Museum Program Pairs Teens with Scientist Mentors

Monday, August 29 4:23 pm

SRMP students Anika Rastgir and Caitlin King study ceratopsian skull shapes with a Museum scientist. © AMNH/D. Finnin

Ailan Hurley-Echevarria removed a pebble-sized piece of dark amber from the variable speed grinder-polisher and looked at the now-smooth and clear surface under the dissecting microscope.

“I think there’s something here in the corner,” he said.

Hurley-Echevarria had uncovered an ancient biting midge (Ceratopogonidae) which had been trapped in amber about 52 million years ago, perhaps after feeding on an Eocene mole or other small mammal in the prehistoric tropical jungles of India.

Within the first few weeks of their investigation of the Cambay amber deposit, a collection of ancient tree resin recently excavated from western India, Ailan and research partner Charlotte Isaac had already discovered a number of significant ancient invertebrates. They uncovered a spider that may be the oldest recorded member of the family Pholcidae as well as the earliest representatives of highly social insects such as rhinotermitid termites. Their mentor, Paul Nascimbene, a scientist in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology, ticks off the list of hidden treasures revealed through their work: 62 diverse ants, five complete termites, some remarkable flowers, and four bees, including a Protobombus, an early bumblebee. Read more »

Battling Bugs Organically Earns Student Young Naturalist Award

2:17 pm

Kalia tested Eastern hemlock, along with green chili and garlic, for their effectiveness as natural pesticides. Photo courtesy of Kalia.

As she helped her family grow produce each year, Kalia learned how to protect her home garden from weeds, rabbits, and deer. But no amount of weed-whacking or fence-building could keep the insects away.

To try to solve this problem, 13-year-old Kalia embarked on a project to find out whether it was possible to avoid synthetic insecticides—and associated environmental and health risks—without compromising the harvest. For her investigation into green gardening, Kalia received a 2011 Young Naturalist Award.

Kalia sought a natural option for protecting her homegrown plants by turning to other plants. “Organic, plant-based pesticides that rely on plants’ natural defenses against insects may not only be effective and inexpensive for protecting crops,” wrote Kalia in her essay, Plant Extracts as Natural Insecticides, “But also safer and more environmentally friendly.”

She decided to test green chili and garlic—which both have track records as effective insecticides—as well as Eastern hemlock, which she hypothesized might repel insects much like the cedar, its relative. Using a food processor and some water, Kalia created three mixtures per plant and tested each by spraying them on greater wax moth larvae and recording the larvae’s survival rates over two weeks. To reduce potential errors—which Kalia details at length in her essay—she maintained a control group that she sprayed with water. Read more »

Museum Will Be Open on Monday, August 29

Sunday, August 28 7:21 pm

Update: The Museum will be open at 10 am on Monday, August 29. The Summer Science Institute will resume as scheduled on Tuesday, August 30th.

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Curious Collections: True Blue Fossils

Thursday, August 25 12:17 pm

Vertebrae fragments of Champsosaurus sp. Photo: ©AMNH

Nestled deep within the Museum’s vertebrate paleontology collection are several gloriously blue bones.

They are vertebrae of the long-extinct Champsosaurus, a crocodile-like creature that lived between about 60 and 45 million years ago, straddling the non-avian dinosaur extinction. They were found in 1882 in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico.

“The overwhelming majority of vertebrate fossils fall into the earth tones, browns, black, and white,” says Carl Mehling, collections manager for fossil amphibians, reptiles, and birds at the Museum. (Click here for a look at some of the biggest fossils in the Museum’s vertebrate paleontology collection, or sign up for a Members-only behind-the-scenes tour with Carl Mehling this fall.)

Specimens that deviate from this drab palette are rare, which makes finding them all the more exciting. Mehling, who discovered the fossils in the vast collections, couldn’t believe the color was natural. “I thought, ‘Get out of here!’” says Mehling. “I thought somebody had put a coating on it that just happened to be blue.”

The muted sapphire tone was no coating but rather a part of the bones, which had undergone a process called mineralization after burial. Dissolved minerals in groundwater deposited minerals in the bones, changing their chemical composition. What minerals could possibly turn a bone blue? Without extensive lab work, it’s hard to be sure.

“Typically, it only takes a very little amount of a mineral to change the color [of an object],” says George Harlow, curator of minerals and gems in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

But, so long as the structure of the bones is intact, what mineral caused this metamorphosis would be just a secondary concern to those who study fossils.

This story originally appeared in the Summer issue of Rotunda, the Member magazine.

Valuable Lesson About Variables

Wednesday, August 24 5:31 pm

Photo courtesy of Aidan.

In the last few weeks, 13-year-old Aidan — a 2011 Young Naturalist Award winner whose scientific project, described in his essay The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees, garnered much attention for examining whether patterns of tree leaf distribution were linked to more efficient sunlight collection—received another important lesson in his young scientific career.

The seventh grader, who came up with a compelling question, designed an experiment, and gathered data for his investigation, fully met the criteria of the Young Naturalist Awards, a research-based competition that encourages students to develop their research skills by engaging in scientific investigations. But he had also made a mistake well-known to veteran scientists: he tested the wrong variable—in this case, voltage instead of power generated. A flawed experimental design, no matter how carefully executed, yields data that cannot be used to evaluate the hypothesis.

Although the contest judges did not recognize the error, Aidan’s interesting results—and his clear description of his methodology in his essay—led an electrical engineer to pinpoint the mistake in another process familiar to researchers: community review. In this case, Aidan’s community happened to include not just other seventh-graders but professional researchers, who were able to accurately assess his project—in itself, a credit to Aidan’s writing skills and clearly described methodology.

Tad Montgomery, founder of ecological engineering firm Tad Montgomery & Associates, read Aidan’s essay online and wrote a letter to point out some additional flaws in the original experiment. Still, Montgomery stressed that “it was deeply heartening to read of [Aidan’s] keen observations of nature…I was deeply inspired by his love of nature and his desire to study and use the wisdom of nature to help solve humanity’s pressing problems.”

In research, recognizing an error is an important step that leads to recalibrating an experiment or method. Aidan, who has demonstrated great intellectual curiosity, had planned on continuing to investigate tree leaf patterns. All science builds upon current knowledge, and now Aidan will be armed with additional knowledge as he heads back into the field—and we at the Museum hope that he will continue to develop his insightful experimental investigations in the near future.