A Lumholtz Legacy: Tarahumara Mask

Monday, January 23 10:59 am

Ethnologist and naturalist Carl Sophus Lumholtz documented over 200 Tarahumara objects, including this carved wooden mask. Photo courtesy of the Division of Anthropology (Catalog no. 65/1030).

For the first expedition organized by the Museum’s Division of Anthropology, to the Sierra Madre range in Mexico in 1890, the Museum recruited a researcher with a truly global resume.

Born near Lillehammer, Norway, Carl Sophus Lumholtz was an ethnologist and naturalist with an intense interest in people and their environments. A pioneer of the participant-observation technique, he had come to the Museum’s attention for his work in Australia, where he spent four years learning the customs of the indigenous Australians while collecting botanical and zoological specimens.

Between 1890 and 1897, Lumholtz led three expeditions to Mexico, traveling some 900 miles in the Sierra Madre Occidental. It was during the second expedition, in 1891, that he lived among the Tarahumara Indians, known as extraordinary distance runners, and detailed Tarahumara daily life, rituals, and beliefs. He also collected and documented 230 objects—among them, three carved wooden masks with human faces, including the one pictured here.

A beautiful example of Tarahumara material culture, this mask had already lost one of its two antlers by the time Lumholtz acquired it on January 6, 1891, during dances celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany. The Tarahumara incorporated traditional beliefs into their Christian observances, and this mask was associated with supernatural beings that helped ensure an abundance of animals to hunt. Read more »

Lab Confidential: Prokaryotic Partners

Wednesday, January 11 9:39 am

A technique called FISH causes bacteria in an adult hippopotamus leech to glow. © AMNH/S. Perkins

Each of the 41 intriguing images in Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies tells a fascinating story about research or conservation projects. Here’s the first in a series of four snapshots.

While researching bacteria found in blood-feeding leeches, Associate Curator Susan Perkins and Curator Mark Siddall have conducted fieldwork around the world, from French Guiana to South Africa.

But one of their most exciting discoveries took place in a Museum lab 10 years ago. DNA sequencing revealed that the symbiotic bacteria in turtle leeches belong to a group of bacteria that were previously found only in plants or as pathogens. As leeches have evolved and diversified, they’ve forged unique partnerships with bacteria at least three different times.

Dr. Perkins and Dr. Siddall confirmed they had sequenced the correct DNA using a technique called fluorescence in situ hybridization, or FISH. This method involves applying fluorescent DNA probes to thin slices of tissue that light up in the case of a DNA match. FISH also showed that symbiotic bacteria were present in young leeches that had never fed on blood, “suggesting the leeches pass the bacteria directly to their offspring,” explains Siddall. Images of glowing bacterial populations in leeches can be seen as part of Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies, curated by Siddall and now on view in the Akeley Gallery. Read more »

Beyond Planet Earth: An Elevator to the Moon

Monday, October 24 10:52 am

A lunar elevator arrives at a station on the Moon. © AMNH/M. Garlick.

Below, astrophysicist Michael Shara, who curated the forthcoming exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, explains how a lunar elevator would work—and why it might inspire a new sport.

We humans are barely toddlers when it comes to space exploration. Our first baby steps off our home planet 50 years ago took us to low Earth orbit. By 1973, 12 intrepid men had walked on the moon’s surface. Since then we have sent robots to every planet in our solar system. The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us that the ordinary matter we are made of comprises only 4 percent of the mass of the universe. The Kepler orbiting telescope has proved that billions of worlds orbit the stars of our Milky Way galaxy. What will we accomplish in space in the coming centuries, as our steps become surer and bolder? Read more »

Margaret Mead Film Festival Celebrates 35-Year Anniversary With Exciting Program

Thursday, October 06 9:25 am

Much has changed in documentary filmmaking since the American Museum of Natural History organized the first Margaret Mead Film Festival in 1977 as a celebration of the pioneering anthropologist and longtime Museum curator.

A still from We Still Live Here, featured in this year's Margaret Mead Film Festival. Photo by J. Reed.

But the one constant has been the Mead Festival’s enduring distinction for bringing the public the best in innovative nonfiction films, a legacy that will be celebrated at this year’s 35th-anniversary program held from Thursday, November 10, through Sunday, November 13.

“Since I first began working in film, the Mead Festival had a legendary place among film festivals,” says Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, who is leading the jury selection for this year’s Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award. “The films are always amazing.”

The festival will screen 31 outstanding films, including 11 U.S. premieres, culled from more than 1,000 international and domestic submissions, as well as a special presentation of space and sci-fi films by Curator Michael Shara, in anticipation of the Museum’s upcoming exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration.

Other festival highlights include a retrospective of the festival’s most influential features over the past three decades; a live performance by Mohawk musicians; an exhibit of kinetic sculptures portrayed in one of this year’s films; and a space-themed Radiolab listening party in the Hayden Planetarium dome. Post-screening discussions allow audiences rich, engaging, and intimate conversations with filmmakers and film subjects.

Full film descriptions and trailers can be found online at amnh.org/mead.

Purchase tickets and create a personalized film schedule at mead2011.sched.org.

For festival highlights or daily updates, information can be found on Facebook at facebook.com/MeadFilmFestival or Twitter at #MeadFilmFest.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall Issue of Rotunda, the Member magazine.

Titanosaur Nest from The World’s Largest Dinosaurs

Friday, July 22 1:35 pm

A titanosaur hatchling emerges from its nest. © AMNH/D. Finnin

They are some of the rarest of rare artifacts: fossil dinosaur eggs with the embryo still inside. And they are prized for what they can tell paleontologists about the adults that laid them.

The exhibition The World’s Largest Dinosaurs features a scale model of a nest found at Auca Mahuevo, Argentina, one of the largest known dinosaur nesting sites in the world. While it isn’t always possible to figure out which dinosaur laid a particular egg, in this case, an embryo within an egg found at Auca Mahuevo site allowed scientists to identify these eggs as those of titanosaurs, a group of sauropods that included such species as Ampelosaurus and Saltasaurus. Herds of female titanosaurs are thought to have laid the thousands of eggs — 15 to 40 at a time — in shallow nests dug out with their huge feet in dry mud and sand over miles of ground at Auca Mahuevo.

Titanosaurs are among the biggest sauropods, the group of saurischian dinosaurs featured in this exhibition. Titanosaur fossils have been found on every continent except Antarctica, and some of the biggest titanosaurs have been discovered in South America. These include the massive Argentinosaurus, which greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition. In life, an adult Argentinosaurus could weigh up to 90 tons.

Size is a curious part of the story of dinosaur eggs. One might think such huge creatures would have equally super-sized eggs. But consider that the extinct elephant bird, which weighed about 880 lbs., had, on average, a 26-lb. egg compared to the average 9-lb. egg of the Ampelosaurus, which grew to about 7.7 tons. Also, there is a limit to the size any egg can be. Eggshell is very brittle, so the larger the egg, the thicker its shell must be to keep from shattering. However, the shell must also allow oxygen and water to get through to the embryo growing inside, and, above a certain size, the egg wouldn’t be both suitably strong and porous. So although the sauropod young grew big very fast, they started out relatively tiny. The hatchlings of the 13-ton female Mamenchisaurus at the center of the exhibition, for example, would have weighed about as much as a small goose.

Click here for more information about The World’s Largest Dinosaurs or to buy tickets.

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