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| The skeleton of Right Whale #2030 in the museum lobby area. |
ITHACA: The best museums
are museums of stories. Stories are teaching tools. New ideas are Velcro hooks
that find the loops of known information. Learning is connecting new
information to prior experience. More connections mean strong, durable memories.
Stories are the connecting loops and hooks of long term memory and solid
understanding. There’s a story in the
lobby of the Museum of the Earth in the form of the remains of Right Whale
#2030. Why isn’t that protected whale still in the northern Atlantic filtering
400 pounds of krill through its baleen every day? Sometime in May 1999, the whale encountered fishing gear with a rope
long enough to wrap around the massive body 3 times.
Cutting an exposed rope from a colossal, wild, moving body would be a tough job
but “wrapped” doesn’t explain enough. The rope was so tight that it tortuously cut
through 7 inches of blubber. Repeatedly, crews of people, skilled and
compassionate, found the whale and tried to rescue it. By September, the weakened
female had 2 of the loops removed but the third loop remained eventually killing
her.
When the body was dragged ashore in New Jersey in October, a crew began
“flensing” or removing the skin and flesh. The bones were brought to Ithaca to
be buried in horse manure where beetles and bacteria finished cleaning the
skeleton.
The whole story of Right Whale #2030 is at the museum. Her 300 remaining but
endangered relatives are at risk from ship collisions, fishing gear entanglements
and habitat degradation.
The story of the museum started with
Gilbert Harris. Harris taught geology at Cornell from 1894-1934 while
collecting and protecting specimens. Not trusting Cornell with his work, he
created the Paleontological Research Institution to hold it, gaining a charter
from the NY Board of Regents in 1936. The collection grew from his home to the
current 18,000 square feet, 3 million items and 50,000 texts now in The Museum
of the Earth.
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| The Hyde Park Mastodon was an old male suffering from arthritis as seen in the damage to leg bones. |
About 100 miles from the museum there was a
story of discovery. The Lozier family in Hyde Park brought in equipment to
expand their backyard pond in 1999. A massive bone was uncovered in the
mud. The Loziers thought they had a dinosaur bone but they were repeatedly
dismissed because nobody has a dinosaur in their backyard.
Finally a professor from Baird College
examined the find. While it wasn’t a dinosaur bone, it was from a mastodon, a
male as it turned out and the old guy suffered from arthritis 11,000 years ago
when it collapsed in a muddy pit where its bones were preserved in a tight
group.
The Discovery Channel brought the story to
the country with Mastodon in Your Backyard. By 2000 the bones were assembled
at The Museum of the Earth. As a bonus, it is among the most complete
mastodon skeletons found.
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The museum has an extensive research facility but it also serves to inspire
children. While we were there we heard high school and college aged students
repeatedly asking, “Did you know...” followed by some curious fact that,
actually, I hadn’t known. Periodically, areas of the museum sounded like a
school cafeteria at lunch time.
There was notable teen who had her imagination and mind captured by ammonites
early on. She gave an impressive, private tour to friends exposing them to an
enthusiastic and detailed vocabulary and knowledge base.
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| Erin Signor from South Jersey said, "10-year old Erin would have loved this place more than I love it now. My mother would have never gotten me out." She is holding the frozen part of the glacier exhibit. |
Erin Signor was visiting with friends and told me that
had she been in the Museum at the age of 10, her mother might never have gotten
her out. One exciting element was the frozen side of the glacier exhibit.
For younger visitors The Dino Zone offers an enormous
Stegosaurus rendered in papier mache in 1903 near a supersized sauropod nest
complete with eggs to crawl over or sit on. There are dinosaur costumes to
model and a nearby story nook full of books under the watchful eyes of a
Quetzalcoatlus.
For those who are slightly older, the fossil discovery
zone is always open with trays of fossils free to examine, identify and take.
Art
on site includes the permanent display of 544 tiles, Rock of Ages Sands
of Time, by Barbara Page as well as other murals throughout the building.
There is a changing exhibition area currently hosting Mapping the Planets in
Silk and Sound by Mary Edna Frasier.
Some might ask why we should study the past. Maybe there
isn’t a hard line between past and present. Some ancient animals are still
alive and have mysterious traits. The tardigrade is an aquatic micro animal found
feeding on moss on every continent. The 1150 or so species of tardigrade can be
seen with an amateur microscope and are said to be resilient, an
understatement.
Tardigrads
have returned from space on the outside of a capsule, surviving a vacuum, extreme
radiation, and intense cold. When they sense a lack of water, tardigrades
secrete a material to encapsulate their membranes so they won’t break, their
proteins so they won’t unfold, and their DNA so it won’t be damaged. When
safe again, they rehydrate ready to eat and reproduce even if the dormant
period was more than a decade. Top that story.
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| Janice Brown, microbiologist, hosted vistors at the tardigrade exhibit on February 17. |
During our visit we saw living,
eating, egg-producing tardigrades. Can they teach us something about a
process of stasis in space travel or help develop weather resistant crops?
Isn’t it worth a look?
The Museum of the Earth is a bit off
the main road at 1259 Route 96 in Ithaca. Call (607) 273-6623 or find information at www.priweb.org.
Winter hours are on Wed-Sat. Admission is charged and there is no café.
The Museum hosts a fossil event on every 2nd Saturday, 10am to Noon. Bring your fossils and funny looking
rocks for identification. Sign up for fossil hunts this summer: July 1 - Hamilton, July
22 - Schoharie, August 19 – Tully. Check with the Museum of the Earth
for specific locations, fees, and special events.
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| There are living things at the museum including two salt water aquariums. |
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