Helen FieldsScience Writer

Last week I reported on some strange rocks from South Australia that may preserve the oldest animal fossils. Or may not. Ok, nobody knows. But they look kind of like animals. Read about it here.

I like that the function of the journal article was basically to throw the idea out there, see if any other geologists come across anything interesting. There’s plenty of rock of the right age exposed on the planet; you just have to tell geologists to look for it, and other samples of these animals (or whatever they are) could turn up.

In the I know everybody category, the lead author’s name sounded vaguely familiar. Before I called him I looked at his website, and indeed – he went to Carleton College at roughly the same time as me. We have four friends in common on Facebook. Fifteen years ago, I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup. Today, his name just sounded vaguely familiar.

I do a heck of a lot of knitting, most of it not really suited for a work blog. But I feel this is legitimate science and paleontology and…oh, cmon, look how cute this little guy is:

The pattern is modified from this knitted stegosaurus.

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.

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.

When I first started freelancing full time, a friend of mine was like, hey, I need some freelance work. You can write quizzes for me. And I was like, oh, I don’t know, quizzes? I’ve never written a quiz. And she was like, nah, it’s easy, go for it. And I was like, well, ok, if you say so. They turned out to be some of the most fun writing I’ve ever done. Here are the last three in my year-long series.

I referenced the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the intro to the Space quiz. Of course.

If you want to be a Fossil, where should you arrange to die? This is the quiz that tells you.

The art person got way sneaky on the quiz about Building Big – sometimes the picture gives you the right answer, and sometimes it gives you the wrong answer. Ooooohh!!

To see all my quizzes, click here.

Check it out – a blog about the excavations at La Brea tar pits, by one of the paleontologists working on it. (I was there the other day.)

I’ve been hearing about the La Brea tar pits forever, so I was pretty darn excited when a friend suggested we go see them while I was in Los Angeles. The tar pits were – are – naturally-occurring tar seeps in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. Animals would wander up, see the tasty water, walk in to take a drink, get sucked in by the tar, and die. Which means there’s a truly incredible number of bones down there. And a museum to show them: the Page Museum.

First of all, let’s get straight what kind of animals we’re seeing:

Definitely no dinosaurs. You got that? No. Dinosaurs. They must get this question a lot – the sign is right at the desk where you buy the tickets. The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, but Los Angeles was under water until about 100,000 years ago. Animals fell into the tar pits pretty recently, when there were already people in the area. (Ok, I think people turned up sometime during the period they refer to – between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago.)

So, this museum is mostly about prehistoric mammals, like American lions and short-faced bears and dwarf pronghorns, all of which used to roam Los Angeles. Most of what the museum has is bones, which, if you like bones, is awesome. My friend and I spent most of the time wandering around talking about evolution (she did her PhD thesis on it, it still confuses me) and talking about comparative anatomy (quite easy to do when you have so many bones to look at).

For example, we talked a lot about elbows and knees:

This is the front part of a California sabertooth. They don’t call them sabertooth tigers anymore, because they aren’t particularly closely related to tigers.

In mammals, anyway, elbows and knees all seemed to bend the same way – elbows point backward when they bend, knees point forward when they bend. These are elbows, at the bottom left. They bend like ours. But mammals vary a lot in where they put these joints.

Cats and dogs keep elbows where we do – in the middle of the leg. Arm. Whatever. But horses keep them way up by the shoulder:

Sorry, there are a lot of bones in that picture. The horse leg is in the foreground. It’s standing on its toes, or fingers; its heel – or the heel of its hand – is about halfway up the leg; and the elbow is up by its ribcage, just below the shoulder

This may not seem particularly earth-shattering, but it kept us entertained the whole time at the museum, figuring out which bones on different animals corresponded.

There were lots of mammoths in the museum, including this 12-foot-tall Columbian Mammoth, the most common mammoth in North America at that time:

So, I asked, why did all these go extinct? Humans killed them, right? My friend (who prefers to be anonymous on the internet, sorry to be all cloak-and-dagger) said, actually, nobody knows. There was climate change, and it looks like there was an asteroid impact and giant forest fires, and maybe human hunters helped, too. But nobody knows for sure.

The museum is arranged around a lovely green atrium, with this lovely great blue heron:

Ok, that’s a fake great blue heron. A sign explained that they’re trying to discourage a real great blue heron from using the pond as his cafeteria (see the orange koi?), so the decoy is there to make him think somebody’s already claimed it. And if you do see a real one, you’re supposed to tell the staff so they can shoo him off.

And if you go outside, the tar pits are still there, burbling away in the park that contains the Page Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art.

They really do burble – little bubbles of methane gas come up to the surface and pop. Note that they are fenced off, so you don’t turn into a fossil yourself. And excavations are still going on – in 2006, the art museum started digging to build an underground garage and came across 16 new areas of fossil deposits. They brought up 23 big crates of asphalt (absolutely stuffed with bones), which are now being excavated in the park.

UPDATE, later: I forgot to say, the tar pits smell like tar! Ok, maybe that’s not surprising, but it’s cool.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Every year during the AAAS meeting, there’s an evening reception where some big science journalism awards are presented. This year, the reception was Friday night at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.

I caught the first shuttle bus to the museum. When they opened the doors and let in the flood of science writers, a guy was standing near the entrance telling us there was food on the second floor. I thought, this guy knows what he’s talking about, and asked him what exhibit I must not miss. He told me to go see the fossils on the second floor. Fossils and food? Clearly that’s where I needed to be.

First: I was impressed that all the signs are in both English and Spanish.

Way to reach out to your population, San Diego. I am delighted to report that the Spanish for “Extinct giant sea cow” is “Vaca marina gigante extinta.”

All the fossils in the museum’s fossil exhibit are local. So as you go through the exhibit, it goes back in time, telling you what San Diego was like in that era and what kinds of critters walked or swam here. This is a walrus from the Pliocene, when San Diego was under water.

It’s head-down, sucking up clams like it would in real life. (The label says modern Arctic walruses feed this way, too.)

The fossil section continued backward, to a section on San Diego’s Eocene rainforest, with funky-looking mammals in the trees. All along, there were cool interactive things – and physical things to do, not just computer screens to poke at. This one lets you sift sand for tiny fossils:

You tilt the sifter thingy back and forth and back and forth until the sediment all runs through the grate and some fragments of bone appear.

Nerd moment: I saw this and said, “Ohmygod, K-T boundary.” The rock above the pale stripe in the middle is Tertiary (T) and the rock below it is Cretaceous (K – from the German “Kreide” for chalk). That pale stripe is the remnants of the event that killed the dinosaurs.

So, below the line, dinosaurs; above the line, no dinosaurs, and a lot more mammals. There’s also lots of neat stuff in the K-T boundary that point toward an asteroid impact as the thing that killed the dinosaurs, like a high concentration of iridium, an element that is a lot more common in asteroids and comets than it is on Earth.

I sat down to eat some tasty, tasty dinner with two strangers who turned out to be highly entertaining. After a while, someone else came and sat with us – and I realized he was the guy who’d told me to go look at the fossils. He turns out to be the museum’s executive director, a job he’s had for 18 years. One of our first questions was why the pendulum wasn’t going. “It should be,” he said.

(It turns out you actually start it by standing outside with a long stick, but this is more fun.)

He also showed off this totally cool globe-shaped screen thing – you can choose from a bunch of different programs, like a plate tectonics one, and it shows you how the planet changed over time. I think in this picture, it’s showing how glaciers advanced and receded during the last ice age (and, correspondingly, how sea levels changed all over the world).

He was clearly proud of his museum’s cool exhibits.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Today I went on a reporting trip to chat with a scientist who likes to collect fossils. (I’ll tell you more when the story comes out.) I saw tons of shark teeth, bits of seals and whales, some coral and barnacles, and also…other stuff from the beach.

Spiderman. Heh.

The Science Channel posted more quizzes!

1. Bones. I put in a Harry Potter question. Oh yes I did.

2. Wind Energy. It’s free, it’s windy, it’s wind energy. Includes a question based on a book I was supposed to read in eighth grade. I was a really good kid, but I don’t think I ever finished this book.

3. Fossil Fuels. Do you know why they’re called that? Eh? Do you? Take the quiz!

To see all my quizzes, click here.