my high school vocabulary words: Most salmon are anadromous. They live mostly in the ocean, but go back to freshwater to breed. That’s why salmon do that whole swimming upstream thing, to find a mate. Shad do this, too.

Catadromous is the opposite – living in freshwater but going to the ocean to spawn. Some eels do this.

So there you go. The vocabulary words of the day. I used to have a mnemonic for remembering which is which, but now I have google.

I got half of that. They do have a hall of dead stuffed mammals – with, bonus, live penguins. But rocks were sorely lacking. There was a dinosaur in the entrance hall and an exhibit on climate change, but basically, this is a museum about biology. Which is fine. I like biology. In fact, it’s my favorite. But I was disappointed they didn’t have a broader reach.

Oh, and there’s a planetarium, but since you have to pick up special passes that run out if you want to see a planetarium show, I don’t think it really counts. And actually I didn’t even know I was entitled to one of those tickets until just now, when I read it on the website – I assumed they cost extra. Nice job with the communications, Cal Academy.

This looks how I always imagined the moon would look if it weren’t lame and dusty and gray:

But it’s not some kind of futuristic outer space pod station thing, it’s the roof of the museum. The Cal Academy has gotten a lot of attention for their “living roof” with native plants – unlike the imported European grasses that cover California’s hillsides, these don’t turn brown in summer. The domes cover the planetarium and the rainforest exhibit, and the hatches can be raised for ventilation. Read about some of the building’s green features in this cool graphic from Wired. The roof was my favorite part of the museum – I made a second stop up there before we left.

So here’s what it looks like underneath one of those domes:

That’s a rainforest in a globe. You have to go through multiple doors, like an airlock, to make darn sure you’re not releasing any of the rainforest denizens into the California environment. Inside are trees, vines, lots of cute chirpy birds, a macaw, butterflies, bromeliads, and fish. When you’re done winding your way up through the ramps in the rainforest, you take an elevator down below the floor, to the basement aquarium – including the fish you were looking down on moments before:

Several of the aquaria are open at the top, so from the ground level, you can also look down on a coral reef and an aquarium that represents the California coast.

In honor of the holiday (this was December 20th) there were several special displays – a little portable planetarium with a show about the northern lights, some stuffed polar animals, and these two bored-looking reindeer:

You’ll be glad to know the reindeer poop was being used to fertilize the plants in nearby Rhododendron Dell. The museum sits in the middle of Golden Gate Park.

So, I enjoyed it. Particularly the roof. But I was shocked by the $30 ticket price,  the highest I’ve paid in my museum tourist expeditions. Of course, I’m spoiled by the Smithsonian, where admission is free. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, you can pay $32 for admission and all the extras – special exhibits, like the butterflies, IMAX movies, and so on. But you also had the option of paying $16 (or less – it’s a suggested donation) to see the permanent exhibitions, which includes tons of rocks, dinosaurs, and other amazing stuff.

And in any case, I do wish they’d mentioned that my ticket covered a planetarium show. Apparently I’m still irritated about that.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

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.

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.

First, let’s dispense with the basement issue. What are you going to do with natural light in an aquarium, anyway? (Ok, the Baltimore aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium do lovely things, I know, I know. But this aquarium gets by without it. So there.) It’s the nation’s oldest aquarium – established in 1873 in Woods Hole, it bounced around a bit over the years, then settled down in the 1930s, after the Commerce building was built. It got a much-needed renovation in the last few years.

Ok, there are no adorable marine mammals. But a lot of people would argue that you shouldn’t have them in captivity anyway. Instead, this aquarium has baby alligators on loan from an alligator farm; when they get too big for the space, they’re shipped back to Florida and end up in the wild, as part of the conservation efforts for the American alligator. Here’s their spiffy Everglades-style habitat:

And let me introduce my new alligator friend:

I like his goofy grin.

Most of the exhibits were about U.S. waters, with a particular focus on the National Marine Sanctuaries – that’s the connection to the building, you know, NOAA and everything is under the Department of Commerce. But they also had a corner about the Amazon, with this awesome snake.

I’ve been told you should never go walking in the rainforest with a herpetologist, because they will point out things like this all the time, when you might have been happier if you’d stayed ignorant. The emerald tree boa mostly eats birds. It gets its teeth into a bird, squeezes it to death, then pokes around until it finds the head (the proper end to start swallowing from).

This tank represents life in Brazil’s Rio Negro. It is appearing in this blog post because it is gratuitously pretty. Also, those are real water plants, not plastic. So that’s nice.

There, wasn’t that pretty?

This gray tree frog lives in North American bogs. Well, not *this* one. This one lives in a tank.

It’s a nice little aquarium. It’s not super flashy and it sticks to the smaller animals, but they’re well presented, and I thought the emphasis on U.S. protected waters was a clever way to focus a small collection. (And then there’s the random Amazon section, but hey, everybody loves the Amazon.)

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

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.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me, of course

I was writing about this guy, Megapiranha – he’s a 3-foot-long extinct piranha relative with interesting teeth. (If you are a person who is interested in piranha evolution.)

Also totally cool: the pacus, which are related to piranhas and look a lot like them, but don’t eat meat. To quote John Lundberg, one of the ichthyologists I talked to: “They really are frugivores. It’s pretty amazing. The pacus that are in the Amazon and Orinoco, they’ll go into flooded forests during the high water season and they’ll wait underneath fruit trees that are coming into maturity. They’ll just hang out. The fruits drop into the water and they float away. Of course the fishermen see that and they fish with fruit.”

Isn’t that funny? Forget nightcrawlers, somebody get this fish a nice juicy piece o’ fruit. He says he watched fishermen in Suriname take a really long pole and put a piece of fruit on the end – something that looks kind of like a kiwi – and slap the fruit on the water. The pacus totally go for it.

art copyright Ray Troll, 2005