Catching Up With SciCafe: Mike Novacek & Mark Norell on Dinosaurs

Thursday, September 16 11:07 am

The American Museum of Natural History’s popular monthly SciCafe series featuring cocktails, conversation, and cutting-edge science presented by experts, is back at the Museum this fall, following its debut season earlier this year.

Some of the SciCafe events presented last season included a look at the Congo river with Museum curator Melanie Stiassny, who shared her team’s adventures and discoveries in Africa’s waters; a discussion withevolutionary psychologist David M. Buss on human mating strategies in celebration of Valentine’s Day; and Professor Kristin Baldwin’s talk on the future of stem cell research and engineering replacement organs.

Another highlight from last season included a SciCafe with Museum paleontologists Mike Novacek and Mark Norell. They shared their adventures (and misadventures) on the hunt for dinosaur and ancient mammal fossils in Mongolia, China, Mexico, Chile, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa.  Here now is the complete video of “SciCafe: Travels with Tyrannosaurus,” recorded on May 5, 2010.

Make sure to check out the fall return of SciCafe on Wednesday, October 6 as Museum curator Mike Shara of the Department of Astrophysics helps celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Rose Center for Earth and Space with a conversation on the next 50 years of space flight.

For more information on upcoming SciCafes, visit amnh.org/scicafe.

Where Museum Scientists Will Spend Their Summer

Wednesday, April 28 12:17 pm

John Sparks and colleague snorkel in a sinkhole in Madagascar. © P. Chakrabarty

How will you spend your summer? Will you backpack through blisteringly dry heat, cutting the trail as you go and pushing flies out of your eyes? Could you dine on white rice for weeks while camping by a series of shallow, rocky streams?

That’s how Associate Curator John Sparks travels while working to discover undescribed species of fish in northwestern Madagascar. This summer he returns with a portable lab to test hearing in a group of cichlids that have an unusually shaped gas bladder that abuts their inner ear and allows them to pick up sounds from the noisy background of streams. Fellow ichthyologist Melanie Stiassny will also be collecting fish, this time along the Upper Congo River and tributaries of the Kasai that funnel fresh water to western Africa. After years of describing the extraordinary biodiversity of the Lower Congo, she is now searching for its source upriver.

Other curators will also be continuing long-term research projects with the goal of discovering new species. Ornithologist George Barrowclough returns to mountainous British Columbia, where male blue grouse emit loud hoots while sitting high up in conifers. These calls, in part, have led Barrowclough to conduct a genetic study to show that this species is actually two. Norm Platnick will travel to Cuba this summer, the first of many trips now that the Museum is collaborating with the National Museum in Havana. Platnick studies goblin spiders, a poorly understood, nearly microscopic group of arachnids that he’s followed for decades. He estimates that only a fifth of the species are described. Fellow invertebrate specialist Jerome Rozen, who has been studying bees for nearly half a century, will visit eastern Turkey to find and describe for the first time nests of the Ancylini, a tribe of solitary bees whose nesting biology is still not fully known. James Carpenter heads for the western mountains of Hungary to collect yellow jackets, continuing work he began in 1976. Carpenter will also collect spit from yellow-jacket adults because, in some species, adults lack the enzyme to break down protein and rely on larvae to digest the food and to function, in effect, as the stomach of the colony. Read more »

Neil deGrasse Tyson Hosts PBS Special Examining Pluto

Tuesday, March 02 2:49 pm

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, is featured in a new documentary airing on PBS that examines the fascination with Pluto and how the world reacted once Tyson stopped referring to it as a planet.

Nearly 10 years after Pluto lost its classification as a planet, ‘The Pluto Files’ features Tyson traveling across the country while interviewing Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto; planetary scientists; Michael Novacek, the Museum’s senior vice president; and even a representative from Disney, the animation company that features popularized Pluto with an animated dog.

This new ‘NOVA’ documentary premieres just as the Rose Center for Earth and Space celebrates its 10th anniversary, having opened to the public in 2000. The most ambitious project in the history of the Museum, the Rose Center then featured an exhibit on the solar system in which Pluto was first grouped not with other planets but rather with newly discovered, icy objects called the Kuiper Belt. It was this original exhibit that started the discussion that is now examined in ‘The Pluto Files.’

A Harvard and Columbia trained astrophysicist, Tyson spends much of his professional work researching star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the Milky Way’s structure. Learn more about Tyson and his work at the Museum on his website.

And to discover more about upcoming events in celebration of the Rose Center’s 10th anniversary, view a full press release.

Podcast: International Year of Biodiversity at AMNH

Thursday, February 11 4:23 pm

More than 400 people traipsed through a blizzard to the American Museum of Natural History on February 10 for the North American launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. Ambassadors, Museum Trustees, and other invited guests gathered under the Museum’s famous blue whale which hangs in the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. According to Olav Kjørven, assistant secretary-general and director of the Bureau for Development Policy, UNDP, the whale is a spectacular monument to Earth’s life and animals endangered by human activities.

The U.N. designated 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity to raise global awareness of the immense variety of life on Earth and to invite action to safeguard the essential networks on which all life, including humans, depends.

Celebrating the International Year of Biodiversity—and photographed in front of the Spectrum of Life at the American Museum of Natural History—are from left to right Paolo Galizzi (Fordham University School of Law), Marjorie Kaplan (Animal Planet Media at Discovery Communications Inc.), Veerle Vandeweerd (UNDP Environment and Energy Group), Ahmed Djoghlaf (Convention on Biological Diversity), Olav Kjørven (UNDP Director of the Bureau for Development Policy), Tran Triet (Phu My Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project), Eleanor Sterling (AMNH’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation), Theodore Roosevelt IV (AMNH Board of Trustees), and Carter Ingram (Wildlife Conservation Society). Photo Credit: AMNH/R. Mickens

“We need to refocus the world on biodiversity—the complex tapestry of interconnections at every level that supports life on Earth,” said Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Museum. “We’ve lost sight of the biodiversity crisis because of other global challenges like climate change. But now we need to step back, understand the causes and consequences of our continued impact on life on the planet, and develop realistic and comprehensive strategies that allow dynamic human communities, economies, and life to thrive.”

The partners for this event, which include Conservation International, Fordham University, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Foundation, and Wildlife Conservation Society, agree that stronger commitments need to be secured for biodiversity and the vital ecosystems that sustain life.

The evening opened with comments by Michael Novacek, provost of Science at the Museum, who introduced Mr. Kjørven and Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. A special preview of the premier world television event LIFE, a co-production of BBC and Discovery Channel, was introduced by Marjorie Kaplan, the president and general manager of Animal Planet Media at Discovery Communications Inc. A panel discussion including Charles McNeill, UNDP senior policy advisor, Veerle Vandeweerd, UNDP director of the Environment and Energy Group, Tran Triet, representative of the Phu My Lepironia Wetland Conservation Project, Paolo Galizzi, Fordham University School of Law, Morten Wetland, Norway’s Permanent Representative to the U.N., and Dr. Sterling followed.

This podcast is the North American launch of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, a designated by the United Nations.  The program, Biodiversity is Life, Biodiversity is Our Life, took place at the Museum on February 10, 2010.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hour 3 mins, 58 MB)

Provost Michael Novacek Discusses Deforestation on Worldfocus

Tuesday, January 05 10:56 am

In a recent appearance on the nightly broadcast program Worldfocus, the Museum’s Provost of Science Michael J. Novacek discussed threats posed to climate and biodiversity by intensive deforestation around the world.

“There’s just too much forest being lost,” said Novacek, whose books include The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts and Terra: Our 100 Million-Year-Old Ecosystem—and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk. “There’s millions of species working together in ecosystems, and they’re not only important for driving the functions of the natural world, but they’re also the sources of food, medicine, and natural resources. By cutting away these forests,
we’re really losing species.”

Watch the full interview below.