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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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Lucy is the first hominid you meet. The ancestors of humans and chimps split about 6-8 million years ago. Lucy was an Australopithecus afarensis, in the human lineage, and she lived about 3.2 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. She was a big deal when she was discovered in the 1970s. I’ve always heard of Lucy, and I imagined she would be more human-like, but she was short and hairy and climbed trees. A lot more apey than I expected.

The real Lucy is on tour in the U.S. right now – quite a controversial move, because there’s only one of her and she’s so fragile. Many museums, including this one, refused to display her. But if you want to see her, she’s in Times Square at the moment.

Neanderthals and modern humans actually overlapped, but they were a different species. We’re Homo sapiens, they’re Homo neanderthalensis. About 28,000 years ago, we came into Europe and somehow drove them extinct. I feel kind of bad about this.

This is a Neanderthal. He looks a lot like us, doesn’t he? Fun fact: He’s named after Neander Tal (Tal = valley) in Germany, where some early fossils were found. Other fun fact: People in the know pronounce the “th” in Neanderthal as “t.”

The exhibit has a lot of neat displays showing how scientists learn things about fossils. This is a Neanderthal who survived a major blow to the head – if you look at the side of his head, around his left eye socket, it’s deformed.

The bones on either side of the skull are from his arms – his right arm is withered because the bash on the head messed up the part of his brain that controls the right side of his body. He lived to be 40ish, so they figure other people in his group must have helped him survive. Isn’t that sweet? See what I mean about feeling kind of guilty that these people didn’t survive?

There are tons of bones and skulls and tools and things in the exhibit. But I realized as I was going through that almost everything on display is casts and models. For the most part, real bones are way too fragile to display. I asked one of the Smithsonian people standing around if there was anything real in the exhibit. She said, other than the one special case with two French skulls and a Smithsonian Neanderthal skeleton, it was a couple of axes and some beads.

So here are the beads.

They know they’re beads, and not just random shells, because the snails came from somewhere else, they’re no good for eatin’, they have unnatural holes drilled in them, and there are microscopic marks on the edges of the holes that indicate the beads were strung. This is from our species, Homo sapiens – about 30,000 years ago in France.

They have a station where you can see what you look like as an early hominid, then get the picture e-mailed to you. This is me as a Neanderthal:

You’re welcome.

Today is a big day for other reasons – it’s the museum’s 100th birthday and also a certain holiday that inspired the cafeteria staff to this act of culinary artistry:

I was tempted, but in addition to being bright green, they were also $3.50 each. Ah, museum prices.

The website for the exhibit is full o’ hominid history.

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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.

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