Contents tagged with collection
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Behind the Scenes: Foundations of a Story
Created: 9/1/2015 Updated: 7/29/2016Subscribe to the Nature Museum blog and never miss a post!
Museum collections are filled with all types of objects – fish in jars, textiles, oil paintings, mammal skins, fossilized plants, historic photographs. These tangible items, the specimens and artifacts, are very cool and I’m only a little biased. But, the really good stuff is something more intangible. The really cool stuff in museums is the data associated with those objects.
Why is data more cool than the real item, you say?
With data, we can tell the story of each specimen and artifact. Here is a label from a Passenger pigeon specimen, Ectopistes migratorius, which states:
“Purchased by Mr. James Richardson, of [the] Am. Museum of N. Hist. [American Museum of Natural History], in the flesh, in the New York Market.”
Passenger Pigeons are an extinct species; the last member of their species died in 1914. This specimen was collected along the Canadian River in 1889, two and a half decades before they went extinct. The pigeon was shipped to New York for the purpose of being sold as food, where it was being sold in a local meat market. That a staff member of the museum purchased the bird and then added it as a scientific specimen to the museum’s collection is fascinating to me. It sparks questions in my mind -- Why did they collect this specimen? Did they have knowledge about the species’ decline at this time? Were they in the habit of scouring city markets for different species? Other species have been re-discovered this way, most notably the Coelacanth.
Without data, the specimen, artifact, or piece of art is only that. We might be able to identify it and give it a name or title, but we won’t know how that particular piece fits into the larger puzzle that lets us understand our world. We won’t know who the artist was or why the piece was created. We won’t know where the animal lived or when or be able to discern how it interacted with its environment. The story is truncated, as is any knowledge that we may have gained.
In the process of caring for the Academy’s museum collections and archives, it is not just the specimens and artifacts that we are preserving, but the information about those items as well. The relationship between a specimen and its data is protected as these components are not nearly as useful separated from each other.
Dawn Roberts
Collections ManagerSubscribe to the Nature Museum blog and never miss a post!
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Motion Film Collection Highlight: William J. Beecher (1914-2002)
Created: 4/11/2014 Updated: 8/9/2016Subscribe to the Nature Museum blog and never miss a post!
This is the third blog post from a series titled: Motion Film Collection Highlight. Two earlier posts can viewed here and here.
William J. Beecher served as the Director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences from 1958 to 1982. An ornithologist by trade -- someone who studies birds -- he was an avid birder, whether in the field or in his back yard. He also had an interest in photography and film.
During his tenure with the Academy, Beecher created educational motion films about local environments and animals that were shared with local groups and museum visitors. Beecher documented many local areas around Illinois, including the Indiana Dunes and Goose Lake Prairie, and was among the first to scientifically document many animal behaviors such as lekking in Prairie Chickens, now an endangered species in Illinois. Here are some still images and a film clip from the motion films created by Beecher in the CAS/PNNM collection.
William Beecher, 1960
Beetles, 1958
Working in the field, 1960
Birds seen during travel to Mweya, Uganda in 1966
People holding up a board with fossils attached. [Fossils appear to be concretions, possibly from the Mazon Creek area in Illinois.] ca.1959-ca.1962
Fox sighting, 1966
Field trip to local prairie, 1968
Great Horned Owl, 1966
Field trip to Goose Lake, 1968
Barred Owl, California,1966Film clip from "Feb 9/60 Zoogeogr regions mammals skulls upside down", 1960
William Beecher, 1967
Dawn Roberts
Collections ManagerSubscribe to the Nature Museum blog and never miss a post!
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Mazon Creek Area Fossil Specimens
Created: 5/24/2013 Updated: 8/10/2016Fossilization is a rare process. In fact, most of the plants, animals, and insects that existed on earth have not been retained in the fossil record because the conditions required must come together with such precision and timeliness that most just miss the boat. Occasionally, a fossil is produced – a leaf, a tooth, maybe a partial skeleton. From these, paleontologists try to piece together the earth’s history.
Most of the time, it is the hard parts of an animal that are fossilized because bone and teeth don’t succumb to the decay process as quickly as the soft parts of an animal, such as muscle tissue. Think about a banana left out on your kitchen counter too long – it will rot away, decomposed by bacteria. Every once in a while though, the conditions are just right to where the fossilization process includes those soft parts. This is rare, but can provide a more complete picture of an animal or an entire paleo-ecosystem. These are truly a remarkable resource, permitting us to look back in time.
Fossils from the Mazon Creek area in Illinois are associated with the Francis Creek Shale formation and date to approximately 307 million years ago, during the Pennsylvanian. This site is unique in that the fossil assemblage includes the preservation of soft tissue, even of animals such as worms and jellyfish! This paleontological site is called a “lagerstätten” or “mother lode” due to the diversity of the flora and fauna represented. Such sites are recognized worldwide as having importance for our national heritage and the process of understanding earth’s history.
Here are a few of the fossil specimens from the Mazon Creek area in the Academy’s museum collections:
Mazonomya mazonensis -- a clam
Euphoberia sp. -- a spiny millipede
Tullimonstrum gregarium - the "Tully Monster",
a carnivorous marine soft-bodied animal, and the Illinois state fossil
Macroneuropteris macrophylla
Lobatopteris sp. -- a fern
Annularia stellata -- a plant similar to a horsetailDawn Roberts
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Collections Manager