Perissodactyl Project

Revisiting Rehousing

2009-12-30T14:38:00.014-05:00

Rehousing: Progress Update

After grueling semesters at various universities, several of the Summer 2009 interns living in the New York/New Jersey area are back at the AMNH lending a hand in the final stretch of the NSF Type Rehousing Project that’s terminating in March 2010.

During these last few weeks of the year the attention has been shifted entirely to rehousing the remainder of the type specimens. Although there are only a few interns, we have been able to develop a good pace. At the beginning of the first week back we were faced with roughly 200 specimens in need of rehousing, after three weeks of readjusting and mastering our hand skills with ethafoam once again we have brought this number down to 100 specimens left for completion. Judging by the progress made as well as the large amount of help to come, we are feeling quite confident that the fifth floor as well as the Type Rehousing Project will be completed by March!

There is rarely a day when we don't encounter an interesting or sometimes mysterious issue associated with a specimen.

Too many mandibles:

One of the types we came across contained a terse note reading “too many mandibles” and quick inspection revealed three mandibles housed with the rest of the specimen. A veritable scavenger hunt for information ensued and it was discovered that while all three mandibles belonged to different individuals, they all had a link to the type. One jaw was figured in the publication of the type, one was labeled with the type’s specimen number, and one was a perfect fit for the maxilla of the type. Since none could be eliminated, all were rehoused with the specimen.

While there may be excitement in the future when a researcher comes across this specimen and believes that she/he is looking at a fossil of Cerberus, there won’t be any need to spend time hunting down the publication and other relevant information, since all the evidence has now been thoroughly documented and included with the specimen in storage, in the card catalogue and in PaleoCat.

Traveling the Silk Road Exhibit:

For those of you who have been following our blog entries, you may recall the week of our tour in the Department of Exhibition. During the summer we were given a sneak preview of the Traveling the Silk Road Exhibit, where we were able to see a model designed down to the smallest detail by their team of preparators.

Fortunately the Silk Road Exhibit is now open to the public! As you enter the exhibit you are greeted by a caravan of camels, which happen to be the same camels that we saw in their preliminary stages during the summer.

As you wander through the four cities starting in Xi’an and ending in Baghdad, you learn about the different technologies and cultures associated with the Silk Road. The exhibit highlighted key techniques used in the tedious process of silk making, and the harvesting of silk worm cocoons. Each caterpillar cocoon is made of one continuous strand of silk which is then transferred onto a loom and woven together. These looms were so sophisticated that they could be used to create intricate designs and patterns. It was amazing to have seen the beginning stages of this exhibit, and then to have had the opportunity to enjoy the incredible final result.

A Summer at the Museum

2009-09-24T14:13:00.010-04:00

This was the final week of the post-season here in the Paleontology Department of the AMNH or, as one child called it in an interview with Time Out New York, the Dinosaur Museum of Magical History.

While we've been working to finish up all the projects we took on this summer, much of the Vertebrate Paleontology department is in Bristol, England at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual conference presenting projects they've been working on all year.

Georeferencing: Final Destination

Feeling like it's finals time in algebra class, we've combined notes and numbers from georeferencing and are proud of our progress. Just in the overtime, the small group of us left completed 26.9% of the lat/long searches out of the entire 1808 item list from the very beginning of the project. Unfortunately, about 6% of the remaining localities cannot really be elaborated further. This is out of our hands though, since the locality on the labels, and catalog cards are sometimes as vague as "Decatur County, Kansas" or "None Given."

Rehousing: Ethafoam Apocalypse

Over the course of this last week we've rehoused everything from rodents, cats, and dogs to bears, primates and other species from some of the rarer mammal families. One of the more interesting genera we came across this week was the Glyptodon - an armadillo relative that's roughly the size and shape of a Volkswagon Beatle!

We've seen quite a few interesting specimens as we've worked across the 5th floor and while we won't reach the lofty goal we set of finishing all the type specimens on the floor, we're leaving Alicea in a good position.

We're finishing out the week keeping in mind that others will continue where we left off. It's important to leave reports for future interns and volunteers to read, to store all our materials in a place that's easy to locate and access, and to break down our work stations and leave the collections tidy.

We wish Ruth, Carl, and Alicea the best of luck as they continue on these endeavors.

Post-Season Update

2009-09-15T09:59:00.031-04:00

We're in the 4th week of the post season here at the American Museum of Natural History and with less than two week remaining we're looking at the 5th floor (the only floor with fossils still in need of rehousing) as a sort of bowl game - an extra chance at the end of a great season to take on one more challenger. Will the 2009 summer paleontology interns come out victorious or will entropy still lay claim to some of the types on the 5th floor?

While the floor has plenty of type specimens in need of rehousing, we've been making quick work of them due to their small size. Most of the fossils we've pulled so far have been rodents or small feline and canine relatives, but then came Eudinoceras - an Coryphydont from Mongolia, closely related to Uintatherium, pictured here. We welcomed the challenge and gave it a great new rehousing, but we are keeping our fingers crossed that we don't come across any of its relatives, as specimens that large (think 50+ pounds just for the skull) take about 5 times as a long as a small specimen.

We've also been working with volunteer Alyssia to train her into rehousing. She'll be at the museum once a week throughout the coming year and will be continuing the type rehousing project. Even if we interns reach our goal of finishing the 5th floor, other type specimens, either ones that are returned from a loan or found in future inventorying of the fossil mammal collections, will be in need of rehousing. She's already helped us with a challenging in-drawer rehousing, so more manageably sized fossils will seem like a piece of cake.

PaleoCat

A few weeks ago we received a comment on the blog asking for more details about PaleoCat. As we mentioned before, PaleoCat was developed specifically for the needs of the Paleontology department of the AMNH and is a great tool for research and collections management alike. It can be used to locate a specimen in the collections, identify all the fossils from a given locality, or print specimen labels. While information is still being added to the database, when complete it will contain data ranging from a fossil's storage location to its taxonomic information to a list of publications on the specimen.

The georeferencing work that the interns have been doing all summer is part of this process to enhance PaleoCat. Once we upload our work, a researcher will be able to find the country, state, county, and even the exact coordinates where the fossil was excavated. It can't be underestimated how important it is that locality information be easy to access when studying a fossil - it puts the animal in context relative to the climate it lived in and the plants and animals it lived with.

Take, for example, fossils from the "Telegraph Line Camp" in China. If you haven't heard of it before, its not the sort of place you can look up in an atlas or type into Googlemaps. Since China is such a large country there are plenty of regions it could have come from - perhaps the coast, or the desert, or maybe the mountains. After our georeferencing is uploaded to PaleoCat, you'd be able to find out that the Telegraph Line Camp is in the Xilin Gol Province of Inner Mongolia, a place that isn't so hard to find on the map. Pictured here is a monument to fossils found in the region, located only a few miles from the Telegraph Line Site.

Thanks for the question and check back next week to hear how the post-season wraps up!

Another wave

2009-09-08T09:10:00.006-04:00

Rehousing
After a sad goodbye to half of our comrades-in-arms on Friday, the next Monday began with much reorganization of materials and space. Our goal was to determine how much of the scrap material could be saved and reused over the coming weeks. With the reorganization we were able to spread our elbows a bit more, providing a more comfortable work zone.

We began working on specimens that have been hiding on the 7th floor. With non-type specimens hiding with the types, specimens "missing", and specimens that only needed their type labels, it was an interesting day. But after much back and forth between the collections and the database and the staff, we were able to finally finish those troublesome specimens and close that chapter in the project (for the most part). We are finally ready to begin the last floor in the collection: floor 5! Floor 5 is the last floor in the collections that need types rehoused.

Georeferencing
We continued georeferencing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like any other week. Those of us who were working on the 8th floor relocated up to the 10th floor, freeing up the 8th floor for the department volunteers. The work continues, with a couple interesting yet evasive localities providing a new look into the task. Locations like Edgbaw, Myanmar, a locality of Barnum Brown, has one of us emailing everyone under the sun to find more information. It has become the "Holy Grail" for her and she does not want to give up on it until the end.

We pooled all of the work finished by the interns over the past two months. We copied it all back into the master copy of the georeferencing file, then split it up again between the three of us who are left. With two of us focusing on localities within the USA, the third intern is working on localities outside of the country. The number of localities seems to have doubled since we first splite them up two months ago, so the task has become a little daunting. But we're up to the task! We're still searching the library and the archives, still finding ramdom sources online and still poking through those catalog cards for even the smallest bit of information that can help us in our search.

It's the end of the world as we know it!

2009-08-20T16:05:00.024-04:00

As a fitting achievement for our final day, we reached our goal of finishing type rehousing on the 6th floor. We’ve been working on that floor for two weeks and breathed a sigh of relief that we could see it to completion. The floor has proven especially challenging because we originally thought it contained only a few type specimens in need of rehousing, but a survey done by volunteers as well as our own run through of the type-inventory sheets revealed we had a long way to go. Some types tried to remain elusive, but with our powers combined, we tracked them down, scattered throughout the cabinets though they were. Many of ‘hiding specimens’ were so large that they required in-drawer rehousing, such as the skull pictured here. The large size of the fossils on this floor is no surprise considering it’s the floor containing Rhinos and their relatives. While working on some of the biggest type specimens to date, we became pros at in-drawer rehousing and developed some new creative ways to work on that scale.

At the end of the day, we compiled information on what we had done over the course of the internship and strategized about what needs to be tackled in the post-season (those of us whose school schedules aren’t whisking us away right now are staying for another 5 weeks to continue work on the project). We're proud to say we entirely finished Element Descriptions and sent them to Ruth to be uploaded to Paleocat. We made a lot of headway in Georeferencing; most of us identified locality information for the country, state and county of each of our roughly 160 localities and spent the final week tracking down latitudinal and longitudinal information. And we wrapped up type rehousing on all but one of the eight floors of fossil mammals.

Anthropology Tour

On Wednesday we visited the Anthropology Department and were guided by Paul Beelitz through the various collections in the department. At the start of the tour Paul gave us a quick breakdown of the field of Anthropology into its components, Physical Anthropology, Ethnology, and Archaeology – for a link to those definition click here. The AMNH has collections of material from each of these three subject areas, primarily from the New World: North, Central and South America.

Some of our favorite artifacts on the tour were the Hopi dolls, known as kachina, which the museum has been collecting since the late 1800’s. It was fascinating to see what has changed and what has remained the same in the making of kachina dolls in over that period of time.

Other highlights of the tour included a teepee liner with a story depicted across it, a painting of the Buddha currently being researched for the untraditional location of texts on it, and a hand-made, life-sized, paper replica of a Peugeot bike from Vietnam.

Finally, all of us were very impressed with the Smudge Room – an area for people with a personal (i.e. ancestral, spiritual, cultural, etc.) connection to artifacts in the collections to interact with them. Paul, who designed the room, said it is most commonly, but not only, used by delegations from American Indian tribes and is equipped with a ventilation system for smoke from incense, sweetgrass, and the likes. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that the objects in the museum are not alienated from their people and vise versa.

Fossil Halls Tour

We also had the privilege of a pre-work tour led by Doc Carl Mehling of the Fossil Halls (Hall of Vertebrate Origins, Saurischian Dinosaurs, Ornithischian Dinosaurs, and Fossil Mammals and Their Relatives). Carl worked on the most recent renovation of the Fossil Halls in the 1990's and told us the stories behind making the exhibits what they are today. It’s safe to say none of us will ever see that, or any other, fossil hall the same way again.

Firstly, Carl explained layout of the hall – instead of taking a chronological approach to the organization of the fossils there, as many museums do, the designers took a phylogenetic approach, recreating the cladistics of vertebrate evolution in the layout of the exhibits. This strategy focuses on evolutionary relatedness as opposed to shared time periods.

Since many of the fossils (and footprints and eggshells) on exhibit are real – the layout of parts of the Halls was finalized using life sized replicas made of cardboard so that they could be moved and repositioned often without fear of damaging them. Keeping in mind how big some of the fossils are, the replicas sound like they were masterpieces in themselves.

One of the most impressive attractions in the dinosaur hall – the real trackway of Apatosaurus footprints – was also one of the most complicated parts of the renovation. The trackway had been found in limestone and excavated in large slabs. When these slabs were given to the museum, the were plastered together on the floor. When the 1990’s renovation of the Fossil Halls took place, moving them involved forcing large metal sheets underneath them (to create what amounted to an over-sized spatula), turning the floor into a giant slip-n-slide with ivory soap and dragging the tracks across with pulleys. Now they’ve stood the test of about 150 million years of the elements and one AMNH renovation. Here is a picture of the tracks taken in 1959 with a young boy sitting in one of the footprint - hope this gives you an idea of their scale.

Reflections

In addition to everything we learned about handling and rehousing fossils and always keeping locality data with a specimen, we leared a lot about the AMNH and the challenges and advantages inherent in such a large institution. Through the weekly tours we saw different ways each department deals with the challenges of maximizing storage space, fighting pest infestations and maintaining an organized collection. We also saw the myriad of ways departments collaborate. Whether is a mammalogist taking a fossil out on loan from Paleontology to compare its characteristics with that of a modern mammal or a paleontologist using the rock saw in the Planetary Sciences to cross section a specimen, the size of the museum means that there is an incredible wealth of information and technology housed in one institution.

That's all for now, but thanks for following the blog in the 2009 season and don't forget to stay tuned for post-season updates!

It's the final countdown...

2009-08-18T08:53:00.000-04:00

As our seventh week comes to a close we say goodbye to Karen who is leaving us on Saturday to head back to school (KAREN WE MISS YOU ALREADY!!). With the realization that the end is in fact drawing near we are remaining upbeat and are continuing our productivity!

We are still working on the sixth floor but have made surprising progress and our goal is to complete the floor before our eight weeks come to a close. We have come across a few drawers which will need special attention and are to be done similar to the proboscidean specimens we were rehousing from the second floor. Many of the specimens this week have been Perissodactyls, mostly rhinos and rhino like creatures, but we have had a few strangers like Amphicyon ingens, the largest bear-dog show up. To date we’ve rehoused a total of 182 specimens and with each day that number grows!

Georeferencing continues and is still going well; most of us have completed the first wave of finding country, state and county (or whatever the equivalent may be) and have begun the second wave which is finding latitude and longitude and in some cases township and range. Most of the localities require much research but others have wonderful notes both on the cards and with the specimens themselves (this is an important lesson for all you budding or current scientists TAKE GOOD FIELD NOTES!!). Google Earth is also a valuable tool as well as Earth Point which helps with finding the township and ranges.

The element descriptions are winding down and most of us have finished our drawers. Once all the drawers are finished we’ll have completed descriptions for a grand total of 17,605 specimens! It seems just yesterday we took on this daunting task and now in the final stages we feel quite accomplished!

The tour this week was of Extreme Mammals, and extreme they were! Our first lesson was what makes a mammal a mammal? It turns out all mammals share at least three characteristics NOT found in other animals they are: 3 middle ear bones (the malleus, incus, and stapes), hair, and the production of milk through mammary glands.

Notably, an important theme throughout the exhibit is convergent evolution. This occurs when two unrelated species have similar biological traits; in other words they evolve to resemble one another but in very different ways.

A great example of this is the wing seen in birds, bats and pterosaurs; they all use it to fly but in each case the bones of the skeleton have been modified in very distinct ways.

The entrance to the Extreme Mammal exhibit is quite impressive! Upon entering you are greeted by a life size replica of Indricotherium, which you then walk under to access the rest of the exhibit. By having the opportunity to walk beneath this specimen you are able to gage just how massive these creatures were! It turns out they measured a staggering 16-18 feet at the shoulder, with their closest living relatives being rhinoceroses.

The exhibit also boasts a wonderfully preserved specimen of Darwinius masillae (fondly named Ida), a primate from the Eocene (about 47 million years ago) from Messel, Germany.

Other interesting and extreme specimens include:

Diprotodon, the largest marsupial to ever live!

Glyptodonts, which are related to armadillos, and lived during the Pleistocene of South America, eventually migrating up to North America during the Great American Interchange. Some of these guys could grow to the size of a VW bus!

The giant ground sloth, also of the Pleistocene

Chalicotheres (Moropus elatus), very interesting clawed ungulates the lived during the Eocene to Miocene
Ambulocetus natans which is the “walking whale” lived about 49 million years ago and was about 10.5 feet long, it’s closest relation is whales and hippos

Uintatherium which lived between 40-30 million years ago in North America and stood 5 feet at the shoulder

It Came From Marrrrrrssss

2009-08-11T12:11:00.000-04:00

Georeferencing:

Overall, the most important aspect of this task is to figure out the country, state, and county location of each specimen on our list. If along the way we find the latitude and longitude within our research, whether it be noted on a catalog card, map, or publication, we add it to our spreadsheet.

One simple but helpful technique that has helped us find the specimen location when the card catalog, internet, and periodical research has failed has been going into the cabinets and looking at the actual specimen. In some cases, the locality, or at least more of a clue to the locality, has been found on the tags and random notes left with the fossil. In other rarer (albeit awesome) cases, the specimen has had the localities and stories (think paragraphs) written on them.

A more complex problem we have come across is locations that span 100 or more entries in our excel database that needs to be further broken down. For example, one list contains about 100 entries from San Jose. In order to pin point the county locations for these entries we had to find quadrangle maps in the archives that luckily had the specimen locations marked on them. Quadrangle maps are topographic maps of Quadra- squares broken into quarters, those quarters broken into quarters, and so on: a structured way of zooming in on paper. We are now in the process of finding the location of each specimen by using the longitude and latitude found on the maps and plugging it into Google Earth to find out what county it lies in. Sometimes the coordinates do not come up on Google Earth so we have some things to further explore.

Happily, as this week comes to a close, many have finished the country, state, and county location and have moved on to entering any latitude and longitude locations found. Chelsea, our georeferencing go-to girl, has asked for each intern to leave her a note on what is completely finished, what needs to be researched further, and what is going to be impossible to pinpoint. Next week we will have a meeting discussing what has been accomplished, what can be further explored, and how to find the longitude and latitude of locations that we did not find in passing research.

Element Descriptions:

By the end of next week, many will be done with their drawers for element descriptions! At that point, we will help each other finish up and perhaps gain more time for georeferencing and rehousing.

Rehousing:

We have finished rehousing specimens on the lower level, the third floor (including extras that were later found for us), as well as the second floor. Next week we will begin to tackle the 4th, 6th, and 7th floors, and finally we will make our way to floor 5.

This week the bulk of our rehousing was on the second floor. What was different about this floor was that we had to build many of the specimens into the drawers due to their size and weight. Some of these specimens include mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres and elephants. We also saw a smaller relation to elephants, the group hyracodontoidea- a modern example being the hyrax.

Before
After

Earth and Planetary Sciences Tour:

Our first half of the tour this week was given by Petrologist Njoki Gitahi. Petrology is the study of the origin of rocks and we were shown rocks that had resurfaced from deep within the Earth. These rocks are very important because they are a great representation of our Earth’s mantle; what we can only otherwise imagine as we cannot go down to the mantle on our own. One such example was a Xenolith. A Xenolith (literally stranger-rock) is a rock fragment that becomes surrounded by a different type of rock during its formation.

We also got to see some different types of hardened lava from Hawaii, most notably, Pahoeoe (which has a ropey look to it) and Pele’s Hair, the goddess of fire. Another type of lava we did not see but can be used as a contrast to Pahoeoe is Aha, a sharp and brittle looking lava also from Hawaii. Last, we saw some remnants of the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. One example was a stack of glass drinking glasses melded together.

The second part of our tour was given by Joseph Boesenberg, a petrologist of meteorites. Meteorites can be likened to what we saw with Ms. Gitahi because they can be compared to rocks found within the Earth. Two types of meteorites we were able to see were iron, a meteorite made of metals, and stony, a meteorite made of rock.

Some of our favorite meteorites included: olivine, a magnesium iron silicate that is named after its color – when held up to the light is gives off a stained glass window effect, an impact crater sandstone, which has many pockets of air, resembles the aftermath of folding egg whites, and floats like pumice , and tektites. Tektites are rocks that are liquefied and ejected from the crater when a meteorite hits the ground. It was the general consensus that everyone’s favorite type was the button tektite. When the rock is ejected from the crater it flies forward, and its front area, in liquid state, comes around to the back giving off the button appearance.

Olivine
Tektites

After discussing various types of meteorites we were told not to stand on the next rock passed around. After some confused looks we *drum roll please* got to hold a piece of Mars!! And no, no one attempted to stand on it.

As our sixth week comes to an end, we are happy to know that many of our goals for the week have been reached in not only rehousing, but in georeferencing and element descriptions as well. We only have two weeks of the project left, but some of us will be staying on through September to carry on, and we are certain we will have more triumphs and stories to report back on!

Another week in paradise

2009-07-31T10:26:00.000-04:00

Rehousing
This week has marked a milestone in the project. After nearly five weeks of laboring under heavy skulls of equids and their relatives, we have completed the third floor types and we are starting to rehouse the specimens in the dungeon. We may be working in paradise, but that does not mean it is smooth-water sailing. This week produced a number of "non-type" specimens impersonating types, several "stowaways" and one specimen that is so big it has to be rehoused in the cabinet drawer in lieu of in the cardboard boxes most specimens are housed in. This specimen includes skull, jaws, skeletal bones and fragments that all must be housed in a single drawer. With limited space in the cabinets there is no choice to split the specimen between two drawers, as we have seen with several other specimens in our time here.

We have also learned about “manuscript types”, which are types that have not been published, but have been described in a manuscript. These lucky specimens were rehoused even though they are not types.

Finishing the third floor has provided a new energy throughout the group. From here we turn to the lower level (That’s the dungeon to us.) where we will be working with some different critters than the horses that will be haunting our dreams for years to come. We have broken away from the Perissodactyls and are moving on to the Artiodactyls. The lower level holds Cervidae (deer) and Moschidae (musk deer). The big cart that Carl provided for us will come in handy more now than ever as the trip to the lower level will take a significant amount of time.

Georeferencing/Element Description
With a few personal triumphs for some of the group, our progress in both Georeferencing and Element Description is coming along nicely. We are becoming more confident with each passing week, as we are grinding through the lists. Teamwork is proving to be a strong suit in this group as those who are already finished with their chunk of the lists are now helping those who had been given additional tasks.

We have had some luck tracking down some of the localities in Mongolia, which has been a thorn in our paw since the beginning of the project. We have located maps and manuscripts that help us find the localities we’re looking for.

With fingers, toes, and eyes crossed, we are hoping to be done with Element Description in the next week or two!

What is this, a school for ants?
This week we toured through the exhibits department with Dina Langis. She showed us several different stages of the planning process for upcoming exhibits. We saw floor plans, both beginning and end process models, and full-scale pieces that are being used in the actual exhibits.

Seeing the models was particularly interesting as it provided several perspectives and stages each exhibit goes through before being finalized and built in the gallery. Exhibits change many times from conception to the opening. There was a rough model of an upcoming exhibit about polar exploration, and a finished model of the Silk Road exhibit which is being built now.

In the idea room, pictures, thoughts, and concepts are pinned up on bulletin boards to promote creative thinking and ideas. All along the wall were pictures for the upcoming Silk Road, Polar Exploration, and The Brain exhibits.

The Silk Road exhibit, which is currently being built has some very cool pieces. A full-sized camel is being sculpted, and fake fruit now looks good enough to eat.

Whooo We're Half Way There....

2009-07-27T11:10:00.000-04:00

Meeting Our Quota
This week we are continuing to work at a steady pace in order to tackle the type specimen rehousing project. Although we are making substantial progress every day, we have decided that setting a daily quota for ourselves would immensely help us to reach our goal within the remaining four weeks.

Using a large flat bed cart that Carl lent us as well as some spare carts, we were able to move many specimens at once to our work space. The carts full of specimens act as a visual reminder to help us with managing our time throughout the day. It's also reassuring to see the carts with specimens that have been successfully rehoused, these completed specimens provide us with motivation and a sense of accomplishment.

Georeferencing and Element Descriptions
Georeferencing continues to be a daunting yet exciting task for all of us. Everyone’s pace is dependent on the difficulty of their locality; the localities that threaten to break our one hour rule include Mongolia, India, and Pakistan. Through this entire process we have come across some interesting localities that prove just how old our collection is, like USSR and Persia for example. With each week we are finding out just how useful the card catalogues are, even the smallest amount of information can be the missing link in our difficult search. In the unfortunate case that the card does not contain any more information we realize that only a certain amount of time can be spent on the location of each specimen, and so we move on.

Element descriptions are a repetitive but rather necessary task. Most of us are over half way through our assigned drawers, and feel confident that we are close to completing this part of the summer project.

Tour of the Ornithology Department

The Department of Ornithology here at the AMNH has the largest collection of bird skins (meaning the skin and feathers) in the world. It seems that this collection could hardly be lacking much. Here we were given the privilege of seeing Bald Eagles, Elf Owls which were miniature in comparison to the Giant Eagle Owls, Toucans, Hornbills and many more.

Evolutionary biology seems to be a large aspect of the Ornithology collection. A clear depiction of this can be seen in the dramatically beautiful colorings of these sparrows from Mexico and South America; each color representing a different geographic region.

One of the most interesting things that Dr. Sweet brought to our attention was the shallow pits found in the ulna of birds. These ridges or pits indicate where a series of quills had once been attached to the bone.

During our tour we were able to see an artist paint detailed images of birds for a field guide, using not much more than the skins from the collection. Further along the hidden staircases and long corridors we came across the osteo prep lab for the Ornithology Department. Similar to the tour of the Mammology Department, we also had the pleasure of experiencing Ornithology's alcohol room. Instead of three large Apes, this time we saw three large preserved Casuaries. During the tour we were lucky enough to see the Audubon room (which is temporarily closed to the public), an extremely beautiful room exhibiting original paintings by John James Audubon and his sons. At the far end of the Audubon room we came upon a room containing bird nests and eggs, many of which were stored in vintage containers like old chocolate boxes, old battery boxes, and shotgun shell boxes.

Although the content of the ornithology collection may differ from that of the paleontology collection, there are quite a few things that we have in common. The numerous volumes of localities, and the process they use to organize their data is very similar to what we have seen here in the Vertebrate Paleo. Department.

Rehousing
On Friday during rehousing we worked on our first rodent and first carnivore... an exciting change from the usual horse skull. With each day it becomes easier and easier to solve unique problems. In some cases new drawers must be made in order to maximize the amount of storage space in the cabinets. We have come across some interesting specimens that have been listed as both holotypes and genotypes or sometimes even cotypes... but with the help of Carl we have sorted out most of these issues. Slowly but surely we are bringing ourselves up to date with all of the different type lingo. Our confidence grows each week regarding the progress we have made so far, setting a pace that is consistent and allows for us to produce quality work. Everyone has developed their own techniques which are all working extremely well. By the end of this week we successfully rehoused the intended number of specimens and are confident that our pace will steadily increase.

The Real Deal

2009-07-17T14:06:00.000-04:00

This past Monday we began our first post-training week and settled into the schedule we will have the rest of the summer - rehousing on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, georeferencing on Tuesday, and elements descriptions on Thursday.

Rehousing
As we become more familiar with rehousing and fossil handling techniques, we're settling into a solid pace of pulling, rehousing and returning a few cart-fulls of specimens to the collections each day. We completed nearly 50 rehousings during the past week.

One highlight was figuring out, with guidance from Carl and Ivy, what to do with the tray of bones set in a large plaster block that we'd mentioned in the previous blog post. Such an arrangement is known as a plaque mount and is intended for display. Since the plaster block is far too large to fit in any of the boxes we have (it takes up nearly the entire drawer), we used tri-rod to stabilize it in the drawer, and if we come across such a mount where parts of the fossil are raised above the top of the tray, we'll make a choroplast riser to protect the bones from other trays scraping on top of them.

A second challenge that arose came not from a fossil, but from a fossils' documentation. Some specimens had notes with them written on newspaper over 100 years old - the oldest so far is from 1898. To keep these notes - which have become pretty tattered - from further deteriorating, we used archival quality tape to mend rips and reinforce any part that seemed prone to tears.

We’re making a big dent in the type collection - or it certainly feels that way. The process is going much more smoothly and we’re continuing to find our niches.

Georeferencing: Where in the world?
On Tuesday we had a briefing with Chelsea about our first round of georeferencing from the week before. We got the chance to ask her about any problems we had run into and also share any helpful hints we'd figured out during our first batch of localities. Since the objective of georeferencing is to take information about the location of a specimen's origin given by the excavator and plot it on a current map - we need to find the country, state/region, and county/division of the excavation site.

One challenge we ran into is that some territorial boundaries have changed since the fossils were excavated. For example, we were working on a locality listed as "Bugti, India" - excavated in 1923 - and weren't making much progress until we figured out that the excavation took place in what is today Pakistan.

The card catalog turned out to be one of out greatest assets in narrowing down options for a given locality. Cards often contain additional notes about the site, such as nearby towns, major roadways or alternate spellings. The first card pictured here is a georeferencing dream come true, containing both a street map on the front and a geological map on the back. Others, like the one pictured below, provide less help, but in such cases we can turn to field notes and other sources.

We divided up the remainder of the master list of localities amongst ourselves. After filling in the territorial information, we'll go back and find the latitude and longitude - using field notes, shipping record, and Google Earth. We'll have plenty more questions for Chelsea when we get to that stage.

What's that smell? Thursday's Tour

After continuing our work on element descriptions, our Thursday tour of the Vertebrate Zoology Osteology Prep Lab lead by Dr. Neil Duncan, Supervisor, turned out to be quite the olfactory experience. Dr. Duncan showed us how he reduces fleshy dead carcases, sent to him by many various departments in the museum, into clean sets of ready-to-study bones.

One technique is performed int the degreasing and maseration room - where bones are submerged in water and left to rot over time in their own juices, go bacteria!

Although that may have sounded icky when Dr. Duncan first described it to us, that process pales in comparison to what goes on in the 'bug room.' Specimens are placed in tubs with thousands of flesh-eating beetles, pictured below on the skeleton of a fish. These little guys get the job done and can clean some small skeletons in less than a day. But be careful not to leave a specimen in there too long - they'll eat the bones if they get hungry. Dr. Duncan also has to worry about keeping the beetles contained. In a museum with taxidermied animals on display and in collections, a beetle escape could reek havoc. The beetle tubs are equipped with lids and there is a layer of glue sealing of the gap under the door to serve as a second line of defense.

Lastly, Dr. Duncan showed us the room where whale bones are stored. Like the collections we saw on the mammology tour last week, this was another example of how modern and paleontology collections have the same issues when dealing with space for specimens, especially large ones such as those from large animals like the blue whale. Finally, we got to go into the fridge at a chilly -4’F temperature that's used to preserve
carcases before they go to the bugs.

A whale skull and vertebrae from this week's tour -

large specimens such as these require special attention in moving and storage.

Not for the Squeamish!

2009-07-10T13:15:00.000-04:00

We began our week at our computers with our continued work of element descriptions. We’ve started the actual description part of the data entry and are slowly working our way through the numerous abbreviations and terminology. We are learning that the most important part in building a database is consistency.

On Tuesday we were introduced to Chelsea, a former intern from last summer, who is the queen of georeferencing. She introduced us to the many ways of retrieving data to fill in the multiple gaps that make up the locality information. Chelsea explained that there are many outlets for finding information. These include anything from Google Earth to Paleocat, and even the more formal sources like journal articles and various books. She encouraged us to utilize the archives at the AMNH and if needed to be creative when looking for locality data. By the afternoon we were working on our individual tasks of finding country, state, and county when given only the locality name. This task seemed daunting at first, especially when the locality said only “Alaska”, however, we were told to keep our scope in mind and not to be discouraged…you can’t get every one.

The middle of the week brought our final re-housing training with Ivy. She gave us an introduction to proper labeling techniques. She explained the differences between holotype and genotype labels (holotype: specific level type specimen and genotype: generic level type specimen) and how to go about writing citations. We also learned about mylar and how it’s used to preserve and protect labels. We also discussed how to fill out c

ondition reports for each specimen that we are re-housing. After this, we were officially on our own to pull, re-house, label, and replace each specimen. Teamwork is an ever

important theme.

Thursday the students turned into the teachers! With Ivy gone, it was now our turn to train Carl…not that he needed a lot of training. Our task was to teach him everything we had learned up to this point. He proved to be an excellent student, taking notes the entire time. After his lesson, he left us to our own and we continued our re-housing. The afternoon brought our first department tour of the Mammalogy department. The tour was given by the Collections Manager, Dr. Darrin Lunde.

You may ask what we saw on this tour… indeed we saw mammals but we also got a glimpse of the long history the AMNH has to offer. We were shown the original library, the attic turret that faces 77th street, the alcohol room (not what it sounds like, these are specimens preserved in alcohol), along with the bones from elephant, hippo, and other mammals. Dr. Lunde talked about the different management techniques that mammalogists encounter in comparison to vertebrate paleontologists. We were surprised to learn that each department, while different, has many similarities when overcoming obstacles.

We ended the week with continued re-housing. Our first major complication arose while pulling specimens we uncovered fossils embedded in plaster that took up the space of an entire drawer. Unfortunately there won’t be any room to re-house them traditionally, so our creativity comes into play once again. More to come on this issue!

We’re gradually becoming more comfortable in our abilities to create these re-housing boxes, and the process is starting to go much more smoothly!

Below are before and after re-housing shots!

The Beginning of the End

2009-07-06T09:03:00.000-04:00

After the grueling process of getting our badges and finding our way through the maze that is the twenty plus buildings that make up the American Museum of Natural History, we found ourselves at the doorstep to fossil heaven...the Vertebrate Paleontology Department. Following our teaser tour of halls we will soon become familiar with - and promises of a more in depth tour later, we began our meet and greet with some of the lab and collections staff who we will meet more formally in the coming weeks. In the afternoon, we got the grand tour of the big bone room and fossil fish collection as well as a handling demonstration of fossils from Jeanne Kelly. We were taught the proper techniques on how to pick up, move, and handle type specimens, as well as how to approach other situations regarding our safety - and the fossils - that we may run into while working in the collections. Following our safety lessons, we set up our computer stations to ready ourselves for our day to day work in the upcoming weeks.

On Tuesday morning we met Ivy the Collections Manager of Fossil Fish and the Frick Mammal Collection loan guru. After testing our geometric and engineering skills we managed to set up six work stations in a relatively small area. We realized this will be the only time it will be clean, but we're very proud of our puzzle solving skills - seven heads are better than one and sometimes an eighth!

Cue dramatic music ** and then there was ethafoam. ** We were then enlightened by Ivy about the importance and archival properties of ethafoam. We were then encouraged to become ethafoam ninjas by trial and error but as Ivy says there really is no error, just things she can and will use later in order to send out loans. We lovingly put these "good attempts" into the fail box. We were also introduced to our current frenemy mr. glue gun and feel that the next seven weeks will be a love / hate relationship. Overall, Tuesday was a test to our problem solving skills and we think we did an ok job!

Wednesday was very similar to Tuesday. We were with Ivy and she had us practice specimen moving, label writing, and we had an introduction to the last part of box assembly which includes a shield of cloroplast. Her motto echoed throughout the day, "as tall as necessary as small as possible." We then used trirod, a close relative of ethafoam, to sculpt around a specimen in order to create a secure environment for the specimens so that it may pass the wiggle test. . The day ended with us pulling and picking out our first specimens for the rehousing project.

On Thursday we got a tutorial from Ruth on how to type in element descriptions using excel. We also received a brief introduction to Paleocat, a customized database designed for students and researchers in the field. We are taking the original verbatim card catalog descriptions of the specimens and creating titles that researchers can quickly access to locate their specimens of interest. We will then reformat the descriptions so that there is some sort of consistency throughout the database. We are quickly picking up the paleo-lingo with help from Ruth and Chloe.

That about sums up our first week of training and practice - now its time to explore the city in search for 4th of July festivities.

Equidae Can Labeling

2009-04-28T13:39:00.000-04:00

For the past few weeks the Vertebrate Paleontology volunteers have been generating labels for doors on the third floor. This project is a face lift for the floor and important for collections management and use in a lot of respects. Our mission was to clearly label each door with information relating to genus names and geographic locations of the fossils inside. This proved quite a task! Old labels were handwritten on 3 x 5 index cards by many different people who have worked with the collections in the past. In some cases, these labels were faded, damaged, missing, misspelled, blank or illegible.

Our first step was to take the old label off of a door, open the cabinet, make a quick inventory of what was labeled on each drawer and made note of it to add to the new label. In most cases, cabinets contain 10 drawers holding a variety of fossils from intact skulls to fragmented ribs, from phalanges to pelvises and all from different localities.

Often the old labels reflected only partial information. The original labels had been created over many decades by different teams of people emphasizing elements dependent on their background be it scientist, intern, or volunteer. This yielded inconsistencies in the information presented as well as the style.

It was important to have labels that were not only consistent but also that would hold up to the test of time. Thanks to the grant provided by National Science Foundation,we were able to print the new labels on archival quality cardstock, one of the many improvements to the collection. The new labels are now consistent in reflecting the family, genus, species for each cabinet. Where applicable, general geographic locality or description was listed. The new labels we created using Adobe PageMaker which allowed us to create a master template to ensure a consistent layout for information.

This enables researchers and scientists to more effectively and efficiently locate specimens. Without such a system, specimens are not as easily accessible, if at all. If you can't find it, it's as if it isn't there at all!

Thanks to our select group of volunteers, the project has been inching toward completion. The task of labeling all 696 cabinets will facilitate future projects of inventory, rehousing, cataloging. In addition to completely labeling floor three, the volunteers have also worked on lining drawers, flagging damaged, uncatalogued, unorganized specimens, and inventory. Carefully documenting each step of the processes is imperative in maintaining consistency throughout all stages of the project.

Conservation Surveys and Handlebar Moustaches

2009-04-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

So seemingly 8 billion fossil horse teeth later, and now that all of the arduous parts of my project are finished, I can look back on my work and put everything into perspective. Overall, I’m really pleased with the turnout of this project. Basically, the museum had decreed that whenever a collection is touched (or in this case, moved), there must be an assessment done to report the condition and the risks that a certain collection faces, whether it be in the physical sense (the condition of the specimen) or in the organizational sense (the management of the collection). Since the fossil horse collections were just rounding out their move between different floors, we knew that an assessment was impending. Before we even started, Lisa, Chris, and I had sat down to tailor a general conservation assessment spreadsheet to meet the museum’s individual needs. We compared various methodologies for taking these surveys, weighing the pros and cons of each. We successfully ran several waves of assessments at once, customizing previous attempts to suit the characteristics of the collections that we have specifically been targeting. My first survey, the aptly-titled space survey, you’ve already heard about in my previous post. Next came two versions of a survey method invented by a man named McGinley (who, to me, is probably the most elusive thing about this whole project… and for some bizarre reason, though I've never seen the poor man's photo, I always visualize him sporting a handlebar moustache, but that’s another story…). In these versions of his survey, I looked at two tiers of assessment levels: the cabinet drawers as a whole, and the specimens in each drawer as individuals. Lisa, Chris, and I used a random integer generator (it’s not that fancy, really, you can just check it out at http://www.random.org/) to come up with a series of random coordinates that I pitted against the storeroom to choose 100 specimens that would represent the collection as a whole in the assessment. By opening a drawer and laying a numbered Mylar grid over it, I could pinpoint each individual specimen completely unbiasedly. Then I tallied these specimens’ “scores” based on whether or not they exhibited certain characteristics (for example, “associated parts unlabeled” or “insufficient room for expansion”). After the McGinley surveys, the next assessment was a conservation assessment, which followed the same basic method of the McGinley surveys, but answered a different series of criteria for each specimen (for example, “yellowing” or “further preparation needed”). This survey was more in depth than the McGinley surveys when dealing with the actual condition of each specimen. We also conducted a risk assessment on the storage room which allowed us to assess the stability of the physical environment in which the specimens are kept (it covered everything from sprinkler systems to visiting scientists). A risk assessment identifies key risks to the collection and is used to prioritize and target the resources needed to provide better maintenance of the collections. Seeing the results of these months of work has been really gratifying. I’ve already starting to graph my collected data, and have also come up with updated, current statistics about the collections. Each survey can be used separately, or in conjunction with each other to create a virtual image of the state of the collections. It’s all a matter of how you manipulate the data. I can now instantly know, for example, how many new drawers the collection needs, or how many specimens have cracks that need repair (or at least have a pretty accurate estimation thereof). It’s really, really refreshing to just pull up a spreadsheet to get a question answered, instead of having to shimmy up 3 flights of stairs, down an elevator, up a ladder, and into a cabinet to solve a problem. This information really comes in handy when pulling specimens from the collections, ordering materials, or even applying for funding! The results were so comprehensive that, much to the delight of my résumé, Chris and Lisa even want me to publish my findings in a scientific journal, and now I’m really excited and looking forward to seeing how my data comes together. Here’s to the next 8 years of volunteering!

AMNH Random Specimen Conservation Survey

2008-11-20T14:50:00.000-05:00

I’ve been a long-time volunteer/intern/employee at the American Museum of Natural History (about 8 years now, and loving every aspect) in several different departments, and I was elated this past September to be extended an invitation by Lisa to join the Natural Science Conservation Department (hooray!). However, upon being told that my tasks as an intern at the museum involved opening hundreds and hundreds of drawers to assess available space (696 drawers to be exact!?! *cue in dramatic music*), I became slightly confused, and more than a little overwhelmed. What exactly did this have to do with conservation? I couldn’t quite make the correlation between the hands-on specimen treatments that I had anticipated that I’d be doing, and now discovering that I’d be taking a survey of available space and condition on an entire storage floor of the Department of Paleontology. Lisa and Chris, my supervisors, had been so incredibly nice and so accommodating that I was almost afraid to ask, for fear of coming off as unwilling. But luckily, as it turned out, the answer presented itself to me without my ever even needing to inquire. Conservation of the specimens themselves within a collection is almost a moot point without first employing a bit of collections management. I guess I’d been so used to looking at things on a micro level (having just finished up a term position in archaeological textile conservation) that I’d slowly been losing a sense of the bigger picture. When approaching a new collection, it makes total sense to first survey it and get a sense of what you are working with. Only then can you prepare more specifically and plan around the collection’s needs. Now it has become obvious to me that you first need to gauge how much material you need, how much time it will take, how many conservators will be necessary, how one should distribute a budget, etc. It would be impossible to just start at one end of the room and fix every specimen one by one down the line – funds would be extinguished in a heartbeat without even taking care of those specimens in the worst and most dire condition! Gaining a scope of the work that will be needed is absolutely integral, as well as prioritizing the work and immediacy needed by the specimens that are to be addressed.

Basically, this is where I come in. The aim of my project is to rank and assess the urgency of care of the fossil horse collection of the Paleontology Department (which is totally appropriate since there is a great exhibit on horses going on in the museum right now), as well as to chart the space available for expansion.

Basically, the storage rooms themselves, as well as the storage cabinets, have been updated and rearranged recently to meet more current conservation standards (for example, getting new steel archival cabinets with rubber seals instead of older non-archival wooden ones). The entire project was spearheaded by Chris and Jeanne and has taken years to complete. The scope of the project is ENORMOUS and funding (as is usual with museums) has had to be stretched thin and made to go far. However, despite the tremendous overarching progress that they’ve made, the collections still have a ways to go in order to stabilize all of the individual fossils. They need attention on a more minute level, which is very costly. Essentially, my aim is to get a grasp on how they have been holding up in the meanwhile. However, there is no real established method for doing my kind of work, which is also one of the goals of this project: to develop a process. As you’ve probably assumed, it’s tremendously time consuming and costly for staff to just go through one by one and look at each specimen. In a collection of hundreds of thousands to millions of fossils, it would take ages just to see what you’ve got, not to mention get an accurate estimate of what more you need. Not only is time money, but also it would be at the expense of the fossils, which would be crumbling away in the meanwhile. So my task is to try and streamline the process with Lisa and Chris, with the objective being to standardize an effective process.

We’ve already researched many, many articles published by museums worldwide on how to approach a job of such magnitude, and we’ve been working hard to tailor my survey to the specific needs of the Paleontology Department’s collections. So far, we have put together a fantastic and efficient template that makes my work both quicker and easier, without sacrificing the individual needs of the collection (but more about that later on...). So far, with my IPOD to keep me energized, and a ladder to keep me practical (I’m barely 5’1”), I have finished the first portion of my survey, which was to assess all the available space in the collections – and it only took me about a week! It is actually pretty nice to be a test subject in establishing your own process and rhythm to working efficiently. Not to mention, I had completely underestimated how downright AWESOME it is to be able to basically snoop around in the collections (which kinda resemble a scene out of Indiana Jones)! In fact, I was explicitly told to leave no drawer unopened. Think about it – being given the green light to explore the storage rooms of the best museum in the world! It has completely changed my view of museums in general: from sterile cold showrooms, into literal treasure troves of education and caretaking.

Like I said, I have been working with the fossil horses, and it’s completely fascinating. I can’t say that I’d had any prior experience in horses, but these fossils are amazing – from the imposing skulls to the intricately grooved teeth. Some of the fossils themselves are practically fossils twice over – they were excavated and brought to the museum over 100 years ago! Even the boxes they arrived in are awesome – sometimes they are in old metal film canisters, sometimes they are crammed into old (now antique) cigarette boxes, and covered with the most sprawling, beautiful early 20th century calligraphy. Sure, there have been times where my work started to feel a little bit tedious (more so because of the constant climbing up and down that ladder), but it was quickly overruled by the sense of accomplishment I got (and still get!) from knowing how beneficial this work is in preserving what we have, and will be able to study in the future. Whenever a scientist is in the storage room with me, I become aware that there are people who spend their entire lives studying the material that will soon be absent from mine when my project concludes. It reminds me what an absolute privilege it is to be allowed this small window into their lives as well as into the life of a museum community. Everyone around me here has such a tremendous sense of forward thinking from studying the past, and I’m more than happy to keep the condition of at least one collections space running at that same pace.

2008-10-10T12:14:00.000-04:00

After the end of the initial eight week internship, Jessica and i stayed on for additional time. For the first two weeks, we worked together lining as many upper cabinets as we could! Jessica tied up the loose ends of her georeferencing and I began the task of combing through the localities spreadsheets for Ainsworth, Lusk, Skinner, Florida and Mongolia. A lot of sites required more attention, so the coordinate hunt ensued! After those weeks had passed, Jessica flew home to Chi Town for a brief respite before jet setting to Australia, where she will be residing with her sister for some time.

For the past six weeks since Jessica left, I have been the sole intern, working closely with volunteers and division staff. In continuing with georeferencing, some tricky locales have necessitated a whole new level of ingenuity. I've been finding a lot of information about the family names associated with different localities from local library records. Obituaries and other articles are great ways to link people to each other and to the land. The days of microforms such as microfiche and microfilm are behind us as access to public records news clippings is extensive on the internet. In one instance, an obituary led me to a folklore account that provided a surprisingly accurate geographic map and further, triangulated the position of an evasive locality. I have been working hard at patching up some holes in the georeferencing, further confirming web derived coordinates with information from specimens, shipping records, and other associated data as well as organizing this information into a format that is decipherable to the human eye and agreeable with PaleoCat, the Paleontology Division's specimen database.

Georeferencing is a somewhat new entity in the museum field that staff from all different divisions are interested in carrying out. It is invaluable to gain a full understanding of the source of the specimens in the collection. Before georeferencing, you might know specific locations for many specimens, but there are also going to be a lot of very unclear locations, perhaps named after obscure rivers or old, long since torn down farms. Much research and detective work leads to pinpointing the location on a map and from these coordinates, a better idea as to how localities and specimens are geographically related.

Georeferencing is a translation from one type of data to another.
Hand drawn maps and written descriptions translate into decimal coordinates.

I have also been spending a lot of time down in the collection. You wouldn't realize it, but just keeping materials in supply for rehousing is a task unto itself! I've been cutting foam, maintaining tags (for uncatalogued specimens, specimens needing repair, and drawers needing reorganization), labeling drawers, and keeping lists. Such tasks require detailed notes! Most importantly, I have been working with volunteers three days a week. I've trained them in all of the duties associated with rehousing the collection down on floor three as well as in georeferencing. This sort of transfer of skill is extremely important to the continuation of the project. Having a seamless flow of the knowledge gained through a couple of months of experience on the project saves a lot of time when new volunteers and interns continue our work. The volunteers and I have worked closely together over these past six weeks and it has been great not only to experience their interest, enthusiasm and admiration of the collection but also to hear some fresh new perspectives.

New Floor Layout

Easy To Read Labeling = Optimal

Tagged Drawer

A few recent rehousing highlights:

Old Newspaper Packing: always contains
dated but amusing articles and adverts

It has been a real adventure working as an intern in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. I have observed the organization and management of many different divisions within the museum and gained an entirely different outlook on the manner in which museums function. What you see as a visitor, though beautifully and meaningfully represented by the exhibition staff is a mall percent of the collections held within. Educating the public directly is only one function of the museum. The vast collections are under constant study by intellectuals from around the world and are essential to dissertations and publications in the most highly regarded journals. new revelations make old specimens pertinent every day and for that reason the maintenance and conservation of our collections is essential.

Now that these fourteen weeks have come to a close what is next? The volunteers are going to be at the helm of the project, georeferencing new localities and resuming rehousing until the next batch of interns come in and learn the skills from the staff and the volunteers. I have been offered a part time job in the North American Archaeology Lab down the hall in the Division of anthropology. I have however, enjoyed this rehousing project so much that I am going to continue on as a volunteer in this division.

I recently found this letter Skinner wrote to Frick in the archives. Although it was written nearly sixty years ago, and by an established collector, I was struck by how much it echoed my feelings of reverence of this institution and gratitude to have been able to be a part in one of its projects.

Week Eight

2008-08-25T15:34:00.000-04:00

Our final week as a group at the museum was downright hectic. So much so, that I am actually writing this from home on Saturday morning! It all began with business as usual: lining drawers, creating lists for specimens needing attention, conducting inventory and georeferencing. I think georeferencing has quickly become one of the interns’ favorite projects. The task began with an excel file filled with hundreds of locality names from sites where perissodactyl fossils have been found. Each intern was assigned a general area, or collector: Mongolia, Lusk, Ainsworth and Skinner. What ensued was a hunt for any and all information about the localities comprising these areas. Searches began with locality registrars and logs as well as Internet databases and mapping programs. When these sources failed to provide enough information it was necessary to find more in the archives! For some localities, it was necessary to find a specimen in the collection in order to figure out where in the archives information about its corresponding locality might be. Confusing? Well, it was to us at first too. Once in the archives, we sorted through shipping records, maps, correspondences, sketches and pictures. How the times have changed! I came across many a letter beginning “My Dearest Frick” and some amusing antiquated language. We spent the beginning of the week really georeferencing up a storm and writing up reports so as to keep the next researcher informed of our progress.

The Archives

Down on floor three, we continued to line shelves of cabinets. We have come across some really interesting contents over the course of our internship. A few weeks ago it was endocasts (horse brains), last week greasy fossils, and this week purple fossils! Let me explain the greasy fossils because this was truly one of the most amazing things my nerdy eyes have witnessed. Last week while transferring fossils, my hand landed in a glob of goo. An intern and I wondered what it could be, some sort of old-timey museum preservational measure? We called our quirky bizarre-trivia expert Carl and he came down to observe. He told us that the Pleistocene specimen, originally found in Alaska in the 1930s must have been preserved in permafrost and had likely been releasing fat in the form of grease for the past seven decades. Pleistocene animal fat, unreal! Despite all the hullabaloo of these exciting rediscoveries, we finished as many cabinets as were available. We also conducted inventory for each drawer in the beginning of the collection.

Tours this week included a Sweet tour of Ornithology and a museum tour led by one of Paleontology’s own volunteers. In Ornithology, we observed beautiful specimens in the skin collection, skeletal specimens, egg and nest collections. Such work is not for the faint of heart. While we were down there one of the head preparators was telling the others how to massage a muscle in the bird that would relax its ruffled feathers. Thursday’s museum tour was a great note to end our tour series on. We went around to some different exhibits and not only learned a lot about the subject matter, but also about visitors’ perceptions ad reactions to the exhibits.

It has been a quick eight weeks and we have seen and learned an invaluable lot about the way a museum is set up, how the different departments interact and how best to problem solve as a team. On behalf of the interns, I’d like to thank the American Museum of Natural History and the National Science Foundation for this opportunity.

Week Seven

2008-08-15T12:12:00.000-04:00

Week seven closes with the completion of around 450 cabinets. Lists identifying which drawers need more attention (they contain uncataloged material, need repair, or better organization) have been completed for each of these drawers as well. These lists will give the collections staff a better idea of where improvements in the collection should be made. The moving company is just a few drawers ahead of us so we have fallen into a comfortable pace while we work together.

This week we finished element descriptions. Each intern was given two card catalog drawers of which we were to transcribe the description of each specimen into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will eventually be transferred into the electronic database Paleocat. Having completed element descriptions and inventory sheets we are now focusing on geo-referencing and lining as many drawers as possible as we head into our last week.

On Wednesday we were given a tour of the Exhibition department. They are currently in development and construction of a new exhibit that will focus on climate change. We were shown the construction of a model of “a ton of coal” and a polar bear that will be rooting through a trash pile in search of food. While the construction of the trash pile was a wonderful example of the creativity of the Exhibtion crew, its intended impact was felt by everyone – we are neglecting our planet. This was an interesting department to visit, the walls and ceilings display many parts of previous exhibits, including “death masks” of some of the historic mammals currently on display.

Friday morning we were treated to an early morning tour of the 4th floor by FARB Collections Manager Carl Mehling. This was one of the most interesting tours because he shared many of the secrets that went into constructing these exhibits – from the challenges that went into hanging models and a few real specimens from the ceilings, to moving enormous exhibits from room to room, and dealing with the constant damage created by vandalism and the daily parade of Museum Guests. Despite these problems the 4th floor exhibits are beautifully constructed, and the important role that they play in bringing science to the public is immeasurable.

Week Six Math

2008-08-08T09:32:00.000-04:00

The end of our sixth week here at the AMNH not only marks the 75% point in our internship, but is also significant for other reasons. We've finally finished pulling inventory sheets for the third floor (which may sound like a simple enough task, but it took an army of seven people five weeks to complete). We have also achieved something we didn't think would happen at all - we've caught up with the movers (an outside company is working with the museum to physically move and clean all of the specimens). They are in charge of bringing up all of the cabinets and all of the drawers from the second floor to the third, and as of yesterday we had just about finished lining the drawers from the 401 cabinets they have filled so far. Our glory was short-lived, though, because after we finished those drawers they immediately filled up 10 more cabinets.

A look at the third floor collections area. There are rows and rows of cabinets that look like these shown here.

So that begs the questions - why is it going faster some weeks than others? And how much will we really be able to complete before we leave on August 22nd? To begin to answer that, I think it's best to show two pictures that exemplify the two extremes we're working with:

Sometimes we have cabinets that are filled to the top with drawers, and those drawers are full of more specimens than you can count (one cabinet we did had 14 drawers). Others will have one or two drawers that have maybe one large fossil in them. This makes some days much faster than others. Overall, though, we've finished 400 of the approximate 700 cabinets that will ultimately be on floor three. Assuming the movers keep up their current rate (and we do as well), we'll probably finish another 160 cabinets in the next two weeks. Although it will mean that we haven't completed the rehousing (there will be ~140 cabinets left to line) it will bring the project very close to completion.

On another note, we've had some very interesting tours over the last couple of weeks. Last week we were treated to a tour of Earth & Planetary Sciences where, among other things, we got to hold a piece of Mars. This week, we visited the Anthropology department and saw parts of the collection (mostly North American materials) as well as the "Smudging Room" - the only room in the museum where it is OK to burn things. This room was created expressly for tribal delegations that visit the department and wish to perform a smudging ceremony with specific ethnological artifacts.

Well, that's about it for this week. Enjoy the last weeks of summer and we'll be back with an update next Friday.

Week Five: A Week in Pictures

2008-08-01T10:02:00.000-04:00

The Perissodactyl project involves a lot of repetition - making labels, transcribing catalog cards, cutting mounds of ethafoam, and of course, lining hundreds of drawers. Although it may not always be the most glamourous work, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that the fossils in our care can remain useful for research for years to come.

That being said, there's only so much we can describe through writing in this blog. I thought this week it would be best to show instead of tell...

This is a box full of Dinohippus fossil foot/ankle bones. The Perissodactyl project is working to upgrade storage conditions (the box above is a collection manager's worst nightmare), and part of that is lining drawers, but another important part is keeping track of how many specimens in the horse cabinets are uncatalogued (have not been assigned an AMNH number and therefore have not been officially added to the paleontology catalog).

Here are some interns, hard at work flagging uncataloged specimens and re-lining the drawers.

For comparison's sake, here is a picture of what a more ideal storage situation would look like:

So you can see, in many cases we've got our work cut out for us. We're not worried, though - we are confident that in the next three weeks we will be able to line and inventory the majority (if not all) of the third floor storage area.

An ethafoam horse made out of scraps. Sometimes you just need a break from mounds of horse teeth.

Week the Fourth

2008-07-25T10:37:00.000-04:00

This week is our fourth at the museum, and as it ends, we approach the half way point of our internship. It is often said, but never understood how time can move so quickly when one's days are spent bearing witness to so many new things!

This week has truly been the culmination of all the experience the past three weeks has taught us. We have been constantly coming across new methods of performing our tasks more efficiently. Some of these have saved us time, and some have turned out not be be as effective as we had hoped. This week, however we applied the best of our methods and have been lining drawers like crazy, printing out inventory sheets with ease, and transferring information from written source to electronic quickly. I guess it takes a while to find out exactly what will work best and to uncover computer shortcuts. Now that we have we are a working very well together as a team.

I think everyone has also reached a point of familiarity with the area as well. It is always interesting to hear one another's stories of traipsing around the city, or to join in on the adventure when possible, even if it is only a short walk, subway ride or a lunch break.

As a result of rescheduling, we had two collections tours this week! On Wednesday we went on a tour of the museum's wasps' nests. The collection contained over a thousand nests ranging in complexity. We first were shown small, simple, single-celled nests in the type of honeycomb pattern similar to what you've probably seen in your yard at some point. Along the way, Christine showed us nests attached to leaves, camouflaged with intriguing bark patterns and in strange arrangements. The most complex were multi chambered, large spherical or conical nests. I'd stay away from those if you ever see one! The wasps' nests collection contains specimens dating to the early 1900s. This collection is really remarkable because each specimen is extremely fragile. The nests are constructed by a mixture of wasp saliva and wood pulp or mud. In such an instance, maintenance of temperature and humidity conditions is crucial to the preservation of the collection. There are monitors for temperature and humidity both inside and outside of the cabinets and the cabinets have been beautifully lined with archival materials.

Yesterday, we were given a tour of one of Ruth's old stomping grounds, Mammalogy. This tour was incredible! The study of mammals encompasses a wide spectrum. It was fun and interesting to see all the department had to offer. In addition to showing us the collection, Darrin, our tour guide shared anecdotes from the field and enthusiastically catered to our many requests. Since mammalogists are interested in all facets of their specimens, the collection contains skins, skeletons, plasticates, and alcoholics... Each of these types of preservation serve a different purpose and we got to see examples of them all. Personal highlights: tiger pelts, elephant skulls, early 1900s photo archives and a mouse lemur presevered in alcohol!

Week Three

2008-07-18T14:44:00.001-04:00

With the end of the third week, things have settled into a routine. On Thursday, we began the last of our varied tasks: inventory. Because the American Museum’s fossil collection nearly doubled when it obtained the enormous vertebrate fossil collection of Childs Frick in the late 60s, the AMNH’s paleo collections contain a large number of uncatalogued specimens unknown to the department’s electronic database. Add to this that the specimens are in the process of being moved up a floor and their cabinets rearranged, and the inventory can be trickier—or at least slower—than you’d expect. Even so the process is important. With a collection so large, a specimen misplaced even by a single drawer can effectively vanish forever.

The rest of our tasks for the week were not new to us and we are perfecting our techniques. Lindsay continues to be terrifyingly ahead of the rest of the game when it comes to entering specimen descriptions from the paper catalog cards into the computer. These element descriptions, when entered, will allow researchers to know which parts of the animal are available for study for each specimen number. We’re all getting better and faster at lining the collections drawers with protective foam, though Ruth has done her best to daunt us. By her calculations, she tells us, we’ll need to be lining 21 cabinets a day in order to finish the necessary 700 that will eventually take up floor 3. We’re somewhere in the 60s. That’s a long way to go. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was Lindsay who replied immediately, “Mm, that’s doable.” We’ll see!

Georeferencing probably poses the most difficulty. Even those of us with the best kept notes to read from have to parse the different variations on a single locality name or the geographic markers—counties, streams, towns, schoolhouses—that may have shifted or disappeared. And then there’s Mongolia. Attemping to pin down GPS coordinates for a location that’s spelled three different ways in notes written by the same person and that’s located in Inner Mongolia these days can really take the shine off of Google Earth. Inconveniently, it seems Google doesn’t know everything.

In the most quotable moment of the week, we missed our mammalogy tour because I had the brilliant idea to cut my thumb with an Ethafoam knife, the first and probably only injury of our summer project. But Darrin, our would-be tour guide and taxidermist extraordinaire, was on the ball when Ruth called to postpone. Without missing a beat, he said, “No problem, bring her over and I’ll stitch her up.” Luckily, my thumb’s alright, and it all ends well if you get a story to tell out of it.

Next week… the half way point!

Week Two

2008-07-11T14:42:00.000-04:00

This week we started Geo-referencing the horse collection. We concentrated on four main locations: Lusk, Ainsworth, Mongolia, and Skinner’s Quarry. To maximize the benefit of these fossils it is important that our information is as complete as possible. Knowing the precise location where a fossil was found is just as important as the fossil itself. It is the task of the interns this summer to fill in as much information about the locations of finds as possible. Country, State, and County are crucial pieces of information to have but they are not always stable in their definition. Determining the latitude and longitude of a locality is an excellent way to ensure that future generations will know precisely where a specimen was found. This is being accomplished by consulting Google Earth, Topozone, and other web based applications that make this endeavor possible and easier than ever.

On Wednesday we were treated to a tour of the Ichthyology Department. They are currently receiving shipments of fish from the Congo where a team of scientists are collecting and conducting research. The Ichthyology Department utilizes a few methods of specimen preservation. The most common is alcohol which allows the entire specimen to be preserved, some specimens are stored in skeletal form, and some are cleared and stained. An enzyme is injected into the fish that turns all tissue clear and stains are used to color the bone and cartilage. This allows one to view the skeletal morphology without visiting the bug room first! The most interesting specimens shown were the Tetra skull with huge teeth, the Tiger Shark jaw, an Electric eel, a Marlin skull, and two gigantic Coelacanth specimens. The female specimen here at AMNH was responsible for settling a long running debate on the development of this unique species. She was carrying 5 pups when she was collected, showing that Coelacanths do not lay eggs but give birth to live young. These finds are crucial in contributing to our understanding of life strategies employed by species and ultimately of their evolution.

We are picking up the pace a little bit each day as we line the drawers on the third floor. It seems a daunting task at the moment as we are still coming up with new ways to increase our speed without causing damage to the fossils. A good lesson in patience and perseverance.

The beginning....

2008-07-03T16:21:00.000-04:00

As part of the rehousing project in the perissodactyl collection at the AMNH, four intrepid interns will spend the summer in the AMNH’s world class fossil horse collection—the sort of thing that makes inventory interesting. The first week of the internship passed as four days of precisely planned training, early stages of our tasks, and our reward for traveling to an institution like the AMNH--tours of the other departments around us.

Some of the training was simple demonstration: cutting an ethafoam template to line and protect a drawer of specimens. Some of it reminded us more of our college lectures as we gave our attention to the volumes of information in Chris Norris’ thorough power point presentations.

With our training behind us, we have begun on the biggest of our summer tasks: carefully removing and replacing the specimens of each drawer of equidae specimens in order to line the bare or cotton-lined drawers with protective Ethafoam. Unlike the cotton lining that was previously found in some of the drawers, the Ethafoam will not outgas as it decays, possibly effecting and damaging the specimens chemically.

Between shuttling quickly between training sessions and work periods (and the staff cafeteria with its unexpectedly luxurious selection of cakes), curators and experts in other departments were kind enough to show us around their domains. Ivy took us to her fossil fish, where we saw the remains of a mysterious shark relative Helicoprion known only by its ostentatious tooth whorl.

At the Vertebrate Zoology prep lab, Neil showed us the mildly gruesome flipside to any museum's neatly mounted recent skeletons: the maceration tanks and the flesh-eating beetle room. Both are methods to remove the flesh from the bones of a carcass. Of the two, the beetles are probably the pleasanter. They eat only dead, dry flesh, and smell no worse than a musty pet shop or the elephant house at the zoo. You can flip open the lid and observe their methodical work without much discomfort. As for the maceration tanks, tanks in which the fleshy bones are put in water and left to rot for a long period of time—Neil mentioned casually that forgetting to change out the water in which the meat has been a rotting feast for weeks for huge numbers of bacteria before leaving for the weekend is a mistake you’ll regret. The regret might have something to do with the fact that the air outtake for the maceration room is disastrously close to the air intake for the planetarium next door.

Other sights seen on the various tours include the bizarre curling shells of the heteromorphy ammonites, the giraffe skins in Mammology’s collection, and the false brontosaurus skull that had been mounted onto what is now Apatosaurus.

And tomorrow… a bit of a rest. Happy Fourth of July.