Preparing Fossils at the Museum

Friday, June 10 11:49 am

Fossil preparation requires an uncommon degree of adaptability and patience. Museum preparators bring to the task diverse sets of skills from such backgrounds as art, paleontology, and archaeology. They generally learn their craft on the job, drawing from related fields such as object conservation to adapt modern glues, solvents, and other archival materials to stabilize fragile areas or repair damage.

Watch as Justy Alicea, a preparator at the American Museum of Natural History, works on a specimen and offers a tour of the Museum’s fossil preparation lab. And for more about fossil preparation, read this story, which originally appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of the Members’ magazine Rotunda.

Click here to buy tickets and for more information about the major exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs, now open at the Museum.

Inside the Collections: Vertebrate Paleontology

Monday, January 03 11:40 am

More than 3 million specimens make up the Museum’s world-class paleontology collections, and only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. In fact, only 0.02 percent of the Museum’s vertebrate paleontology specimens are on view; the rest are stored behind the scenes, where they continue to be studied by Museum scientists and their colleagues.

One such storage space is the so-called Big Bone room, which houses some of the largest items in the collection. Its holdings include one of the largest complete limb bones in the world: the 650-pound thigh bone of the long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur Camarasaurus. Visitors will be able to see this spectacular specimen in the upcoming major exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs (April 16, 2011-January 2, 2012), which explores the amazing anatomy of a uniquely super-sized group of dinosaurs, the sauropods.

For a look at the 650-pound femur and some of the other fossils in the Big Bone room, check out the video below.

AMNH Moveable Museums Go to Washington

Monday, November 01 5:28 pm

On Friday, October 22, two of the American Museum of Natural History’s Moveable Museums — 37-foot-long customized recreational vehicles outfitted as mobile exhibition spaces with specimens, videos, and interactive activities — made their way to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for a two-day science Expo, the culmination of the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival.

The Expo featured some 550 science and engineering companies, museums, science centers, colleges and universities, and 200 K–12 schools presenting more than 1,500 free, hands-on activities and over 75 stage shows featuring scientists, celebrities, magicians, jugglers, rappers, and more.

A welcome video featuring President Barack Obama kicked off the event. Read more »

Celebrating Fossils: New Discoveries in America’s Great Plains Bring Ammonites to Life

Wednesday, October 13 5:17 pm

The Museum’s leadership in scientific discovery and research dates back to its founding. To celebrate National Fossil Day, October 13, 2010, the Museum hosted a number of educational activities for school groups: fossil experts used ‘touch carts’ to give students a hands-on look at some of the fossils featured in the Museum’s permanent exhibit halls, and students explored more about how fossils are formed, dated, and collected. Museum scientist Neil Landman’s newly-published research on ammonites will provide even more to discuss.

Although ammonites — shelled mollusks closely related to modern day nautilus and squids — have been extinct for 65 million years, newly published data based on 35 years of research is providing invaluable insights into their paleobiology. Specimens found in the rock record of an ancient seaway that covered North America during the Cretaceous Period reveal fascinating details: ammonites thrived at cold methane seeps that supported diverse ecosystems at the bottom of the sea, consumed small prey, and often survived attacks from predators.

About 70 million years ago, what is now North America was divided in half by a broad inland sea that covered much of the continent. This epicontinental sea, according to the new research published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, contained cold methane seeps of bubbling gas that created underwater oases. These ecosystems attracted and supported organisms like bacteria, sponges, gastropods, bivalves, sea urchins, sea lilies, and ammonites.

“You have to imagine the underwater scene 70 million years ago,” says Neil Landman, curator in the Division of Paleontology at the Museum. “A cloud of zooplankton, with ammonites flocking to the vents, forming isolated communities surrounded by the muddy sea floor. Because the sedimentation rates in the seaway were so rapid, the ammonites and other organisms were buried quickly after death, preserving exquisite details of their morphology.”

Part of Landman’s ammonite research will be presented at the upcoming Geological Society of America Meetings in Denver.

For more information, please see the official press release.

Oldest Evidence of Dinosaurs Found in Polish Footprints

Wednesday, October 06 1:54 pm

Reconstruction of cat-sized stem dinosaur Prorotodactylus isp. found in Stryczowice, Poland that was a quadruped with a dinosaur-like gait and orientation of the toes.

A researcher affiliated with the Museum has just described the oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage: 250 million year-old fossilized tracks that are a few centimeters long.

“The oldest dinosaurs and their immediate relatives were small and rare,” says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student affiliated with the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.

Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, a four-legged animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now central Poland. The prints of Prorotodactylus isp. show distinctive dinosaur-like features, including three prominent central toes parallel in alignment. The back edge of the print is straight, evidence of the simple hinged ankle that distinguishes dinosaurs from relatives like lizards and crocodiles.

The paper also describes 246-million-year-old Sphingopus isp. footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur. This trackway–from a different but nearby site–may be the earliest evidence of moderately large-bodied and bipedal true dinosaurs. These tracks are larger at 15 centimeters long.

“The biggest crisis in the history of life also created one of the greatest opportunities in the history of life by emptying the landscape and making it possible for dinosaurs to evolve,” says Brusatte.

For more information, please see the official press release.

Near the Holy Cross Mountains of Poland where the oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage is found are the three authors of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper (l to r): Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, Stephen Brusatte, and Richard Butler. Credit: Marian Dziewiński