Photo: Heather Huson

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.

It’s from a long-term study site in the Kalahari desert. Most of the research there has to do with the evolution of cooperation; meerkats are social animals who live in groups. If you’re going to follow the meerkats all day, you need to be there when they first poke their noses out of the sleeping burrow.

In summer, some groups get up as early as 5 a.m. “We have to get up at ludicrous hours of the morning to get there on time,” says behavioral ecologist Alex Thornton. But the scientists who work there also know something else: “There are certain groups, where if you are going there in the morning, you can have a bit of a lie-in” – because they consistently get up later. Thornton and some colleagues analyzed 11 years of data and found that their sense was right – some groups consistently get up early, and some consistently get up later.

The researchers concluded that this is evidence of a tradition, a controversial concept in the non-human animal world. They looked at all kinds of characteristics of the sleeping burrows, but couldn’t find any other reason that would explain some groups getting up later. This could even be true in the same burrow – “You might find that group A use a burrow and they get up late and group B use the same burrow a few days later and get up early,” Thornton says. And it’s not genetic; if a new meerkat comes in, it learns what everybody else does.

See my very short story (and one more meerkat picture) here.

Photos: Alex Thornton

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.

First, a disclosure statement: I got into the museum free. Theoretically, anyone can do this. The museum admission fee ($16 adult, $9 kids) is actually just a suggested donation – you could walk up to the cashier, say, “Hi, I’m not paying!” and get a ticket. But that takes some nerve. I got a voucher from the communications office because I’m a journalist, and my ticket included entry to a couple of things you really do have to pay for.

But I’m pretty sure that even if I hadn’t gotten in for free, I would still think this museum was awesome. ‘Cause it is. Awesome. One blog post can not come close to doing justice. It is a darn big museum. Here are some selected highlights.

First: If I were a kid growing up in New York, I would want to become a mineralogist. The minerals are displayed in this crazy room in the back of the museum, with all different levels and ramps and stairs and carpeted places to sit. I kind of wanted to move in.

I didn’t want to move in anymore after it was invaded by actual children who are growing up in New York. Golly, school groups can make a lot of noise. This leads to one of my useful tips on this museum: Weekdays are good, but weekdays after 2 are better.

One of the biggest dang things is a model of a blue whale. Can you imagine if you were snorkeling or scuba diving and you saw one of these? Wow.

They were setting up some kind of party underneath the whale. I wonder how the whale feels about that.

I couldn’t help, as I went through the museum, comparing it with my hometown natural history museum (the Smithsonian one). Like, we have this one big elephant in the rotunda. He is big, and he is awesome. And New York is like, “Whatever. We have a whole herd of elephants, and they’re not even important enough to be in our entrance hall.”

I like how the sign by the elephants says four of them were “collected” by Carl Akeley in the 1920s. I know, our relationship with nature was different then, and I suppose the dead, mounted carcasses of these elephants have several decades’ experience inspiring young people to scientific greatness, but come on. “Collected”? That sounds like he picked them off the savanna with a butterfly net.

The AMNH particularly excels in that standby of old-school natural history museums: the diorama. There are dioramas of everything. Asian mammals. African mammals. Birds. New York state environments. Neanderthals. There was even an extreme close-up diorama showing the soil surface, with an ant the size of a baby and a disturbingly oversized centipede. Here’s one from the hall of African mammals, featuring a pair of Greater Koodoos:

One of the things I like about the dioramas is that in addition to the sign telling you about the animals, there’s a second sign telling you about the environment they’re in. These guys live in scrub at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. A few years ago my natural history museum scrubbed its dioramas and remounted the mammals on their own, against mostly white backgrounds. It is a beautiful exhibit, but a different approach to talking about animals – more organized around evolution, less reference to environment.

The dinosaurs live on the top floor, where there is [gasp] natural light. Yeah, I know, every picture up to now has been kind of gloomy. That’s the nature of museums, I guess, or at least museums that are trying to preserve things when ultraviolet light is the enemy.

This Tyrannosaurus was remounted in recent years. In 1915, when the museum originally mounted it, scientists didn’t agree on how Tyrannosaurus stood. Some thought it stood like a bird, with head down and tail in the air; others thought it stood upright and dragged its tail. The museum had to pick one, so it went with the upright model. Since then, scientists have decided that would dislocate the neck bones (ow) so they’re leaning in the bird direction. It was remounted in 1992 to 1994 according to that hypothesis:

It’s kind of less threatening when it’s low to the ground, although…now that I think of it, that might just make me even easier to eat. Big, pointy teeth just above head level. Yikes. Good thing they’re extinct.

So like I said earlier, they don’t have a bull elephant in their entrance hall; instead, they have a crazy big dinosaur. Ok, they kind of made this up. The dinosaurs are all real, but they have no idea if a female Barosaurus was indeed capable of rearing up to defend her baby from an attacking Allosaurus. But what the hey, it looks cool and extends about 50 bazillion feet into the sky.

Really, there was so much to see at this museum, I’m saving bits of it for other blog posts. Something to look forward to!

UPDATE: Those other posts: Butterflies; Subway.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Many more Maru videos here. And thanks to CuteOverload (who else?) for introducing me to Maru.

Yes, your pets are trying to kill you. Ok, not kill you, and they mostly don’t do it on purpose, but they really are dangerous. Researchers at the CDC analyzed emergency room data and came up with estimates for how many injuries caused by falls are related to pets. A lot, it turns out. This weekend I met someone who’d gotten pretty banged up by falling over cats on the stairs. Yikes. Here’s the story.

The other story is about dogs, but it’s also about a theory in evolutionary biology. The question is how personalities evolved – all kinds of animals have them, and some biologists think they may have come about along with a few different life plans. One is sort of the “live fast, die young” plan, where you live like a pop star, reproduce early, take risks, and die young. This is thought to be associated with bolder personalities. The other is a more cautious, longer life. The guy in my story thought he’d look at dogs to see if these relationships are true across breeds with different personalities.

photo: by me

She kept me company while I worked. (She’s not dead, she’s waiting for you to rub her belly.)

I like how the tortoise (in Boston’s Copley Square last weekend) is dressed up for the holidays. Do you think the decoration would help him win the race? Or create drag and slow him down? Or motivate the bunny to kick some turtle butt for once in his lazy life?

Merry Christmas!

It’s funny to wish someone a “merry” day. Who ever describes anything as “merry” anymore? I wonder if that’s a Victorian holdover.

Read more about the silky sifaka – that website is by Erik Patel, the main source for my story.