Helen FieldsScience Writer

This weekend I was in Lawrence, Kansas, where my dad grew up, and stopped by the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. It’s in a great old building atop a hill on the KU campus.

In olden times (the Cretaceous, if you want to get technical – late in the dinosaur times), Kansas was underwater. The west coast and the eastern U.S. were separated by the Western Interior Sea. I love that it has a name, even if it isn’t a very poetic name – like it’s got a name waiting for it, in case the Rockies decide to go back down.

All that water means Kansas is rich in fossils of wacky sea creatures like this guy:

He’s a Xiphactinus molossus, a kind of bony fish. Doesn’t he look mean?

Also awesome: crinoids.

Crinoids are echinoderms, relatives of starfish and sea urchins that leave behind a lot of hard bits. They make beautiful fossils (a couple of these have been colored to show you what you’re looking at.) There are actually still crinoids, but they’re not nearly as diverse as they used to be.

One of the prized possessions of the museum is Comanche the horse. Dead horse! In a glass case!

Comanche survived the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, with several arrow and bullet wounds. After he recovered, he became a mascot for the Seventh Cavalry. He did parades and wandered around Fort Riley, about 100 miles west of Lawrence. When he died in 1891, he was sent off to the University of Kansas to be preserved. In 1893 he – or his skin, anyway – helped represent Kansas at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Here’s a great slide show on his restoration a few years ago. They had to build a full-size model to make sure he’d make the corners on the way to his new exhibit space. I love the pictures of him wrapped in plastic for the move. His head’s sticking out, which is reassuring – you wouldn’t want the dead horse to suffocate.

My dad remembered going to the museum on Cub Scout outings to see the snakes. I checked and, yep, they’ve still got snakes. (Probably not the same snakes as in 1950. No word if Cub Scouts still come look at them, but I can’t imagine they’d miss the chance.) They have fifteen species that are found in Kansas, each in its own cheerfully painted case.

I feel like the common garter snake, at right, got the nicest room. All those cheerful Kansas sunflowers.

The cottonmouth seemed particularly mean.

For one thing, it’s got the triangular head that screams, “I AM VENOMOUS.” Also, there were little furry gray things floating in the water that looked a heck of a lot like bits of mouse. I thought snakes swallowed their food whole, but I don’t know, maybe that one put up a fight.

photos: me, of course

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.

Yesterday I wrote about turtles. Turtles are awesome. Their shell is made of bone. Bone! Ok, the part you actually touch, the outside, is made of – guess what – tortoiseshell. It’s something like horn. But under that, the hard stuff is made of ribs and vertebrae, fused together. You can see it in the green turtle skeleton at left – sea turtles like this one have big holes in their shell because they don’t really need as much shell as land turtles. (In a land turtle skeleton, that would all be solid.)

Anyway, the truly wacky thing about this arrangement is that the shoulder blades are in front of the ribs. In front! That is weird! As evolutionary morphologist Ann Burke told me: “If you take a deep breath and shrug your shoulders, you realize how bizarre it would be if your shoulder blades were stuck inside your ribcage.” Tetrapods like you and me and cats and birds, we pretty much all have more or less the body plan. But not the turtles. They’re all, “Hey, watch, guys, I can put my ribs behind my shoulder blades.”

I was using my highly sophisticated technique for finding sources who are named in the references of an article – googling burke turtle evolution - and it seemed like, whoever I named, I would get a link to this article from creation.com. So, that’s interesting.  Several scientists I talked to mentioned that turtles do more or less spring fully formed into the fossil record. To creationists, that means someone must’ve placed them there.

This whole thing really made me want to go down to the National Museum of Natural History and look at the turtle skeletons. It’s very old-school: a big long hallway with unsexily displayed skeletons, like this. I love it.

art credit: FCIT

P.S. Hey, I just noticed: this is my 100th post on this blog! Howdya like that?

Monday I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about how snakes move. They only run one picture, which meant we couldn’t use this awesome shot of a snake sewn into a little cloth jacket. Doesn’t the snake look perky? It’s all, “Hey, guys! I’m in a jacket! What’s up?”

The study was figuring out how snakes have different friction in different directions – they’re more frictiony toward the back than the front, so they can slide forwards. The jacket was to even out the friction. If you put a snake in a jacket and you put it on a table covered in cloth, it can’t get a grip to slither forwards; it just squirms around. But it looks stylin’!

photo credit: Grace Pryor and David Hu

Hey, lookit – I wrote this. Things I know now that I did not know 38 hours ago:

1. Pterosaurs were not dinosaurs. They were reptiles like dinosaurs, and they lived with the dinosaurs and went extinct with the dinosaurs, but they weren’t dinosaurs – they were pterosaurs.

2. I knew about birds having hollow bones, but it turns out they also have sacs filled with air that hang around outside the bones. Weird! Birds have a really nifty respiratory system, which, when I looked it up in my freshman biology textbook, did seem vaguely familiar – those air sacs help move a ton of air through the lungs so they can keep pumping enough oxygen to keep the muscles going during flight. Flight takes a LOT of muscle action. You try flapping your arms for an hour and see how you feel.

3. How to spell Rhamphorhynchus (a genus of pterosaur). Actually, apparently I did know this, because the guy said it, and I typed what it sounded like, and I’d guessed correctly. What can I say? I’m a born speller.

art credit: Mark Witton, 2009