Museums, meh?

Sarah: I love museums. I get a kick out of the science, the history and the culture found in museums large and small, local and international, rich and poor.

But I know not everyone is the same as me. I get that many people would rather not spend an afternoon browsing amongst stuffed mammals, touching geological samples or listening to sounds from the Antarctic. That’s ok, I can deal.

But even if you’d rather wash your hair than visit a biodiversity gallery, I hope the following story will convince you that museums are important.

In 2013, South Australian scientist John Long was working in a museum in Estonia. John is a palaeontologist, and an expert in mapping out how us humans managed to evolve from vertebrates which occupied our world millions and millions of years ago.

Checking out miscellaneous samples that had been sitting around in boxes and not perceived to be of much value, he picked up fossilised bones from a fish. This fish had lived in the seas around Scotland millions of years ago. And something clicked. This fish had a clasper! A clasper is a small boney structure which early male fishy vertebrates used to help deposit sperm inside early female fishy vertebrates. The exciting thing was that this fossil placed penetrative ‘boy on girl’ sex way back in time — 385 million years back, to be precise — and far earlier than it had previously been believed to be happening.

The discovery triggered a detailed analysis of other fossils of the same species and a major paper in the top-ranked journal Nature. It will possibly change how scientists think about sex, evolution, genes, and biodiversity. Yeah, it’s big.

But from my point of view there’s another exciting part of the story. Stuff in museums is valuable. Stuff in museums holds secrets just waiting to be told. Stuff in museums can change our lives! If we could just get a bit more funding around to allow scientists with appropriate training to get in there and work through those boxes.

Here’s a story I wrote on this exciting finding for The Lead South Australia.

Day 286. Lord of the Butterflies

“That’s not a butterfly. THIS is a butterfly”

Or so may have said Dr Andy Warren on viewing the limited specimens I’ve managed to catch in my back yard (shown here in an image from Day 281).

This week Andy – aka Lord of the Butterflies – is the feature attraction at RealScientists, and has dazzled us by sharing simply amazing images from field studies near Gainesville, Florida and collections at the Florida Museum.

Andy’s tweets were so prolific, I archived them according to days (since I am the tweet-collecting storify dude at RealScientists).

You actually don’t need to read the text to enjoy them: just click through, and scroll down to see the wonderful diversity in the Lepidoptera family (which includes butterflies and moths). Other amazing animals also pop up, including tortoises, armadillos and alligators oh my!

• Day 1: from the muggy and buggy fields of Florida;
• Day 2: the secrets of preparing Lepidoptera for museum collections;
• Day 3: how are new species described? and beetlemania;
• Day 4: this is what museum staff look like! And more amazing butterflies;
• Day 5: your own ‘access all areas’ pass to the Florida Museum;
• Day 6: spectacular butterfly collections from Iran, Peru, China, Chile and South Africa;
• Day 7: our final field trip – look out for the alligator! 

You can keep up with all the action by following Realscientists on twitter  – and now on Facebook too.

[image thanks to pablogrb on flickr]

Day 164. Overflowing with images

As reported yesterday, my visit to Paris’ Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy was filled with so many beautiful images that I’ve saved a few for today’s post.

The confronting statue shown above, Orangutan strangling a borneo savage by French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, is displayed in the entry to the building. Wow.

The case shown below contains the blood vessels from the brain of a man, filled with a solid and laid out to show the divisions from relatively wide to very tiny capillary vessels.

I was simply amazed to see real mammoth skin and fur, shown here on this foot and lower leg found in a Siberian swamp.

Finally, this beautiful split fossil of a nautilus makes me smile for its perfection.

Day 163. Heaven in a gallery

I simply love museums.

I think it’s because they remind me that people are curious, and have always been that way.

Visiting Paris’ Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, I found a wonderful old building filled with three levels of bones and anatomical pots and dissections and fossils and relics of life. Absolutely brilliant.

Included in the amazing range of material were:

Fossils discovered by Mary Anning (subject of Tracey Chevalier’s novel Remarkable Creatures):

A replica set of the fossilised bones of Lucy, a 3.2 million year old hominid Australopithecus afarensis:

A dissected lizard, with organs inflated:

I took too many photos for one post – more tomorrow!

Day 162. Dinosaurs in Paris

I stepped back in time in visiting the Dinosaur, La Vie en Grand exhibition at Paris’ Natural History Museum yesterday. It was a true test of my French, as none of the signage was in English.

Here are a few facts I managed to extract about the huge herbivore Mamenchisaurus:

• Humans have 7 cervical vertebrae (bones which make up the neck region of the spine); Mamenchisaurus had 19;
• The total weight of all the skin of a human adult is approximately 5kg; for Mamenchisaurus, skin weight has been estimated at 1.1 tonnes;
• Humans need to consume approximately 2 200 calories a day; Mamenchisaurus needed 100 000 calories;
• Humans have approximately 6 litres of blood circulating; Mamenchisaurus had 600 litres; 
• Humans have a lung capacity of 0.5 litres; Mamenchisaurus breathed in 82 litres per breath. 
  

The museum had set up a series of archeological digs for the children attending that day – the photo here shows their buckets and equipment ready to go.