North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences Part II

This is the second of a two part series about my experience at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  Part I can be found here. 

It was impossible for me to take pictures of every fascinating thing that we saw in the collection department and after awhile, I got so overwhelmed I just stopped taking pictures.  However, there is one more I’d like to share with you.

This skeleton is that of a velociraptor, of Jurassic Park fame.  The first thing I thought when I saw it was that it was much smaller than I imagined it would be.  Even taking into account the fact that in life it would have been covered by muscles and skin and so forth, I think the raptor was much smaller in real life than in the movie.  That’s not to say that it wasn’t still dangerous!

We did not spend our entire time in the collection (although there was enough back there to occupy us for several days).  We also went out into the exhibits.  We saw a collection of all of the poisonous snakes in North Carolina (I could possibly have done without that, to tell you the truth).  We saw a wonderful habitat full of butterflies and moths and one (sleeping) sloth.  Then, we went to see one of the major draws to the museum–the Acrocanthosaurus fossil.

My picture here really doesn’t do it justice.  The fossil is so enormous I couldn’t possibly get the entire thing in the shot.  The acrocanthosaurus is a very rare fossil.  Only four skeletons have been found and the museum has the most complete skeleton in existence.  The acro was a large meat-eating dinosaur with long, serrated, flesh-tearing teeth and amazing claws.  The museum has their acro displayed as part of a reconstruction of an attack on another dinosaur.  The reconstruction is based on casts of footprints which you can see in another hall.

The remainder of the visit was spent in the Prehistoric North Carolina exhibit.  This was a set of six ancient habitats arranged in a sort of continuum with bones from the animals in one habitat seemingly half-buried in the terrain of the next.  We entered the exhibit “backwards,” that is, we entered at modern day and went back in time.  Although this was not the route the exhibit designers intended, it gave me the impression that we had seamlessly starting moving backwards through time.  That we had started in a modern-day museum and now were traveling backward, away from the familiar and deeper into history.  The habitats were marvelous–full of vegetation as well as fossils and scenery.  I was too absorbed in it all to take pictures–with one exception.  I took a picture of Willo.

Specifically, I took a picture of Willo’s heart (found in the middle of that circular area).  Willo’s heart is the kind of specimen museums dream to have in their collection.   Soft tissue (organs, muscle–anything that’s not bone) fossils are incredibly rare and Willo is the first dinosaur to be discovered with an intact internal organ.  The museum has done a battery of tests to show that there is, indeed a heart inside Willo.  They have some very cool images of the CT scans and a 3-D reconstruction on their website.

There was so much more to the museum.  We spent about two and a half hours there and saw only a portion of what the museum has to offer.  I’m certain you could spend an entire day there and still miss things.  It’s really a beautiful museum full of wonderful exhibits.  Many of the more modern museums have caught on to the idea that in order for people to find something interesting, that thing needs to be relevant in some way to them.  This museum does that really well.  Most of what we saw out on the floor was North Carolina-centric.  It was as though the exhibits were saying, “Right here, right on this very spot, there once may have been this species of dinosaur,” or this species of plant, or maybe only a few miles away up in the mountains right now there lives this fantastic slimy eel or terribly poisonous snake.  So often when you see fossils in museums although the sense of antiquity is present, the sense of place is not.  You feel as though these fantastical creatures lived on some other continent, in some other magic land, not right here, not right in the US.  Not so here.  Here, it was evident that North Carolina had hosted some spectacular species in the past.  I was so wrapped up in it, leaving the museum, going out into the street was jarring–look, it’s the modern world, the world of concrete and steel, gas-guzzling monsters!  For awhile, I had forgotten about that world.

So, all I have left to say about the NC Museum of Natural Sciences is, if you are ever in North Carolina–go.  If you are ever in South Carolina, or Virginia, or somewhere in the southeastern United States–go.  Really.

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Part I

I just returned from the Science Blogging conference in North Carolina. The day before the conference, several tours were set up. I went to the Museum of Natural Sciences tour which was led by the Exhibit Director, Roy Campbell.

I’m not sure it’s possible to have a more enthusiastic guide. He really, truly, and deeply loves this museum, loves the exhibits and the work that is going on there and brought everything to life in a way that I imagine few people could. I think that last time I heard someone speak so enthusiastically about a topic, that person was telling me about playing Guitar Hero on their new Wii.

One of the highlights, at least for me, was actually getting to peek at some of the behind-the-scenes work and the collections.

When fossils come back from wherever they were dug up, a lot of the time they are encased in sediment and rock (sometimes some much so that to the inexperienced eye, you might not even realize there is something important there!). There’s only so much you can do when you are at the site of an archeological dig. So, the museum needs a place where the fossils can be carefully cleaned, and at least some of that goes on in this room. In this room, fossils are meticulously cleaned and prepared (note the microscope in the picture which can be used when cleaning very small pieces). Scattered everywhere are fossils–variously colored, large and small–of animals and plants, some of which are perfectly cleaned and some partially cleaned and waiting for more cleaning and some that seemingly haven’t been touched yet.

Here is a fossil of an incredibly large animal whose taxonomy I don’t remember (to be honest, I felt a little out of my depth here, being a cell biologist who didn’t know her Triassic from her Jurassic–everyone else in the tour had much more knowledge of what I like to call macrobiology). Although you probably can’t tell, this fossil still has sediment on it. You can also see its teeth, including an injury in its mouth. Perhaps in another post I will show you an enlarged version of the photo.

After the fossil prep room, we moved into the collection area. When people hear of museum collections, they often think of it as mere storage. A large warehouse type area where they keep all of the things that they own that don’t fit into the exhibit space. And, indeed, when you go in, you might have the impression that you have walked into the attic of an obsessively organized packrat naturalist. The area is full of large, labeled cabinets and shelves with enormous bones on them. It is a place where they truly do have skeletons in the closet! However, a museum collection is NOT storage. It is more accurately called a library. There is a wealth of information locked up in those cabinets and researchers come from all over to study the things found in the collection. While I was there, in addition to the wonderful people who help curate the collection, I met a student who was taking bone samples in order to analyze DNA from coyote and wolf skeletons (they have a special way of doing it in order to minimize the damage to the skeleton) to determine if the animals ever interbred and if so how far back was the first occurrence among the samples in the collection. The cabinet of birds of prey that I am showing in these pictures could be invaluable to a researcher who wants to study some effect on the bird population at a certain period in time. The (taxidermied) birds were all tagged and if there were other samples associated with them (organs or whatever) that was indicated on the tag. Much of the museum’s collection of local wildlife comes to them from the average person who finds a dead animal in their yard or by the road and brings it to the museum. When that happens, the people who curate the collections record the information about the animal and preserve the animal. The same sort of thing happens at many natural history museums (for instance, I know the Field Museum collects dead squirrels given to them by average citizens and all collects all of the birds whose lives are cut short by an unfortunately collision with McCormick Place).

Large specimens can’t fit into cabinets and those are seen on shelves or sometimes just piled in the middle of the floor. Here is a pile of bones from a whole whale that washed up on a North Carolina beach. Specifically, you are looking at the vertebrae of the whale. I put a pen on it so you can get some idea of scale. That is just one vertebra from the skeleton! Take a moment to ponder how long and how messy it was to dismantle an animal of that size and bring it back to the museum.*

There was so much more, but that will have to wait for another post!

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*[Warning: Don't read this part while eating!] If you are wondering how they get the bones so, um, clean, the answer is bugs. Think about that for a moment…. Aren’t you glad you asked?