So on a trip to Ann Arbor recently, of course I had to check on the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, formerly–and less eloquently–known as the Exhibit Museum of Natural History, I suppose to emphasize that they were actually showing things off, instead of just doing research. Research is the point of university natural history museums (and is the reason I haven’t gotten around to blogging about Berkeley–they have hardly anything on display).

Let’s look at some rocks and bones.

Does that look like any old rock? Well, it’s not. For one thing, look how pretty! For another, it’s a piece of the Acasta Gneiss, a rock formation in northern Canada. That’s some of the oldest rock on Earth, about 4 billion years old. The Earth only started to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Of course, almost everything on Earth has been here for something like four and a half billion years. It’s just that most of it has been melted down and turned into something else in the last 4 billion years, and this rock hasn’t.

The museum’s main room is about the history of life, with old-fashioned display cases around the edges and some nicely redone skeletons in the middle. I particularly enjoyed the mastodons.

This old girl was found in the 1960′s on a farm in Michigan. Mastodon bones are pretty common in Michigan, and I like that the museum features local fossils so prominently. Like mammoths, mastodons are extinct elephant relatives. You can tell them apart by their teeth and the slope of their foreheads. (Learn more from the Field Museum’s online exhibit about mammoths and mastodons.)

Skeletons of animals from 10,000 years ago are rarely complete, and this one needed some filling in. But you don’t have to guess which bits are real and which aren’t. The museum lays it out for you.

Yes, the tusks are fake, but don’t worry, the museum didn’t make up this mastodon’s differently-sized tusks; she really did break one during her lifetime. The real pieces of ancient ivory are safe in the collection.

One last thing: a little section of the carving around the door to the museum.

The study found that snow leopards eat mostly ungulates, which was no surprise. But the researchers also found the remains of one solitary chukar partridge. If you would like to live like that adventurous bird-eating snow leopard, here’s a University of California extension document on raising chukar partridges. Like snow leopards, chukar partridges are native to Eurasia, but unlike snow leopards, they have been introduced to the western U.S.

Illustration: ”The Cat: An introduction to the study of backboned animals” by St. George Mivart, 1881

How come there were no projects to build life-sized inflatable whales when I was there, I ask you? It’s just not fair.

Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about scientists who used poop to study right whales’ hormones. They were originally interested in reproduction–the right whales that live off the East Coast of North America are reproducing very slowly, and it’s not totally clear why. They used the poop to develop a right whale pregnancy test, and they can also tell if a female is lactating or a male has reached sexually maturity.

For this study, they used measurements of stress hormone metabolites to look at the whales’ stress levels. Stress is a big deal for animals, including humans–it can compromise your immune system and mess with reproduction. In this case, they were looking at how the whales respond to ship noise.

Fun fact that didn’t make it into the story: The scientist says the smell of right whale poop is “uniquely foul.”

Fun fact that did make it into the story: they found the poop with poop-sniffing dogs. No kidding. Read all about the whales, the poop, the dogs, and what all of this has to do with 9/11.

Photo: New England Aquarium

Here’s a set of NASA pictures of Ham and a brief history of animals in space.

Kandula was born at the zoo in 2001. One of the highlights of my journalism career was in the summer of 2002, as an intern at NPR. Kandula was about seven months old and I got to go into the elephant enclosure and follow him around with a mic to get sounds of him playing in the water. SO CUTE. Here’s the story about elephant lungs.

My favorite line in the study was in the part about how they got the chimps to take part in the experiments. The authors wrote: “If a chimpanzee declined to participate that day, her test was rescheduled for another day.” These chimps live outdoors in a research colony in Georgia. On a day when the researchers were planning to work with a particular chimp, they’d open the door of the research building and call her name. The chimps think experiments are fun, but sometimes they just don’t feel like it – if there’s nice weather, say, or some interesting social interaction they don’t want to miss out on. And if that happens, well, they just don’t participate that day.

Read it here.

It’s not clear whether this means tayras are really thinking about planning for the future, or whether they’re just doing something that they have learned will be useful later.

Here’s what one of my sources, Mathias Osvath, says about the difference between associative learning and planning: “If you have associatively learned something, like, ‘If I push the red button I will be rewarded,’ then that is of course an act for the future. But it does not include anything cognitive, more than the learning mechanism…. True planning is when you shut your eyes and you think about what you will have for lunch tomorrow.” Which are they doing? Nobody knows.

At certain times of year, ships have to slow down when they’re going through right whale habitat. For example, they have to go slow off Georgia in the winter, when moms and babies are hanging out, and off Boston when the whales are feeding there in the spring. The whales aren’t totally lockstep about their migration, but they are more likely to be in some places than others at particular times of year.

One of the niftier items I mentioned in the story is the buoys in the Boston shipping lanes that listen for right whales. If a buoy hears a right whale call, they send it back to shore where a human checks it, then somehow the information gets out to ships.

You can see this for yourself – the Right Whale Listening Network has a nice website that shows which buoys are active right now and which of those have heard a whale in the last 24 hours. Right now I see one red whale outline out east of Cape Cod. The buoys in Cape Cod Bay aren’t working because there aren’t as many right whales in the area at this time of year.

photo: NOAA