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.

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.

I went to nerd heaven on Wednesday. I was in New York for a meeting, so I decided this was my big chance to see the American Museum of Natural History. This is the museum that scientists from New York talk about when you ask why they’re scientists. It’s full of rocks and bones and stuff, and I had never seen it.

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.

I have an embarrassing admission to make: I love fish, I love aquariums, I grew up in the Washington area, and I had never been to the National Aquarium in D.C. Until today. In my defense, the National Aquarium is basically one big room in the basement of the Commerce department, it doesn’t have a very good reputation, and it is dwarfed by the ginormous, beautiful National Aquarium in Baltimore. But I happened to have a pass for free admission that expired tomorrow, so this afternoon I finally stopped in.

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.