A Gray Whale Skeleton: Stories With Stories

What happened was just this:  I got hooked on the story.

For the first time in my life, I became actively interested in a book.  Me the sports fanatic, me the game freak, me the only ten-year-old in Illinois with a hate on for the alphabet wanted to know what happened next.

William Goldman, The Princess Bride:  S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, edition copyrighted 2003, p. 9.

For the most part, the stories we tell are expected to have a beginning, middle, and end.  We move through them (at least at first reading or telling) wanting to know what happened next.  An end may be reached because problems or situations are resolved.  At that juncture, there is no next.  But quite clearly that’s not sufficient for many of us, witness the endless stream of sequels in multi-volume novels or movies.  Then there is that interest, perhaps demand is better, for prequels.  We want to know what happened before.  All of which leaves me wondering where one story begins or ends, and another story begins or ends.  Are we in the midst of stories with stories?  I think these observation aren’t just restricted to fictional stories.  This post is about a true story with stories.

In late 2021, the most complete gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) skeleton ever found was transported from the collections of the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Department of Biology and Marine Biology to those of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.  In a multi-day process, experts from the Museum and the University worked on preparing the 42 bones of this juvenile specimen (including the skull, jaws, and vertebrae) for the trip (bubble wrap figured prominently in the effort).  The bones were carefully packed into a van and then (as carefully) driven up the East Coast to the Museum Support Center in Maryland.  Transferring the bones into the Support Center’s whale warehouse was another major undertaking.  (Unless otherwise noted, information presented in this post comes from the first two sources cited in the reference list at the end of this post.)

Pictures of the skeleton by UNCW’s Jeff Jankowski are included here with the generous permission of UNCW.  The first shows Dr. David Webster, Associate Dean of College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), with key elements of the skeleton.  The second of preparation for the move shows Dr. Webster (far right), Bill Crews (Facilities Coordinator CAS, center background), with Museum specialists David Bohaska (left) and Peter Kroehler (center right).

While the unique completeness of the skeleton is an important scientific draw for this specimen, that it is the skeleton of a gray whale is another critical attribute.  This skeleton is estimated to be roughly 1,000 years old, while the gray whale population that inhabited the Atlantic has been extinct for at least some 300 years with gray whales confined today to the North Pacific Ocean (reference #3, p. 502).  (Their range may be expanding and some may be entering the Atlantic once more.)  This skeleton may offer insights into the environment within which this individual lived in the Atlantic.  As Dr. Nicholas Pyenson, Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals at the Natural History Museum, said of this skeleton, “Specimens like these, tie to place and time.  They tell us how the world once was.” (reference #2)

This quick story of the move of a juvenile gray whale skeleton from a university campus in North Carolina to Smithsonian facilities in Maryland begs for some clarification.  A brief comment on what happens next:  the skeleton apparently will not go on display but will be stored by the Natural History Museum and made available for scientific research in the future.

More to the point and of more interest:  what happened before?  Here the stories (the prequel stories) become more complicated and somewhat fuzzy.

UNCW held the skeleton’s bones in its collections for perhaps three decades.  Apparently, for much of that time it was unclear what species of whale was represented here.  There were some humpback whale bones in the mix of bones but those turned out to be “red herrings.”  The skeleton was ultimately identified as coming from the extinct Atlantic gray whale, an identification later confirmed by Nicholas Pyenson of the National Museum of Natural History.  That identification prompted the negotiations that led to the donation by UNCW of the skeleton.

What happened before that?  How did UNCW come to hold this skeleton in the first place?  David Webster, UNCW dean, recounted that local residents Rita and Tom McCabe approached the university to see if it would be interested in the donation of some whale bones that were, at the time, being stored in the McCabe’s garage.  When the university accepted the donation, a transfer occurred, one markedly different from the one last year when the bones traveled to the Smithsonian.  As Webster recalls, “They [the McCabes] drove a small Chevy S10 pickup truck to campus, and they had bones hanging out all over the place.”  (Reference #1). 

And what happened before that?  Now things get very interesting and decidedly vague.  The news articles that appeared in the last couple of months about this gray whale skeleton donation are actually the reason this story or stories have proven irresistible to me.  The articles are singularly vague about how these bones came to light so they could be socked away in the McCabe garage.  Here’s how the UNCW news article described that process:

When Rita and Tom McCabe started collecting shells, fossils, and treasures like megalodon teeth during leisurely walks along the shorelines of West Onslow Beach [North Carolina] in the 1970s, they gradually found a variety of larger bones that they kept stored in their garage for years.  (Reference #1)

News pieces like this may be recounting what there is known to tell, but a description like this triggers a curious response in a fossil collector, well, this one, at least.  “Leisurely” beachcombing over some period of time seems highly unlikely to enable someone to build a collection of 42 bones from a single whale skeleton (including articulated vertebrae, no less).  Consider the size and weight of the bones depicted in the photographs above, as well as the number of people involved in packing and transporting the bones from the university to the museum.  Does one “gradually find” bones of this magnitude and in these numbers on a beach and carry them easily home?

The storyline at this point might do with an alternative narrative, one that salutes the McCabes’ foresight and dedication, but adjusts the account of what they did.  It seems more likely to me that the discovery and collecting of these bones happened in some sustained fashion and involved a substantial amount of time and energy on the part of the McCabes and anyone else who may have helped in the recovery from the beach.  This version of the story finds some support from the fact that Rita McCabe, and apparently to a lesser extent, Tom McCabe were devoted fossil hunters.  They led collecting trips to West Onslow Beach for the North Carolina Fossil Club.  (Reference #5)  A loving portrait of Rita McCabe on her death written by a son recounted that she was known as “Mrs. Onslow Beach.”  She started by collecting shells but was drawn to the fossils.  “Within years she would harvest every bit of information about the tens of thousands of fossils she would find on Onslow Beach.”  (Reference #6)

And what about even before that?  How did the skeleton come to be somewhere on the West Onslow Beach?  As noted, the skeleton is an estimated 1,000 years old.  Its history from its death to the discovery of its skeleton is unknowable in nearly all respects.  But given that this is the skeleton of a juvenile gray whale and the condition of some of its bones, a few things are likely.  Extant gray whales undertake long distance migrations from southern breeding grounds to northern feeding grounds.  Appropriately, the skeleton’s trip from North Carolina to Maryland probably paralleled a part of the marine migrations that the juvenile might have made a couple of times with other gray whales from breeding grounds perhaps as far south as the waters off Jupiter Island, Florida, to feeding grounds as far north as the depths off Southampton, New York.  (reference #3, p. 507)  Thus, it is possible this whale died during a migration along the East Coast.  Further, it is conceivable that, after its body washed ashore, it was butchered by local Native Americans.  Cut marks on some of the bones suggest that chapter of the story.

Onslow Beach deserves a chapter in this story or story of its own.  The beach is part of the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune.  Tom McCabe was a Marine, so there’s that connection.  As for the geological and paleontological aspects of the beach and its myriad fossils, I came across an article about fossil collecting on the beach that ran in the Camp Lejeune newspaper The Globe on November 2, 2006 (reference #7).  Relying on observations by North Carolina Fossil Club members, the article posits that that the beach’s fossils come from areas that were near-shore in the early part of the Miocene, as well as from inland sediments of younger ages, hence the wide range in ages of the fossils found here.  Of particular interest for this post, the article begins:

Fifty years ago, Rita McCabe didn’t even know what a sand-dollar looked like.  Today, the Jacksonville [North Carolina] resident is the owner of a considerable fossil collection which includes mastodon teeth, mammoth molars, whale vertebrae and shark’s teeth of every imaginable size. . . .  The Smithsonian Institute [sic] has taken an interest in her collection and sent representative to look at her specimens, which she keeps carefully tucked away in her home.

Yes, happily, there are stories with stories.

References

1) Krissy Vick, UNCW Department of Biology and Marine Biology Gifts Extinct Gray Whale Specimen to Smithsonian, UNCW News, December 21, 2021.

2) Alia N. Payne, A Gray Whale Makes its Way to the Smithsonian, Smithsonian Ocean, December 2021.

3) Scott E. Noakes, et al., Late Pleistocene Gray Whales (Eschrichtius robustus) Offshore Georgia, U.S.A., and the Antiquity of Gray Whale Migration in the North Atlantic Ocean, Paleogeography, Paleoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 392, 2013.

4) Elly Cosgrove, From UNCW to the Smithsonian:  The Decade-Long Journey of Extinct Gray Whale Bones, WECT News, January 17, 2022.  There is an excellent video associated with this news story.

5) North Carolina Fossil Club, Janus, Number 1, 1994, p. 2.

6) North Carolina Fossil Club, Janus, Number 1, 2014, p. 2.

7) Amy Segreti, Going to the Beach?  Bring a Bag to Carry the Ice Age Mammal Fossils, The Globe, November 2, 2006.

Pandemic Days ~ Missing the Wonders of Fossils in Natural History Museums

The medical doctor and science essayist Lewis Thomas was once asked to be part of a gathering to create a list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.  He declined the invitation given his time constraints, but continued to mull over what he’d choose as the seven and, finally, penned an essay on the topic.  He began by considering the surprising richness and complexity of what we mean by wonder:

Wonder is a word to wonder about.  It contains a mixture of messages:  something marvelous and miraculous, surprising, raising unanswerable questions about itself, making the observer wonder, even raising skeptical questions like, “I wonder about that.”  Miraculous and marvelous are clues, both words come from an ancient Indo-European root meaning simply to smile or to laugh.  Anything wonderful is something to smile in the presence of, in admiration (which, by the way, comes from the same root, along with, of all telling words, “mirror”).  (Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, 1983, p. 55-56.)

While sheltering-in-place, I have gone in search of wonders not of the modern world, but of deep time, that is, I've gone looking for fossils, which are among the objects that make me wonder and smile.  I tried to do this by using online virtual tours to explore the holdings of natural history museums, here in the United States and elsewhere in the world.  Though there are tours to be had in some natural history museums, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of those in this country appear to offer none.  The same seems to apply to these museums worldwide.  I wonder if the experience of this pandemic will change that reality when these institutions are once again unshuttered.

At some point, many of those that do feature virtual tours partnered for their creation with the Google Cultural Institute, a non-profit entity founded in 2011.  These tours rely on the use of Street View Trolleys, the same camera technology used on automobiles to create Google Maps and Google Earth.

(This image of a trolley was taken from a YouTube video on the use of trolleys in cultural venues.)

American Museum of Natural History

I first stumbled on this Google project when I visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where the “Exploration” page offered a link to a virtual tour of the museum from “Google Arts and Culture” (the tour link is near the bottom of the page).

Here is the opening view of the virtual tour.  In this post, when the word “view” is underlined and highlighted it is an active link which will take you to where in the tour I captured the image.  Please note that most of the images shown in this post will not be precisely the views that will open when the "view" link is clicked.  Apparently any zooming in or out, or rotating that I did fails to fully register with the URLs used to create the links.

This beginning was actually a bit disappointing because the view failed to identify precisely where I was in the museum.

The images at the bottom of the opening shot link to specific areas of the museum that can be toured.  But, again, none of them are identified.  I clicked on the Tyrannosaurus rex image figuring there had to be fossils there.

This is the view that greeted me.

Fossils for sure, but a somewhat bizarre opening shot of this part of the museum’s dinosaur collection.  I was encouraged that the sign could be read ("in person," it is readable).  That had been a major concern going into this and, with care, most signs shown in this museum are readable.

Any view in the tour can be manipulated – zoomed in or out, rotated up, down, right, or left.  Arrows on the floor offer a way to move to another location offering another perspective.  For example, from the opening shot of the T. rex just presented, I zoomed out a bit and rotated up, generating this more impressive view.

I moved to one end of the hall and turned and captured the view below that peers down the length of the hall.  This shot nicely captures the way in which the American Museum of Natural History has chosen to display its dinosaurs – not within their environment or within the context of multidimensional stories, but by taxonomic groupings.

I wandered through the dinosaur holdings at the museum for awhile but, despite some wonderful fossils, I came away disappointed.  While touring, I had little sense of precisely where I was in any hall or, for that matter, in the museum as a whole.  I felt disconnected from the museum and its specimens, very much a stranger remaining at some remove from what was on display.  Symptomatic of this was the very skimpy information that I received when I clicked on the small images that, on occasion, appeared, associated with a specific item in an exhibit.  All rather perfunctory.  Did museum staff actually oversee and direct the creation of the tour?  Doubtful.

A Very Few Natural History Museums in Britain and Europe

The Google Cultural Institute website offers access to a wide array of tours of cultural institutions, including some natural history museum.  Links to 49 “collections” came up when I searched for “natural history” on the Institute’s website, most of which were museums.  Only 27 offered virtual tours.

I will only share a bit of what I experienced when I toured a few of those museums.  I spent most time at just three:  the Natural History Museum, London, Natural History Museum, Berlin, and the Natural History Museum, Vienna.

Yes, there are some fascinating fossils that one can view on these tours, with an emphasis on dinosaurs.  The issues I identified with the virtual tour of the American Museum of Natural History apply to these museums' tours in spades.  Worse, reading signs was difficult; I found most to be unreadable (and not because of any language barrier).  It does seem that signage overall in these institutions is scarce.  Are museum signs with heavy doses of explanatory text mostly an American phenomenon?

As I wandered through these museums, I began to explore the awe inspiring architecture of some of the buildings that house these collection.  Perhaps the architecture alone might the object of a virtual tour.  To wit, consider this view of part of the 19th century home of the Natural History Museum, Vienna.

I suspect that the limitations I’ve highlighted above are true of all virtual tours of natural history museums generated by the Google Cultural Institute’s Street View Trolley.  A far better approach, I would argue, is for museum staff to curate virtual tours actively with a structured message and the desired visitors’ experience in mind.  One museum has taken that approach.

Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History

I admit that I am biased in favor of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (I volunteered there for several years and have often extolled its virtues in the pages of this blog).  Of the virtual tours I took for this post, the crown jewel is that offered the the National Museum.

For this post, I limited myself to the recently reopened and thoroughly renovated Fossil Hall – Deep Time, and came away, once again, enraptured by the breadth and depth of what there is to see and learn in that hall, even if one just visits virtually.  As fashioned by the Smithsonian, this tour does not give one full control over where in the hall the cursor finds active links and that, I think, is a good thing.  It’s a healthy function of how much the tour was intentionally planned and designed.  This is a tour de force.  (My apologies, the first thing to go with sustained cabin fever may be the joke filter.)

The museum’s various virtual tours are accessible through a portal page.  Clicking on the Permanent Exhibits icon (a bit down the page) opens up a view of the rotunda on the first floor.  As seen in the image below, a floor diagram floats in the upper right hand corner, identifying the permanent exhibits on this floor.  (The floor plan can be closed but I often kept it open to remind me of where I was.)  In each exhibit, small bubble icons mark where a visitor can go.  If one hovers over an icon, the location is identified.  The Fossil Hall (green on the floor plan) is awash in icons.  Clicking on one places the visitor in the exhibit at that location with a 360 degree view that can be manipulated.  (Be warned that many of the views afforded of different specimens suffer a bit from reflections off the display cases.  Site credit is given as follows:  “Imagery and coding by Loren Ybarrondo.”)

Here are just a very few of my favorite views from the Fossil Hall tour.  None of these subsequent images is accompanied below by a web address because this tour does not associate a unique address with any specific place in the hall.

Of course, the tableau of a Tyrannosaurus rex about to dine on a fallen Triceratops horridus has become this hall’s iconic image:

The completeness and detail of many fossils from the Green River Formation (Eocene, 54 to 48 million years ago) make them quite compelling.  Here is one display of these fossils in the hall.  While on the tour, I could move closer to the exhibit, study some of the specimens, and read explanatory text.

Another of my favorite features of the Fossil Hall is this display of marine fossils from the Late Cretaceous.  This view centers on a large mosasaur, a Tylosaurus, that holds a neat secret.

Moving close to this mosasaur, one discovers that, somewhat obscured by its ribs, is a small clutch of bones mounted on an illustrated stomach.  Apparently, this mosasaur died shortly after making a meal of a plesiosaur which, in turn, had recently eaten a smaller species.  A fossil find that kept on giving.

No point uploading more images, the virtual tour "in person" is well worth taking, feeding that sense of wonder over deep time.

As noted at the outset of this post, Lewis Thomas ultimately did choose his Seven Wonders of the Modern World.  What an eclectic array of object from the natural world he chose.  Not what I would ever have anticipated, but they are objects that generated profound questions for him, offered up mysteries that challenged accepted wisdom, and exhibited complex, surprising, and awe-inspiring behavior.  Wonders.

The seven in the rank order he gave them beginning with his top choice are:  the planet Earth (a "living system, an immense organism, . . . ."); thermophilic bacteria (those that live in environments with extremely high temperatures that heretofore were thought inimicable to life); the Oncideres beetle (whose complex behavior told Thomas how little we know about nature); the scrapie virus (an infectious agent causing brain disease in sheep and goats whose composition and behavior defied explanation); the olfactory receptor cell (a neuron living far from the brain); the termite (the miracle of its collectivity); and a human child (to Thomas, human childhood is essentially for learning language which creates our wondrous collectivity).

These days, it is rather hard to “to smile in the presence of” the full range of the wonders of the natural world, particularly the one that all the world's people are experiencing now, but Thomas, I think, could have managed it.

David H. Koch Hall of Fossils - Deep Time ~ Come for the Dinosaurs, Absorb the Lessons

On June 8, 2019, after five years of work, $125 million, and, I’m certain, myriad headaches, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History opened its completely renovated fossil hall, the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils – Deep Time.  This post describes primarily what caught my eye on my first visit to this remarkable hall.  Given that it houses over 700 fossils and presents some 75,000 words on its signage, I clearly missed a great deal and return visits are in order.  At the outset, I would note that, for all intents and purposes, this is a new hall and that’s how I’ll refer to it below.

The prior incarnation of a Smithsonian fossil hall enveloped visitors in darkness that seemed to emanate from the crowded displays, the gloomy worn carpeting, the faint-hearted lighting, and even the outdated science that was referenced in the skeleton poses and the signage.  No natural light, no windows.

This newest hall greets the visitor with grace, space, and, above all (quite literally) light.  (Dear visitors, please embrace these attributes wholeheartedly.)  The picture below – a panorama shot of a  Diplodocus skeleton stretching nearly 90 feet from the tiny tip of its tail (curving off to the left) to its undersized head at the end of a wonderfully long neck – shows some of the new hall in much of its airy glory.

That’s where I have to begin, with the dinosaurs, because that’s where most who come to this hall will naturally first gravitate.  And the child in most of us will find irresistible the tableau in the center of the hall’s long room where a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Triceratops horridus portray a scene that may well mirror many that actually occurred some 66 million or more years ago.

Of note, the skulls of both skeletons shown above are casts because the actual skeletons (housed elsewhere in the museum) would have weighed too much to be posed in such close proximity with each other.  This is described in an article and illustrated map of the new hall that appeared in the Washington Post (Bonnie Berkowitz and Aaron Steckelberg, A New Old Home for the Nation’s Dinosaurs, June 2, 2019).  This is a highly informative piece on the new hall.  Well worth exploring.

Labels throughout the hall clearly identify what’s a cast and what’s not.  Material that fills in incomplete specimens are a different shade allowing the sharp eyed to distinguish real fossil from manufactured material.  I have to say that some of these differences in shading are too subtle for my eyes.

Back to the tableau of a teenage (it is assumed) T. rex beginning to munch on a T. horridus.  It fails to answer a question debated among paleontologists.  Was T. rex a predator or a scavenger?  The display is agnostic on this, though, in all likelihood, T. rex went both ways.  (Hear National Museum of Natural History’s director, Kirk Johnson, discuss this aspect of the T. rex on the NPR show 1A with Joshua Johnson (episode aired on June 11, 2019).  In this episode, Kirk Johnson waxes enthusiastic about many features of the new hall.)

Among other dinosaurs found here is this Camarasaurus skeleton positioned near the Diplodocus.

The Camarasaurus picture highlights one distinguishing feature of the new hall:  there’s no effort to fill spaces with recreated, lifelike foliage from the diverse time periods.  Rather, the vegetation representations are minimalist.  The hall does allow visitors to see the ecosystems of such worlds, depicting them in little “diorama” stands scattered throughout the hall.

Here’s a close-up of the diorama of a grassland scene some 19 million years ago, reconstructed on the basis of fossils found in the Harrison Formation, Nebraska.

How is this new hall organized?  The designers want visitors to enter from the museum's rotunda and, so they are to begin with recent history, not deep time.  Visitors are greeted by bronze statues of a human family being stalked by a saber-toothed tiger.  The former recognizable, the latter striking but still mostly familiar.  Walking from the entrance down the length of the main long gallery, visitors at first move somewhat slowly back in time, only hundreds of thousands of years in those initial steps, but then rather quickly millions of years go by until, angling off to the left from this first gallery, visitors come to the initial emergence of life on the planet.  This organization forces a rethinking of time as, in the process of walking through the exhibits, the familiar or somewhat familiar is replaced by the faintly familiar which in turn is replaced by the truly different, alien even.  Deep time, for sure.

There is a spiral motif that marks some of the hall’s signage which not only represents how Earth’s history reaches far, very far back in time, but also speaks to the connections among all things.  The past is, indeed, prologue.  No “special creations” here.  One such spiral sits high over the entrance to the hall accompanied by a quotation from Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species.  That quotation marks one of the recurrent themes that is traced throughout the hall’s displays – the history of life on this planet cannot be understood without a recognition of the fundamental role that evolution played and is still playing.

No shying away in this hall from evolution.  Indeed, a statue of a young Charles Darwin sits near the center of the hall with a Galapagos finch (?) perched on his shoulder.

This message about evolution’s central role in life on Earth is unavoidable as one’s path in the hall moves from the present into deep time.  Among the many exhibits and signage positing and elaborating on this theme, is a large sign featuring Smithsonian paleobiologist Gene Hunt.  An extensive set of quotations from him begins, “Species evolve by natural selection to meet the challenges of the world.”  Accompanying this is a fascinating (at least it was to me) display of two arrays of specimens of the bivalve mollusc Spondylus, commonly, though erroneously, referred to as “spiny oysters.”  The array on the left shows eight Spondylus specimens from a single species that lived in Florida some three million years ago.  Back then specimens of this species exhibited some, relatively marginal variations.  But, as the display notes, “Over time, variations like these can become the building blocks of new species.”  The eight Spondylus specimens on the right are from different species of this genus living in oceans today.

That evolution has had to contend with several major extinction events in deep time is unquestionably also a central element in the hall’s lesson on evolution.  One of the most striking ways this is conveyed comes when one gets back to the end-Permian extinction.  Here is a close-up of the key part of a graphic showing the wealth of diversity among plants and animals that marked the Permian in general (at the left of the event), but which was abruptly curtailed:

Massive volcanic eruptions 252 million years ago released gases that dramatically altered the climate, causing extinctions that rippled through food webs and devastated animal communities.

Emerging from that extinction event, life on Earth was diminished with a tremendous loss of diversity.

Embedded in the text of that sign is another fundamental message of the new hall that is repeated many, many times – Earth’s climate changed frequently in deep time and such changes had fundamental consequences for life on this planet.  Yet, as central as this message is to an understanding of how life as we now know it came to be (yes, the living are all connected in this great spiral of time), what impressed me perhaps most forcefully about the new hall was the way the content of that message is framed for visitors when they begin their journey.  Here is one way that message is delivered early in that journey.

"And humans are the cause."

And another:

One early kiosk loops a video discussing what can be learned about climate change over the past several hundred thousand years by studying ice cores.

Toward the very end of the short video, after it shows the strong correlation discovered between changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide and changes in the Earth’s temperature (more carbon dioxide, higher temperatures), the voice-over narrator says this:

Today CO2 is skyrocketing higher than any time in the past 800,000 years as we burn fossil fuels and cut down forests.  This time, humans are the reason Earth’s temperatures are rising.

Human’s lethal touch on life on Earth is felt in other ways as this display asserts.

To me, that’s the most amazing aspect of the new fossil hall – its robust assertion, clearly backed by science, that today’s climate change has human activities as its root cause and that it poses an existential threat.

Why is this amazing?  Because it shows that a bright line was drawn between David H. Koch, the core financial donor to the remaking of the fossil hall, and the content of the new hall.  David and his brother, Charles, head a multinational corporate empire founded by their father which, among other things, owns oil refineries and pipelines.  Writer Jane Mayer profiled the Koch brothers in a fascinating and detailed article in 2010 that ran in The New Yorker (Covert Operations, August 30, 2010).  In it, Mayer wrote:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.

Their attitude toward climate change?  As quoted by Mayer, a 2010 Koch Industries newsletter asserted that "fluctuations in the earth’s climate predate humanity . . . .  Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s figure out how to get along with her changes.”

That's why I think it quite striking that the new hall teaches its lesson about today’s climate change so strongly (stridently even), despite the beliefs of that donor.

I fear I've given the richness of the new hall short shrift because all I've highlighted has been the dinosaurs and the interwoven messages that I hope all visitors absorb.  There are hundreds of fossils on display, most much smaller than those awesome Mesozoic creatures.  I will close with a picture of what is one of the jewels of this new hall (I agree with director Kirk Johnson on this).  The piece of matrix pictured below comes from the Green River Formation (Wyoming) and features the 52-million-year-old, intact, incredibly beautiful skeleton of a tiny early horse, Protorohippus venticolum.  This is the most complete skeleton of this early horse species found to date.  The preserved detail is breath taking.  Given the fossil impressions of several fish in this matrix, evidently this horse died at a lake’s edge, floated out on the water for some distance, and then sank to the bottom.

The Last American Dinosaurs at the Smithsonian ~ Paleoecology of the Hell Creek Formation

In the last two million years of the Cretaceous Period, the area of Montana and the Dakotas presently marked by the Hell Creek Formation was decidedly green, a humid and semi-tropical landscape featuring rivers and forests.  The formation itself, according to paleontologists John R. Nudds and Paul A. Selden, “is a fluvial deposit, laid down by meandering rivers, which frequently flooded onto a broad alluvial coastal plain on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains.  The rivers flowed east across this plain into a large epeiric [shallow, inland] sea, the Western Interior Seaway, which during Cretaceous times was retreating southwards and eastwards, exposing the coastal plain.”  (Fossil Ecosystems of North America, 2008, p. 182.)

The Last American Dinosaurs:  Discovering A Lost World, the new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, features the Hell Creek Formation, then and now.  Perhaps the exhibit's most immediately appreciated gifts are the dinosaurs which end the barren months that followed the closing of the museum’s fossil hall earlier in the year for renovation.  Two mounted skeleton casts of a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Triceratops horridus dominate the entrance to the exhibit (the casts affectionately known as Stan and Hatcher, respectively), and several other Triceratops skulls and the skull of an Edmontosaurus appear as well.

But, the heart of the new exhibit is captured by its subtitle.  If visitors make the effort to go beyond the dinosaur hook and consider the story being told by the exhibit, they will be rewarded, learning a bit about that 66-million-year-old “Lost World” – what it was like in its ecological complexity, and also how we have come to know it.  So much more than dinosaurs.

The best of the exhibit is its middle where the opposing walls offer complementary narratives.  On one wall is an array of recent pictures of the contemporary, arid landscape of the Hell Creek Formation showing museum scientists scouring the rocks for fossils, such as tiny teeth and impressions of plants.  Here is the fieldwork that underpins the exhibit.

  Among these images is a particularly lovely one focused on that critical piece of fieldwork equipment – toilet paper.

More importantly, fieldwork is placed in its proper context.  As visitors step back from this montage of pictures, they encounter a display, not only of field equipment, but also of what happens after the fieldwork, from how specimens are safeguarded in the field to the careful and painstaking prep work in the museum’s labs.  In fact, someone standing before this montage need only turn to the right to look through the windows of the FossiLab and see ongoing work on fossils.

On the opposite wall from the pictures of collecting at Hell Creek is a wonderful mural by Smithsonian scientific illustrator Mary Parrish.  It’s primary element is her rendering of a stream scene in the Hell Creek area some 66 million years ago.  She acknowledges that she’s filled it with more species than were likely to be in such a location at one time, but the scene captures the essence of what that environment was like – wet, lush, and green.  The key to this scene is that dinosaurs do not dominate it; they are a part of an environment graced by plants and other animals.  It’s an ecosystem, not a blockbuster movie scene.

I hope visitors take the couple of minutes needed to watch the video associated with the mural.  In it, Parrish explains the process she follows in creating her artwork.  It’s excellent; indeed, all of the videos in this exhibit are first rate.  (Several of the videos, including Parrish's, can be found here.)  Still, I do have a complaint about how her mural is treated.  The mural itself includes more than this pre-extinction scene and some of the material that went into making it.  It encompasses the destruction of the extinction event and the recovery of the landscape in the Paleocene Epoch, yet visitors, I suspect, will not quite get that.  Perhaps because of the unfortunate position of a pillar, it was decided to interrupt the mural’s flow with a tall, metal frame holding displays about the asteroid hit.  It connects to the pillar and stands at right angles to the mural, dividing it in two.

The fossil material around the Parrish’s stream scene reinforces its message.  Visitors will see a beautiful cast skeleton of Didelphodon vorax, the largest mammal living 66 million years ago.  I am quite taken by this cat-sized marsupial, both because it’s bigger than I, in my ignorance, believed mammals to have become when they co-existed with dinosaurs, and because it disappeared in the end-Cretaceous extinction event, along with some other mammal taxa.  This extinction may have opened a door to mammal diversification and size increase, but it came with a mammalian cost.

Parrish carefully places one in her mural.  Seen here, clinging to a limb, beneath a philodendron leaf.

Plants, plants, and more plants.  The mural is awash in vegetation.  Displayed immediately before the mural are fossil impressions of leaves of plants that lived then.

Further, a slab of leaf impressions suggests how abundant the vegetation was.

Of the many other aspects of the story of this lost ecosystem that merit attention, there is one I will mention in closing – what message it might hold for us now.  Given the contemporary demise of many species, the exhibit asks whether we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.

There’s a great deal to like about the exhibit, and, happily, I think it’s a harbinger of what we will experience when the renovated fossil hall opens in 2019.

Closing of the Smithsonian's National Fossil Hall ~ What Becomes of Stan, Hatcher, and Diana?

It is so quiet on the shore of this motionless lake
you can hear the slow recessional of extinct animals
as they leave through a door at the back of the world,
disappearing like the verbs of a dead language . . . .

                ~ from Endangered by poet Billy Collins

I think Collins' simile has it right.  More on that at the end.

The National Fossil Hall of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is going the way that most of the denizens it has housed for a century went – into extinction.  Its several rooms currently (well, for the next few days) offer the visitor a path that begins with the first glimmers of life captured by fossils in the waters of the early Paleozoic, winds its way past the thundering reptilian beasts of the Mesozoic, and ends in the Cenozoic, filled with mammals, some of mega size.  All of this will be closed after April 27, 2014 (the Ancient Seas exhibit is already shuttered), and many of the fossil skeletons will be retired, not to be a part of the new Deep Time Hall slated to open in 2019.

In 1911, a year after opening to the public, the Smithsonian’s New National Museum (now called The National Museum of Natural History) first introduced visitors to a hall dedicated to the display of mounted fossils of ancient animals.  This was the wonderfully named Hall of Extinct Monsters.  The picture below shows the hall at some point after 1932.

Dating photographs in the Smithsonian’s Archives is a challenge and, on this one, I've followed the lead of Ellis L. Yochelson in his The National Museum of Natural History:  75 Years in the Natural History Building (1985).  As Yochelson noted, few of the images from prior to 1975 bear a date and captions are rarer still.  The Diplodocus skeleton standing in the middle of the picture facing the bottom is a clue – this mounted skeleton was only completed in 1931.  I downloaded the photograph from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives.

This is a revealing image.  The original Hall of Extinct Monsters was not a dinosaur hall.  Yes, it featured dinosaurs such as the Diplodocus, and the iconic Triceratops (more on it below), standing toward the back of the hall, facing a side wall and resisting the flow of the room.  But other kinds of monsters populated the hall.  For instance, on the right, there appears to be a mosasaur, a marine reptile, swimming toward the bottom of the picture, and I think that may be a mammoth with its swooping tusks, on the left.

Today’s Fossil Hall exhibits, unlike the Hall of Extinct Monsters, kept the dinosaurs together.  The panoramic view (below) shows many of the dinosaurs as they are on display . . .  for the moment.

The picture (which is nicer if clicked and opened) starts on the far left with an apparent confrontation between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Triceratops.

I suspect that, during the time these two dinosaur skeletons have faced each other in this hall, many visitors have pondered the possible outcome of such a battle royal.  What they might not have known is that this specific fight pits Stan against Hatcher as these particular specimens are known.  Stan, the T. rex, is a cast of a specimen found in 1987 by amateur paleontologist Stan Sacrison and excavated in 1992.  The Smithsonian does not have Stan’s actual fossil bones.  Hatcher, the Triceratops, is also a cast and was so named by a 10-year-old in a national contest in 2001.  The name honors paleontologist John Bell Hatcher who, in 1891, found the original fossil bones, which are housed in the museum and were part of the skeleton displayed for many years (seen in the photograph of the Hall of Extinct Monsters above), until they became too fragile.  In recent years, a few of them, including the skull, have been on display next to the cast of Hatcher.

The fate of these casts?

Last week, Washington, D.C., was abuzz with talk of dinosaurs, prompted by the arrival by truck from Montana of the T. rex specimen that will be a star of the Deep Time exhibit.  This specimen, known to many as the Wankel T. rex after rancher Kathy Wankel who discovered it, is some 80 to 85 percent complete, a remarkable percentage for a dinosaur skeleton.  Sadly, with the appearance of this new T. rex, now labeled The Nation’s T. rex by the Smithsonian powers-that-be (not very catchy, I’m afraid), Stan, the king, is dead.  Long live the king.

This fall, the Museum will open The Last American Dinosaurs:  Discovering a Lost World, a temporary exhibit about the world as it was at the very end of the Cretaceous (and beyond) and how we learn about it.  It’s an exhibit that has the unenviable task of trying to satisfy visitors’ appetite for dinosaurs during the interregnum while Deep Time is being created.  Hatcher and Stan will be featured.

[Note:  After its initial upload, I edited the post to write that both Hatcher and Stan will be part of the temporary exhibit.  That the two casts will reappear is based on J. Freedom du Lac's article in the Washington Post describing events of the final day of the Fossil Hall (At Natural History Museum:  A Crowded Farewell to the Fossil Hall, April 27, 2014).]

If you look closely at the picture above of the Hall of Extinct Monsters that opens this post, you can almost make out the mural that covers the back wall of the hall.  That mural, titled Diana of the Tides, is a reminder that, at one point, early in its existence, the New National Museum displayed a portion of the Smithsonian’s art collection.  Here’s a closer view.

This image of the mural was taken from a 1910 article in Art and Progress (Sylvester Baxter, “Diana of the Tides”:  A Notable Gift to the Nation, Volume 1, Number 7).

Painted by John Elliott, the mural depicts the goddess Diana controlling the tides with a team of charging horses.  Regardless of its artistic merits, the work is awkwardly large, and, apparently as a result, wasn’t removed when the Smithsonian’s artwork went elsewhere.  Rather, during one renovation in the 1960s of the “dinosaur hall,” the mural was covered by a fake wall where it still remains.

An interesting decision will have to be made about Diana’s fate as the current National Fossil Hall is taken back to the studs.  (Amy Ballard provides a great deal more detail on Diana of the Tides and her century at the museum in a post on the National Museum of Natural History’s Unearthed blog – Diana of the Tides:  A Sensation of Her Time, January 25, 2011.  Be warned, the link to the blog often fails to connect and times out - it's a Smithsonian problem.   Ballard’s post features the mural in color.)

At the outset, I described the renovation of the National Fossil Hall as an extinction.  I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.  My sense is that the remaking of the current hall is intended to be so thorough and the result so different from what we have today that, for all intents and purposes, today’s Fossil Hall will be extinct.  Deep Time, when it opens in five years, will offer the visitor a space of great openness and light (so welcome after today’s mostly dark and crowded rooms), and displays that will capture the complex interplay of ancient animals, plants, and environment, processes as relevant today as they were in deep time.  The science of paleontology will be alive here.  The strictly chronological flow that marks the rooms of the current National Fossil Hall will be gone.

(A nice overview of the Deep Time project can be found in Vicky Gan’s piece for Smithsonian Magazine titled About Deep Time:  A Preview of the Natural History Museum’s Fossil Hall Renovation, October 29, 2013.)

And, finally, whatever the poet intended (and I don't think he intended the meaning I ascribe to it), Billy Collins’ simile comparing extinct animals to the verbs of a dead language captures fully what Deep Time, as I understand it, will be about.  The past isn’t composed of disconnected alien worlds, and a dead language isn’t a disconnected, forgotten one.  The worlds of the past connect to us, just as do the words of ancient languages.  They have shaped us.  Paleontologist Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish series, now showing on PBS, offers a wonderful way to experience that connectedness with deep time.  The series is as thoroughly entertaining and informative as his book of the same title.

Museums Telling a New Natural History Story

My intention to write a post about the blog that the Paleobiology Department in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) launched several months ago was reinforced when I came across Edward Rothstein’s review of the multi-million dollar “transformation” or “refashioning” of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) (Beyond Dioramas:  Nature’s New Story, New York Times, August 3, 2013).  It struck me that both efforts – one a very expensive investment in the remaking of a museum and the other a low-cost digital activity with minimal financial outlay – present (to varying degrees) a critical element of the story that natural history museums are now sharing with their visitors, whether those visitors come to a physical structure or a website.  These museum are telling how scientists in the natural history fields do their work.

Rothstein, cultural critic of the New York Times, asserts that the natural history museum, in general, has been a lumbering beast, resistant to change, that is, until recently.  The beast’s evolution, he posits, is “quickening.”  So, what has changed for the NHM?  The essence of his somewhat rambling review seems to be that NHM chose to go “local” (read, Los Angeles) and focus on the “history of human interaction with nature.”  The tried and true elements of the natural history museum remain in the NHM – the dioramas from the 1920s and 1930s have their place along with the fossils.  But these are just a part of this museum’s landscape which now features local artifacts – to wit, the shoes and clothes Charlie Chaplin wore in City Lights, or a 1902 Tourist, a wooden car – topped off by the exhibit titled Becoming Los Angeles which presents the history of the peopling of the area.  Apparently, where this new approach most reveals its promise is in the Nature Lab in which children (and their parents) learn about the local Los Angeles fauna and are drawn into “citizen science” activities.  Rothstein labels the Nature Lab’s exhibits “among the most successful I have seen for children in a science museum.”

I must admit that I initially thought that the LA museum might have wandered too far afield in its efforts to remake itself (and appeal to a broader audience), but I have to remember the sweeping nature of what’s included in that term natural history.  Wooden cars and movie costumes are not a stretch.

In drawing visitors into a greater understanding of the “history of human interaction with nature,” the NHM appears to have embraced two disparate aspects of that objective.  The first centers on humans reshaping their natural environment (e.g., the Becoming Los Angeles exhibit).  Interesting and important, to be sure.  The second – how we humans learn about nature – is, for me, the more critical element.  This should be part of the heart and soul of the story that natural history museums are telling – how paleontologists, botanists, entomologists, and the other scientists in the natural history fields do their work.

Rothstein writes that the NHM’s Mammal and Dinosaur Halls now “hint” at this.  They seek to present the “interpretations” and “uncertainties” of the work.  Further, and more to the point, in some of these NHM exhibits,

[t]he emphasis is on how paleontologists learn and on how our understanding has changed.  Scientists appears in videos and panels, outlining arguments and demonstrating procedures.

I'll have to see them for myself to know whether hint is the appropriate verb.  Based on the description of the new Dinosaur Hall on the NHM's website, I come away feeling that the NHM is doing more than just hinting.  Of the three questions purportedly addressed by new Dinosaur Hall, one is "How do scientists know what they know?"  Luis Chiappe, Director of the NHM's Dinosaur Institute, is quoted as saying, “The new Dinosaur Hall has the potential of inspiring new generations of scientists, since this exhibition highlights discovery-based fieldwork, the experience of going outdoors and finding treasures, and then understanding how they fit within current scientific record.”

Amen to that.

A less significant but still an important contribution toward this refocusing of the natural history museum and its story is the blog launched by the Paleobiology Department at the Smithsonian's NMNH.  Getting beyond the “punny” title – Digging the Fossil Record:  Paleobiology at the Smithsonian – is well worth the effort because typically the content is very interesting and the blog’s authors successfully explicate the complicated.  (Unfortunately and rather puzzling, the identity of the writers of individual posts isn’t always provided.) The tone is light and engaging.  Altogether, it’s a fun blog to monitor.

In its initial post, the blog sought to entice readers:

If you have ever wondered what paleontologists do in the field or wished you could see Smithsonian fossils that aren’t on display, subscribe to this blog for behind-the-scenes photos, field reports from our scientists, research news, archival images, paleo art, and many other stories about our collection and our work, past and present.

So, far in its brief existence, Digging the Fossil Record has lived up to its own PR, offering a fairly wide mix of content, though, to date, it’s been largely dominated by accounts of Smithsonian scientists doing field work.  Among these posts have been a multipart series about collecting plant fossils at a Permian site in north-central Texas, a two-part series focused on core drilling in Tanzania in order to collect the fossil shells of marine microorganisms, and, most recently, a five-parter on a collecting trip to the North Dakota badlands (more on that one in a moment).

Though other kinds of offerings have been on the menu, they’ve been a bit sparser.  The blog has explored, among other subjects, some of the prep work being done by volunteers in the Museum’s FossiLab on material brought back from the field, the background of the new T. rex skeleton coming to the Smithsonian (just in time for the disruption of the complete remodeling of all of the paleontological offerings at the NMNH, including the Dinosaur Hall), and the life’s work of a premier, though largely forgotten, dinosaur hunter, Charles W. Gilmore, a curator at the NMNH for a couple of decades in the first half of the 20th Century.

The North Dakota badlands series, titled From the Field:  Putting Dinosaurs in Their Place, is a good example of what the blog has to offer (besides titles with puns).  The collecting trip is placed firmly in context.  In preparation for an exhibit opening next year that will “flesh out” the natural environment in which the Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex lived, the NMNH team went in search of fossils of “small vertebrates, mollusks, plants, and, of course, dinosaurs . . . ” in the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation.  It was eye opening to this amateur collector that the objective of the trip was that clear cut – gather the material needed for an exhibit on a Late Cretaceous ecosystem.  For me, setting out with such a definitive goal would be a certain recipe for disappointment.  But that’s where experience and expertise enter the equation.  The team included paleobotanist Kirk Johnson (also the Director of the NMNH) who has often collected plants in this area.  He led the team to favorite and productive spots.

Methods employed in the field are on display in these posts.  Small quarries are dug, rocks are moved and split, revealing the impressions of plants within.

(The photo of the multiple leaf impressions was taken by Diana Marsh; that of the palm leaf was taken by Kirk Johnson.  These pictures and one below were downloaded from the blog under the terms of use specified by the Smithsonian.)

Ancient river channels are crawled through in search of tiny fossil teeth and bones lying on the surface.  Matrix is shoveled into bags for more thorough searching back in the Museum’s FossiLab.  GPS devices are used to record precise locations of finds.  Sketches are made of the landscape, attending to the locations of different sedimentary layers.  Layers are measured with a Jacob’s staff (had to look that one up since the post in question offers no explanation).

(I could not find a credit for this photograph.)

One post describes a “bone walk” or biostratigraphic survey in which every visible fossil is collected, with its location noted, from one specific sedimentary layer.

These posts make it abundantly clear that this work, in general, is not one string of wonderful fossil discoveries; they well capture the painstaking nature of the work and the challenge of collecting under the hot North Dakota sun.

Perhaps most important to me is that any attentive reader of this series will learn that the field work is but one step in the process.  These badlands posts repeatedly emphasize that lab work awaits these finds – sifting through matrix for more vertebrate fossils, carefully exposing more of the leaves from the split rocks.  I hope that the blog will follow these fossils from the field through the lab, onto the curation process, and, finally, to display in the new exhibit opening in 2014 (or, if we're being really honest, sometimes to storage in plaster jackets or in drawers in some cabinets).  Now, that would certainly capture some of how the work of natural history is done.

Sadly, the small effort by the National Museum of Natural History’s Digging the Fossil Record blog is blunted because the blog is rather hidden (I originally wrote “buried”) on the Smithsonian’s busy website. Yes, there are some other offerings on the NMNH website that feature the processes of science, but these are too little and too secreted away.

Yet, hope springs eternal.  I look forward to seeing, in several years' time (possibly by 2019), the NMNH's totally remade paleontological offerings fully expressing this new story of natural history.

[Note:  As originally uploaded, this post perpetuated the misconception that the NMNH was renovating just its Dinosaur Hall.  All of its paleontological offerings are being redone as outlined in a Washington Post article from last year.]