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.

Scientific Illustration at the Museum

Thursday, June 23 12:00 pm

Sinornithosaurus. Image: © AMNH/M. Ellison

Before the camera, scientists depended on drawings to replicate the natural world, its flora and fauna, on the printed page. But even today, well after the arrival of photography and other sophisticated imaging techniques, old-school illustration persists as the method of choice in books, articles, and professional research papers. So how has this craft survived alongside photos and high-tech scans?

First, there are some instances—such as portraying an extinct animal no human has ever seen—that simply demand creative rendering. But even with extant species, scientists say that, with the possible exception of presenting small areas of minute surface detail, there is simply no substitute for putting pen to paper.  Even 3-D scanned images can lack the resolution needed to represent complex structures, color gradations, and other essential details.

It is not a matter of resisting technology. Many scientific illustrators use computer software to execute their drawings or to tweak pen or pencil images after they have been digitized. And most consider computed tomography, scanning electron microscopy, and other high-resolution imaging techniques important tools, enhancements of the eye that allow for ever more detail in the finished drawing. (Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies, an exhibition showcasing examples of such imaging and its use in Museum research, will be on view in the Akeley Gallery starting Saturday, June 25.) Read more »

Grandfather and Grandson Set Record for Sleepovers

Monday, March 28 4:20 pm

Gregory Cox and grandson Shane, 11, have camped out under the blue whale six times. Credit: © AMNH/C. Chesek

When Gregory Cox was a teenager attending the Food and Maritime Trades School in the 1960s, he sometimes took advantage of a midday switch from the East Side campus to the West Side to skip school and head to the American Museum of Natural History.

“I didn’t take the [school] bus, I took the subway,” he recalls over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. “They never caught me!”

Cox, who lives in Brooklyn, went on to a career in ship repair, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him. Now retired and a Family-level Member, he loves sharing his longstanding affection for the Museum with his grandchildren, Shannon Concalves and Shane and Shamus Drucker of Staten Island.

Contrary to Cox’s playing hooky, Shane, who is 11, uses extra schoolwork as an excuse to get his grandfather to take him to the Museum. “Every time he has a school project, he has to go there to research it first,” Cox says. “He loves it.”

Moreover, since the Museum inaugurated its Night at the Museum Sleepover program four years ago, it is a matter of special pride for Cox that he and Shane have spent six nights camping out under the blue whale in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.

“My grandson is bound and determined to have the record for most times,” Cox says.  So far, he has succeeded. “No one has come close,” says Leslie Martinez, who manages the program.

Cox is so keen on the sleepover experience that he carries around descriptions of the program he printed from the Museum’s website to hand out in doctors’ offices and elsewhere , encouraging others to experience the sleepovers for themselves. “I appreciate that he tells everyone about it,” says Martinez. “He’s a great support.”

At age 3, Cox’s youngest grandchild Shamus is still too young for a sleepover. Shannon, 16, was too old when the program began four years ago for kids 8 to 12 (the age range has since been expanded to 7 to 13), and although Cox says he saw her through an avid dinosaur phase when she was younger, she is now more likely to visit the Museum with a boyfriend. “She outgrew me,” he says, noting that, on the other hand, at Shane’s age “grandparents are everything.”

And even though Shane will outgrow the program in a few years, Cox still foresees many, many years of Museum visits and even sleepovers ahead. “By the time Shane outgrows me, I’ll have the little guy!” he says.

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

The next sleepover date is Saturday, April 16. For more details, visitamnh.org/sleepovers.