NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER Mission PI Sean Solomon Will Speak At The Museum July 26

Friday, July 23 8:38 am

Since NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft was launched on a mission to study Mercury in 2004, it has returned stunning photographs of the innermost planet gathered during a series of flybys. (For a recent New York Times story about the surprising discoveries the spacecraft has already made, click here).  Sean Solomon, principal investigator of MESSENGER, will be at the Museum on Monday, July 26, to speak about the new insights gleaned about Mercury’s high-density composition, its geological history, and its magnetic field in a special lecture. He will also discuss what’s next for MESSENGER, which is slated to enter Mercury’s orbit in March 2011. For some of the images retrieved from the mission so far, check out the gallery below.

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Lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida occurred in August, 2004, launching the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft on a 4.9-billion-mile journey to Mercury. The spacecraft, which was built for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, flew by Earth, Venus, and Mercury several times and will have circled the Sun 15 times before going into orbit around Mercury in March 2011. Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA

Lincoln Ellsworth: The Museum’s Own Polar Star

Friday, July 16 2:34 pm

Tin cup from Roald Amundsen's ship. © AMNH/C. Chesek

A corridor on the Museum’s first floor just off the Grand Gallery celebrates a relatively unsung hero of polar exploration: the American Lincoln Ellsworth, who was also a Museum Trustee. His bust graces the back wall of the narrow hallway, while the display cases on either side contain artifacts detailing Ellsworth’s efforts to become the first man to fly across both poles, a feat he accomplished in 1935 when he crossed the Antarctic in his plane Polar Star.

Ten years earlier, Ellsworth’s first attempt to fly over the North Pole teamed him with Norwegian Roald Amundsen, whose earlier overland competition with British Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole is chronicled in the Museum’s new exhibition Race to the End of the Earth. Through the special relationship between Amundsen and Ellsworth, the Museum Library’s Memorabilia Collection came to possess items the Norwegian explorer carried with him on his quest to reach the South Pole, including a sledge, chronometer, binoculars, shotgun, and a tin cup from the ship Fram, which are featured in the new exhibition.

Partially underwritten by his father James, a wealthy coal mine owner and banker, Ellsworth’s 1925 attempt to fl y over the North Pole failed. One year later, he and Amundsen succeeded in a dirigible, the Norge, built and piloted by Italian explorer Umberto Nobile. Ellsworth would go on to other expeditions, contributing geological and fossil specimens to the Museum’s collections in the process. He died in 1951 at age 71, but his legacy of support for the Museum and its mission continues to this day through an annual gift from The Lincoln Ellsworth Foundation.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer issue of Rotunda, the magazine for Museum Members.

Don’t Miss Your Chance to Travel the Silk Road

Thursday, July 15 3:16 pm

Explore an interactive map of the Silk Road. AMNH/D. Finnin

There’s only a month left to hitch a camel ride on the illustrious Silk Road without even leaving New York City. Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World sends visitors on an ancient trade route that stretched from the marketplaces of Asia to the bustling hub of the Middle East. And on Sunday afternoons, visitors can wrap up their journey with live musical performances organized by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project.

A camel caravan greets visitors as they begin the 4,600-mile adventure from Xi’an, the flourishing capital city of China, to Baghdad, the intellectual center of the ancient Islamic world. Such a far-reaching trip required months of trekking across difficult terrain during the route’s golden age, from AD 600 to 1200.

“No single person traveled the entire extent of the Silk Road,” says Curator Mark Norell, who curated the exhibition.  “However, trade goods did. And more importantly, ideas associated with those trade goods did. Certainly, we can trace the spread of religion and spread of social trends to the goods…that moved along the Silk Road.” (Take a tour of the exhibition with Norell here).

Visitors can trace the diffusion of goods, culture, and ideas as they travel from east to west through four major commercial cities. Kids can pick up a “passport” to stamp along the way, and a combination of hands-on exhibits—from a massive interactive map to a musical station that lets listeners layer the sounds of traditional instruments—brings the sights, sounds, and stories of these distant civilizations to life.

In Xi’an, the birthplace of silk, travelers can immerse themselves in the folklore and production of this delicate fabric before passing through the aromatic nighttime market of Turfan, discovering the secrets of paper making in Samarkand, and telling time with the stars in ancient Baghdad.

It all makes for a thrilling journey that The Economist’s Alice Gregory calls “the kind of museum experience that is all too rare.”

Traveling the Silk Road runs through August 15, with live musical concerts every Sunday. Check out a recent performance below.

A Bug’s Life: Lethocerus cordofanus Mayr

Tuesday, July 13 8:36 am

© AMNH/D. Finnin

Anyone who has encountered a member of the giant water bug family Belostomatidae, perhaps while trying to enjoy a nice summer dip in a pool, will remember why these aquatic insects are commonly called toe-biters: they’re not shy about hunting prey, even the human kind.

The biggest insects of the order Hemiptera, a broad group that includes true bugs, cicadas, and hoppers, these aquatic predators are found in shallow streams or ponds across the world. When there’s no tasty-looking toe nearby, they generally feed on snails, tadpoles, frogs, small fish, and even small birds, but they don’t actually bite: like all true bugs, they lack chewing mouthparts. Instead, their method of dining involves grabbing prey with their forelimbs, or raptorial forelegs, and injecting it with a powerful proteolytic enzyme, which liquefies tissue by breaking down proteins. Once the prey turns to mush, water bugs feed by sucking the liquefied remains through a proboscis. If that sounds agonizing, it is. Water bug “bites” inflict pain on a par with the top-ranked insects on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a four-point scale created by entomologist Justin O. Schmidt to compare the stings of the order Hymenoptera, which includes bees, wasps, and ants. But though fairly painful, this sting is not actually dangerous to humans.

The water bugs’ other nickname—electric light bugs—comes from their attraction to light. Though they are clumsy fliers, water bugs do take to the air when seeking out new streams and rely on surface light bouncing off water to find their way. When humans bring electric lights to new areas that include water bug habitats, the two species inevitably collide.

Species of Belostomatidae occur worldwide but this particular specimen from the Museum’s Department of Entomology, a male Lethocerus cordofanus Mayr, was collected in 1911 in Morogoro, Tanzania. Though nearly a century old, like most insects, its hard body preserves well without any special treatment. It’s one of approximately 24 million specimens housed in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer issue of Rotunda, the magazine for Museum Members.

Museum Scientist’s Team Describes Two New Fish Species from Gulf of Mexico

Friday, July 09 9:05 am

Although the Gulf of Mexico has been intensively surveyed by scientists and picked over by fishermen, it is still home to fishes that are waiting to be described. New research from a team that includes Museum researchers that was recently published in the Journal of Fish Biology describes two new species of pancake batfishes (Halieutichthys intermedius and H. bispinosus) and re-describes another (H. aculeatus), all of which live in waters either partially or fully encompassed by the recent oil spill.

“One of the fishes that we describe is completely restricted to the oil spill area,” says John Sparks, curator of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History. “If we are still finding new species of fishes in the Gulf, imagine how much diversity—especially microdiversity—is out there that we do not know about.”

Pancake batfishes are members of the anglerfish family Ogcocephalidae, a group of about 70 species of flat bottom-dwellers that often live in deep, perpetually dark waters. Pancake batfishes have enormous heads and mouths that can thrust forward. This, combined with their ability to cryptically blend in with their surroundings, gives them an advantage for capturing prey. They use their stout, arm-like fins to ‘walk’ awkwardly along the substrate; their movements have been described as grotesque, resembling a walking bat.  As most anglerfishes, batfishes have a dorsal fin that is modified into a spine or lure, although their lure excretes a fluid to reel in prey instead of bio-illuminating.

The pancake batfishes described by Sparks and colleagues, genus Halieutichthys, live in shallower waters than most batfishes and occur along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic from Louisiana to North Carolina. Until now, the currently described three fishes had been lumped into one species, since they all have similar coloration and body shape. Read more »