Local yokels! Head on over to the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Metro Center for their new climate change photo exhibit.

Hat tip to Surprising Science.

Labels: climate change, dc, global warming, museums

This is another photo from Saturday's hike. Unakite is rumored to be the 'state rock' of Virginia, though it's not in the state code. Regardless of its official status, it sure is a distinctive sight: An epidotized granitoid, unakite is identified by the distinctive pairing of pistachio-green epidote and pink potassium feldspar. There's some grey/purple quartz there too. In the mid-Atlantic states, it's only found in the Blue Ridge geologic province. Here, on the trail below Dark Hollow Falls in Shenandoah National Park, my friends and I encountered this lovely boulder of unakite bearing a vein of milky quartz.

The original granitoid was Grenvillian in age, about 1.1 billion years old. Presumably the metamorphism took place during Alleghanian mountain-building, between 300-250 million years ago. Unakite has been quarried in Virginia for use as a building stone, and can be seen as tiles on the first terrace of the steps leading from the National Mall up to the southern doors of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

Labels: blue ridge, dc, igneous, metamorphism, minerals, museums, smithsonian, virginia

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Department of Mineral Sciences invites the museum community to a memorial service commemorating the life contributions of Tom Simkin, the founding director of the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program. Simkin also served as president of the Geological Society of Washington. A memorial program will be held at Baird Auditorium on Tuesday, September 8 at 10:30 AM, followed by a reception in the Executive Conference Room. We welcome your attendance. Please send your RSVP (yes only) to Sally Kuhn Sennert (KUHNS@si.edu) by 1 September to help us make catering estimates for the reception.

Labels: gsw, museums, smithsonian, volcano

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is looking for a creative individual to work on contract in the capacity of Producer/Writer for a new Human Evolution website. In this capacity, the individual will work with the Museum's Human Evolution Web team, and coordinate with the Web Development Contractor to bring creative solutions to presenting the human evolution story, shaping, editing, and writing multimedia content. We are looking for someone with experience writing science stories, producing multimedia, and developing content for museums. For more information, contact Robert Costello, costellor@si.edu.

Labels: anthropology, evolution, jobs, museums, smithsonian

Here's a nice fold I saw the other day at the Smithsonian:

Labels: museums, smithsonian, structure

I saw Ray Stanford, an enthusiastic amateur paleontologist, speak last month at a meeting of the Paleontological Society of Washington.

It was my first PSW meeting, and I got a warm welcome from PSW president and University of Maryland paleontologist Tom Holtz, who gave a specific shout-out to NOVA Geoblog, encouraging the ~30 attendees to check it out. (If you're arriving as a consequnce of that endorsement, welcome!) Four of my Honors students joined me for the talk. Just getting to go behind the scenes at the Smithsonian is a treat in itself. From the Easter Island moai in the Constitution Avenue lobby of the museum, we were escorted through labyrinthine passageways to the Cooper Room. Our route brought us past immense fossil collections, cossetted away in row after row of cabinets. It was enticing, and made me resolve to arrange a special tour there sometime for the Honors students.

The point of the talk was Stanford's immense collection of fossil dinosaur tracks (and at least one apparent mammal track which is quite large: raccoon-sized at least, with apparent dinosaur skin impressions right next to it). It used to be thought that Maryland only had Triassic/Jurassic fossil tracks, from the Newark Supergroup rift valleys that opened up during the breakup of Pangea / opening of the Atlantic Ocean. Stanford has made a real scientific breakthrough by demonstrating that there are early Cretaceous-aged tracks in the area too.

None of his Cretaceous-aged tracks are collected in situ. Instead, he finds them all as "float" (weathered-out loose blocks) in streams draining exposures of (what I infer to be) the Patuxent Formation. (He didn't specifically mention source formations that I heard during the talk.)

He's found a ton of stuff! Actually,if I'm being literal, he's found tonS of stuff! And he stores it all in his living room! He recently had the foundations of his house reinforced because he has so much STUFF. Hundreds of tracks, and other fossils, too. Whoa! This guy does not play by the same rules as most folks.

There were a lot of coprolites mentioned, including:

• a 98-pound coprolite (!)
• a coprolite with a dinosaur footprint in it
• a dinosaur footprint with a coprolite in it

He also shared what he claimed were skin textures preserved in tracks. Some were self-evident, and I readily accepted them as valid. However, others weren't visible to the naked eye, and he only "demonstrated" them with Photoshopped images wherein the contrast dial was turned up to 11 -- I think this "technique" generated patterns that resembled skin impressions, but when I looked at the fossil itself, they were nowhere to be seen. I am dubious about this particular claim.

The talk gave me lots to think about, but not so much about dinosaur lifestyles or anatomy so much as the role of amateurs in science. Here's a guy with boundless enthusiasm, and he's finding stuff that the books literally said didn't exist. His efforts have resulting in expanding Maryland's Mesozoic paleontological record into the Cretaceous, and he's found all sorts of stuff that's super-duper interesting, like that mammal track.

Stanford was profiled last year in Geotimes magazine, before it switched its name to EARTH. Discovery News also ran a story about his findings. Interestingly, when Googling his name for this blog post, I also came across some other wacky stuff he's involved in, including UFO's. This definitely jibes with the lack of scientific rigor that I perceived in his presentation. (Quote from the interviewer: "In the 1970s, Stanford was the moving force behind the Association for the Understanding of Man (AUM) and Project Starlight. The former an attempt to decipher the UFO enigma by psychic means, the latter using advanced scientific instruments.")

So, having learned this, what do I make of his paleontological data? The best I can come up with is to trust my own eyes and view his claims open-mindedly but with the traditional scientific filter of skepticism. I accept the coprolite data; I found it self-evidently convincing. The skin-texture data? Not so much. The UFO stuff? Don't get me started...

Labels: coastal plain, cretaceous, culpeper basin, fossils, maryland, meetings, mesozoic, museums, psw, science and society, smithsonian

Here's some cool field trips being offered by the Virginia Museum of Natural History. Not particularly cheap, though.

Labels: field trips, fossils, museums, virginia

Ptygmatic folding is a style of folding characterized by an "intestine-like" appearance. The folded item (in this case, a granite dike) folds back on itself, and the cross-cut material (in this case, a schist) flows out of the way. In other words, there's a viscosity contrast between the relatively-stiff granite dike and the relatively-weak schist.

This particular ptygmatically-folded dike is in a boulder outside of the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, DC. That's a quarter at the top of the photo, for scale.

Labels: dc, igneous, museums, structure

I'm sure I won't be the only one to be writing about this today, but here's a couple of links to news items about Liberty University's "Advanced Creation Studies" students touring the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

NBC (snarky!)
Washington Post (with photos)

Labels: evolution, museums, news, smithsonian, teaching

This weekend, I walked down to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History to check out their new Sant Ocean Hall (previous mentions on this blog).

The new exhibit hall has been under construction for a long time, and opened to the public the previous weekend. I've got a few photos here to share some of what I saw, but the museum also maintains their own Flickr page, which has additional (and better) photographs.

It's pretty cool. There are suspended specimens of both giant squid and also this coelacanth (with "pup" at upper right):


The exhibit has a lot of cool stuff having to deal with the geological aspects of oceanography, too, like this interactive exhibit about drill cores and how geologists interpret sediment. It would make an ideal visit for Historical Geology students:


The thing that caught my eye at first was a series of skeletons showing the evolution of whales over time, and in particular the shrinkage and eventual absence of their hind limbs and hips. I failed to note the name of the first one (falsely thinking I could look it up online!), but the more distant two specimens are Dorudon and Basilosaurus:


And they've got a nice C. megalodon jaw reconstruction holding lots of authentic teeth:


There are lots of smaller fossils, too. I was really impressed by the substantial portion of the hall which was given over to ancient oceans, as preserved in the sedimentary record. Here's a case showing some stunning fossils, including a MASSIVE asaphid trilobite and the best receptaculid ("sunflower coral") that I've ever seen:


A lot of trilobites are on display, most donated by Bob Hazen, of the Carnegie Institution and George Mason University. Here's a lovely Olenellus from Pennsylvania:


Also, you'll find Dunkleosteus, mosasaurs, and this Placinticeras ammonite with mosasaur bite marks running across it.


Here's a rudist clam, one of a half-dozen diverse and chunky specimens on display:


Lastly, I'll show a photo that's part of their display on the Burgess Shale. They include some imagery from Walcott's journal documenting actual fossil specimens that are displayed right along with it. Pretty cool -- a sort of window onto historical paleontological field work.


I also wanted to mention a really neat display called "Science on a Sphere," where a suspended sphere about six feet across gets imagery projected on it from the inside, accompanying narration that explains phenomena like plate tectonics, El Nino, the thermohaline "conveyor belt," and so forth. This YouTube video (not mine) gives a small taste of the Sphere as it explains surface currents using rubber duckies:



All told, it's a great exhibit, and you should check it out next time you're in DC.

Labels: fish, fossils, museums, oceans, smithsonian

Joel Achenbach reports in today's Washington Post about the Smithsonian Institution's newest addition: the Sant Ocean Hall, which opened this weekend at the National Museum of Natural History. I plan to go check it out myself this week, but until I get the chance to report, consider Mr. Achenbach's words.

Labels: dc, museums, oceans, smithsonian

Just a few weeks left until the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) opens the doors of its new Ocean Hall to the public (Saturday morning, September 27). I'm particularly excited that it contains an exhibit on ancient seas, including a Basilosaurus skeleton!

Labels: dc, museums, oceans

News: The coprolite cartoon I mentioned last week (published this month in EARTH magazine) is now going to be part of a permanent display on scat and coprolites at the Dinosaur State Park museum in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. My favorite part about this idea is where the new exhibit is going to be... it's in the bathroom! Ha! You gotta love that... talk about a teachable moment!

Labels: art, connecticut, fossils, humor, museums

Browsing around the web this afternoon, killing time when I should be working on my Geotimes cartoon, I came across this essay on the New York Times website: "Musings inspired by a quagga"*, by Olivia Judson. Good stuff, although I do get tired of hearing that old "but the extinction that caused the death of the dinosaurs wasn't even the biggest" cliche. Inspired by a visit to the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Judson explores the role of extinction in evolutionary processes. Worth a read.

*By the way, mark your calendars: August 12 is Quagga Day, so proclaimed by Ed Abbey. The one this year is the 125th anniversary of the death of the last quagga.

Labels: evolution, museums

This is how good it is to be a professor on summer break: Yesterday afternoon, after composing yesterday morning's epic account of my Massanutten trip, I toodled on over to the Palisades Museum of Prehistory to (a) drink beer and (b) talk rocks with the museum's curator, Doug Dupin.

The Palisades Museum of Prehistory is in far western Northwest DC, near the Dalecarlia Reservoir and Sibley Hospital. There, you'll find a neighborhood called the Palisades, and in the Palisades, you'll find Doug Dupin's house. In Doug's backyard, you'll find what appears to be a nice shed. Turns out, this is the museum. It's a long story, but basically it boils down to this: Doug was a cartographer, but a contract went sour, and so he was staying at home with a lot of time on his hands. He decided to grow some grapes to make wine, and store that wine in a self-dug wine cellar. He started digging the hole, and encountered arrowheads, pot sherds, and other artifacts. He got intrigued, and decided to showcase the findings atop the wine cellar in a self-made museum.

If you want more details, the Washington DC CityPaper profiled Doug in a 2006 article. A good read; I recommend it.

Doug is a great guy -- pursues what he's interested in, be it homebrew, viniculture, skateboarding (he once rode the length of the C&O Canal on a self-made board -- read about it in this New York Times Magazine article), or archaeology.

Doug attended my "Walkingtown, DC" walking tour of DC's geologic history, and brought along a few odd rocks for me to identify. At the end of the tour, he invited me over to see his museum. Yesterday, I finally got the chance to do that. We cracked open a couple bottles of Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA and started browsing his collection of found prehistoric objects. Doug was very interested in my analysis of rock types (apparently archaeologists use a different set of terminology for describing what rock types projectile points are made out of).

On his own property and in neighboring areas of the Palisades, Doug has found hundreds and hundreds of objects, many of them beautifully worked arrowheads of flint, quartzite, and rhyolite. There are also some oddballs that don't fit with the human prehistory theme: a 1791 coin bearing the image of Louis XVI, crystals of amethyst and gypsum, old glass bottles, rounded river cobbles, and anything else that caught his attention. One of the most astounding things I saw yesterday was a huge woolly mammoth tooth. Doug told me a friend of his found it in the Potomac River while canoing (I think he said near Seneca Creek, but that was a beer and a half in, so maybe I've got that wrong). But there it was, a fully ridged mammoth molar; unmistakable. I hadn't heard of previous mammoth finds in our area, but I guess it's not surprising they were here.

Anyhow, I had a great time, and I recommend that everyone in the DC area make an appointment with Doug to go check out his collection and support his project.

Labels: cenozoic, dc, history, mesozoic, museums, piedmont, tourism

On an odd day, a post about an odd place:

Reading David Byrne's blog last week, I was alerted to the existence of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. When I went to this museum's website, I found a phantasmagoria of odd objects and pseudoscientific farce. It's not supposed to be real; it's supposed to be art. But... why "Jurassic?" Like a lot of McSweeney's works, it seems a little too clever for me to "get." Though not a geologist, Byrne seemed similarly perplexed: "the mixture of the real ... and the imaginary... is a bit of a head twister at first."

Labels: art, museums, websites