Snow Day!

Due to the inclement weather the Museum of the Earth is closed today -- Friday, February 26, 2010. Enjoy the snow and be safe!

Snow Day!

Due to the inclement weather the Museum of the Earth is closed today -- Thursday, February 25, 2010. Enjoy the snow and be safe!

Fossil of the Week

2/24/10 – Ecuadorean Cone

Cone shells (in the gastropod, or snail, family Conidae and mostly in the genus Conus) have always been very popular with collectors, of modern shells and fossils alike. This one is Conus (Leptoconus) roigi Marks, 1951 (PRI 20498), from the Lower Miocene of Las Masas, Ecuador, in South America. This is a rather small specimen, only a little over 1 centimeter (approx. ½ inch) long, and is the figured paratype* [the holotype** is also in the PRI Type Collection]. Another paratype was deposited in the Stanford University paleontological collection – authors of new species are always encouraged to “spread their type material around,” so that original specimens are more widely available to other researchers, and so that if any disaster ever happens to one museum, some specimens will survive elsewhere.

The specimen: This and other specimens described in the original paper (published in the Bulletins of American Paleontology, no. 139) were collected during geological explorations for oil by the International Ecuadorean Petroleum Company (which was associated with the International Petroleum Company of Toronto). The author, Jay Glenn Marks, was employed by the oil company as its “megapaleontologist” and, together with three “micropaleontologists,” analyzed samples to help predict where oil might be found. This was once standard practice by many oil companies, and was a lucrative field for paleontologists and paleontological museums. The species was named for C. A. Roig, who collected most of the type specimens. Oil and gas mining is still an important industry in Ecuador, accounting for 26.8% of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product, a basic measure of a country’s overall economic output) in 2008.

The author: Jay Glenn Marks was a graduate of Stanford University, earning a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and finally Ph.D. degree in 1951 – the paper that described Conus roigi, entitled “Miocene Stratigraphy and Paleontology of Southwestern Ecuador,” was his dissertation. His graduate advisor was none other than A. Myra Keen, one of the most respected American malacologists (scientists who study mollusks), who (according to one biography) “believed in blending the study of fossils with the study of modern faunas.” In 2009, a Stanford University School of Earth Sciences alumni newsletter reported that Dr. Marks was retired and living in Colorado, “where he plays golf and informs his fellow residents about interesting geological events.”

*See 10/14/09 - Atrypa aperanta Crickmay for a definition of paratype specimens. This one was illustrated in the original description paper, so is doubly important.

**See Fossil of the Week 8/19/09 - Cerithium gainesensis for a definition of "holotype."

Text by Paula Mikkelsen

Collections at PRI...

Workers reading "upper collections" for new compactors on 2/22/2010.

We are excited to report that the reorganization of the PRI collections is now well underway. Earlier this fall we received a National Science Foundation grant to allow us to complete the final step in an ongoing reorganization effort that will help us better care for our collection and make it more accessible for research, education and exhibition purposes.

After a fall of boxing up and moving parts of the collection to temporary homes, we are now beginning the installation of new storage compactors. Once the compactors have been installed, the collections department will begin the work of reoganizing, further curating the collections and filling all of our new empty drawers. Our Director of Collections, Dr. Greg Dietl, is excited about the changes happening in his department and we hope to see increased scientific usage of the collections resulting from this reorganization.

This Weekend at Museum of the Earth...

Fossil of the Week

2/17/10 – Big-Mouthed Barnacle!

Like a gaping fish, the Caribbean Barnacle offers us an apertural view of its shelly plates. However, the photograph is deceiving – this specimen is only 9 mm (less than a half-inch) in diameter at the base. Its name is Balanus caribensis described by Norman Weisbord* in 1966 in PRI’s monographic journal Bulletins of American Paleontology. It is the holotype** (PRI catalog number 27348) from the Playa Grande Formation (Pliocene Era) of Venezuela, so only approximately 4 million years old (pretty young for a fossil). The specimens were collected from a bluff just west of an intersection of two roads near the Playa Grande Yacht Club!

Barnacles are marine crustaceans (related to crabs, shrimp, and lobsters) classified in their own group, the Cirripedia. That word means “curl footed” and reflects the main feature of a living barnacle – its legs are modified into feathery appendages that curl in and out of that gaping aperture to fan the water for edible food particles. The base of a living barnacle is permanently cemented to a hard surface, like a rock, a shell, or (as any boat owner knows) any human construction that sits in seawater. Barnacles first appeared in the fossil record in the Middle Cambrian Period (approximately 500 million years ago), although they are not common until the Neogene (the last 20 million years). This is because barnacles are creatures of high energy environments, like surf zones. In such a place, when the animal dies, it usually falls apart rather than being preserved intact. This makes for lots of pieces, but very few complete fossils.

Barnacles appear in many 18th century books on marine life among mollusks (clams, snails, etc.) – their shells show superficial resemblance even though the animals inside the shells are very different. Barnacles were first fully classified by Charles Darwin who studied them over the course of many years and published a series of monographs on them. “Darwin lore” tells a story relating how central barnacles once were to Darwin’s life: one of Darwin’s children, upon visiting a new playmate for the first time, admired the new friend’s home, but then asked “Where are your Daddy’s barnacles?”

*See Fossil of the Week 11/24/09 - Arca zebra abisiniana for more about the author Norman Weisbord.

**See Fossil of the Week 8/19/09 - Cerithium gainesensis for a definition of "holotype."

Text by Paula Mikkelsen

Science Cabaret with Trisha Smrecak

Trisha Smrecak, PRI's Global Change Project Manager was recently interviewed on WICB radio's Science Cabaret to discuss Marcellus Shale. Take a listen below:

It's Friday Night and I'm feeling alright...

Because it's Charles Darwin's birthday, and nothing says birthday like a party!

We're kicking off the evening with a lecture at 5 p.m. entitled “Constructing Biodiversity: From Darwin to the Cambrian Explosion” with Dr. Douglas Erwin, from the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Cornell University’s Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.

Then we cap off the night with a rousing Birthday Party for Charles Darwin at the Museum of the Earth at 7pm with appetizers, desserts and wine -- featuring a sneak peek of our upcoming exhibit! Tickets $10. Call 607.273.6623 x11 to purchase or purchase them at the door. You can also purchase tickets online here.

Darwin Days 2010 isn't over yet. Tomorrow we have a full day of events planned at the Museum!

Saturday kicks off with our FAMILY DAY: Darwin Family Day from 11 am to 3 pm at Museum of the Earth. Take a voyage through the Museum with fun crafts, experiments, and presentations along the way! Included with Museum admission. Free for members.

LECTURE: “The Arms Race at a Snail's Pace: Coevolution between Predator and Prey in the Fossil Record” with Dr. Greg Dietl, Director of Collections, PRI at noon in the Museum of the Earth’s classroom. Dr. Dietl's lecture has been created with all of our visitors in mind! Lots of fun stuff to see and touch for visitors of all ages. Included with Museum admission. Free for members.

Darwin Days: Day 3

The Paleontological Research Institution and its Museum of the Earth cordially invite you to celebrate Charles Darwin’s Birthday (February 12) during our weeklong celebration of his work and his ideas.

In its 83rd plenary meeting, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. Because of this we have themed our Darwin Days celebration around Biodiversity.

Today's Event:

LECTURE: "Saving all the Pieces: Evolutionary Benchmarks for Conservation" with Dr. Harry Greene, Cornell University, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
at 5 p.m. in CU’s Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.

About Dr. Greene (reprinted from Cornell University News Service:

Harry Greene: A passion for 'icons of danger, life and death'

By Susan S. Lang

Kevin Stearns/University Photography / Professor Harry Greene, one of the world's leading snake experts, handles a black pine snake and a Mexican milk snake.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- More than 40 years of snake hunting have taken Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, to 18 countries on six continents. He has slogged through snake-infested jungles, forests, deserts, rain forests, swamps and savannas, camping for weeks at a time. He has squeezed out prey from the guts of slithering serpents to see what they eat and implanted tiny radio transmitters into their body cavities to track where they go. And although he has handled hundreds, if not thousands, of specimens and has been bitten hundreds of times, only once was it by a venomous snake. And that was when he was an inexperienced 17-year-old.

Greene is one of the world's leading snake experts and a popular Cornell professor who teaches the nonmajors basic course in biology and a course in herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians, for which he keeps a collection of some 50 live snakes. He is also the co-faculty curator of amphibians and reptiles in the Cornell Museum of Vertebrates (a collection of 35,000 specimens) with his wife, Kelly Zamudio, an associate professor in the same department.

Fascinated by reptiles as early as age 7, Greene recalls reading the same books on snakes and lizards over and over again at the 13 different schools he attended while his father was in the U.S. Air Force. It wasn't until Greene was 13, though, that his father took him to a seminar given by a prominent reptile ecologist whom Greene decided he wanted to emulate -- and, indeed, later consulted about a career in biology. Greene went on to publish two scientific papers while he was still in high school and another four in college (to date he has published about 150).

"But I was such a nerd in high school; I never noticed girls," said Greene. But he noticed them in college, so much so that by the end of his sophomore year at Southwest Texas State University, he had a cumulative 1.89 GPA and nearly flunked out. He got serious, however, once he transferred to Texas Wesleyan College, where he lived over a funeral home and drove an ambulance as a full-time job. "I saw a lot of horrible things," said Greene, recalling fatal car crashes and how he had given CPR to a dying girl. On the other hand, he once delivered a baby to an 18-year-old woman.

Ambulance driving was gratifying, however, for it saved lives, he said, possibly even his own. Drafted into the Army just after graduation at the height of the Vietnam War, Greene was one of the few men from his basic training unit who didn't go to Vietnam. Instead, he worked as a medic for two years in Germany, visiting herpetariums and museums whenever he could to study more snakes.

After the Army, Greene earned an M.A. degree at the University of Texas at Arlington (1973), and just as he finished a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Tennessee (1977), he was chosen from 600 applicants to interview at Cornell. His sample lecture, however, was such a "colossal flop" that he didn't get the job. But after 20 years as a professor of integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley, Cornell came around again in 1999, this time offering Greene and his wife, who had recently earned her Ph.D., tenure-track positions in the same department.

Greene has brought to Ithaca a passion for venomous snakes, creatures that many people fear. "With venomous snakes we contemplate violence and mortality without implication of real evil, devoid of anthropocentric traps laid by fur, feathers and facial expressions," Greene wrote in the epilogue to his award-winning book, "Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature" (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997). The 351-page book is a tribute to the beauty and mystique of the reptiles, combining personal essays and natural history with more than 200 stunning photographs.

After seeing so much violence and death in his youth, Greene contemplates venomous snakes as he considers mortality, death and evil. "To me, venomous snakes are personal icons of danger, life and death -- as if in that crystalline moment when the fangs pierce another creature, I might finally understand my own fears and losses," says the bearded and burly herpetologist whose areas of specialty are behavior and ecology, mimicry, conservation and evolutionary biology.

He has dissected the stomachs of hundreds of dead snakes to study their eating behaviors, but his recent work, using radio telemetry to track the same snakes for years at a time, focused on the social behavior of rattlesnakes. He has observed, for example, that females typically fast during winter hibernation and during their subsequent spring pregnancies. After giving birth, although the female hasn't eaten for 10 months, she fasts for another 10 days to protect her vulnerable young until they are ready to strike out on their own.

Greene also works hard to muster more financial and curricular support for descriptive natural history, such as the ecology and behavior of organisms. "People will only care more, pay more and even sacrifice for those things that they understand, so we need to establish biological diversity, ecology, behavior and conservation as among the core components of scientific literacy," stresses Greene in a recent scientific paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (January 2005).

And that's why diversity is such a strong theme in Greene's Biology 109 course, which typically has up to 350 students each fall, many of them freshmen. "Being a professor is pretty much my life," said Greene, who has won three teaching awards. "I love teaching and studying biology. And since I have no children of my own, my students are my kids; I just love watching them go through such incredible growth from their freshman to their senior years."

Fossil of the Week

2/10/10 – Eocene Crassatella Clam

This week’s Fossil of the Week is a bivalved mollusk named Crassatellites trapaquarus, described in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences by Gilbert Harris in 1895, while he was still a Cornell University professor (that is, before he founded PRI). Like the wentletrap snail last week, it is from Smithville, Bastrop County (near Austin), Texas, from the Lower Claiborne Eocene, St. Maurice stage. It was originally part of the Paleontological Museum at Cornell, and is a paratype* (PRI catalog no. 702). Harris brought this collection with him to PRI when he retired and founded PRI in 1932. This specimen was part of a large series of fossils collected by Harris in the late 1890s at various U.S. Gulf Coast localities “as might furnish well preserved basal Eocene fossils.”

This is an extinct member of the bivalve family Crassatellidae, which still has living members today. “Crassatella clams” are marine suspension feeders, filtering food particles (as most clams do) from the water. They do not have siphons, and so burrow in the sand very shallowly, if at all; some species attach to hard surfaces with elastic byssal threads secreted by the foot, while others simply lay epifaunally on the surface of the sea bottom. Predators include octopuses, boring snails, and shell-crushing sharks and rays. Certain anatomical and shell features of crassatella clams suggest that their evolution involved pedomorphosis – a process by which juvenile features are retained by the reproductive adult. The robust shells of one large South Australian species have been traditionally used as hand tools by Aboriginal hunter-gatherers.

*See 10/14/09 - Atrypa aperanta Crickmay for a definition of paratype specimens.

Text by Paula Mikkelsen

Darwin Days: Day 2

The Paleontological Research Institution and its Museum of the Earth cordially invite you to celebrate Charles Darwin’s Birthday (February 12) during our weeklong celebration of his work and his ideas.

In its 83rd plenary meeting, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. Because of this we have themed our Darwin Days celebration around Biodiversity.

Today's Event:

Wednesday, February 10
PANEL DISCUSSION: “Evolution and Biodiversity in the Sea”
at 5 pm in CU’s G10 Biotech

Panelist include:

Dr. Jim Morin, Cornell Univeristy
Dr. Drew Harvell, Cornell Univeristy
Dr. Myra Shulman, Cornell Univeristy
Dr. Paula Mikkelsen, Paleontological Research Institution

Moderator: Dr. Warren Allmon, Director, Paleontological Research Institution and the Hunter R. Rawlings III Professor of Paleontology at Cornell University

Happy Darwin Days!

We would like to invite you to celebrate Charles Darwin’s Birthday (February 12) during our week long celebration of his work and his ideas. This year we have themed our events around biodiversity as 2010 was declared the International Year of Biodiversity by the General Assembly of the United Nations. We'll be hosting a series of panel discussions, lectures, a day of family fun, and an evening birthday party. Check out our schedule below!

Schedule of Events

Tuesday, February 9
PANEL DISCUSSION: “Evolution and Biodiversity on Land”
at 5 pm in CU’s G10 Biotech

Wednesday, February 10
PANEL DISCUSSION: “Evolution and Biodiversity in the Sea”
at 5 pm in CU’s G10 Biotech

Thursday, February 11
LECTURE: "Saving all the Pieces: Evolutionary Benchmarks for Conservation" with Dr. Harry Greene, Cornell University, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
at 5 p.m. in CU’s Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall

Friday, February 12
LECTURE: “Constructing Biodiversity: From Darwin to the Cambrian Explosion” with Dr. Douglas Erwin, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
at 5 pm in CU’s Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall

RECEPTION: A lively birthday gathering with appetizers, desserts and wine featuring a sneak peek of our upcoming exhibit. 7 pm to 9 pm at the Museum of the Earth. Tickets $10. Call 607.273.6623 x11 to purchase or visit us at any of the other Darwin Days events.

Saturday, February 13
FAMILY DAY: Darwin Family Day from 11 am to 3 pm at the Museum of the Earth. Take a voyage through the Museum with fun crafts, experiments, and presentations along the way! Included with Museum admission. Free for members.

LECTURE: “The Arms Race at a Snail's Pace: Coevolution between Predator and Prey in the Fossil Record” with Dr. Greg Dietl, Director of Collections,PRI at noon in the Museum of the Earth’s classroom. Included with Museum admission. Free for members.

Learn more about Darwin Days at www.ithacadarwindays.org

Natural History @ Noon

What are the Most Important Ideas to Understand about the Earth?

Saturday, February 6

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Don Duggan-Haas, Education Research Associate, PRI

Most Americans fail to understand even the most basic Earth system science. Why don’t most Americans understand these ideas, in spite of being taught them several times throughout their years of schooling? One reason is that we typically teach too much without identifying what are the most important concepts to understand. What if we only taught five things in Earth science, but taught them really, really deeply? Don Duggan-Haas suggests five big ideas that everyone ought to understand about the Earth.

Fossil of the Week

2/3/10 – A Rib-less Wentletrap

This week’s Fossil of the Week is a tiny snail, barely a quarter of an inch long. It is Acirsa (Acirsella) henryleai, named by PRI’s second director Katherine Van Winkle Palmer in 1928. This is the holotype* specimen (PRI 350) from the Middle Eocene (Lower Claiborne Group, Upper Queen City Formation, approximately 45 million years old) of Smithville, Bastrop County (near Austin), Texas. The specimens were from the south bank of Colorado River, where Gazley Creek joins it, from a sand sample on the eastern bank of the creek. This was one of the most common species at that site.

Although I am familiar with most gastropod families, this one surprised me – it is a member of the family Epitoniidae, commonly known as the wentletraps. Wentletraps are very popular with shell collectors. Most of them are small (less than 2 inches long), porcellaneous white, and are adorned with very pretty “axial” (parallel with the shell’s long axis) ribs or frills called “costae” – the word “wentletrap” comes for Dutch-German for “spiral staircase,” which refers to these little “steps” around and around the shell. This fossil Acirsa has no trace of these, which made me wonder “What makes this a wentletrap?”

Katherine Palmer and her coauthor on the original paper (W. Armstrong Price, in Journal of Paleontology) gave no good answer to this. [Their division of labor here is interesting – Price saw and described the locality, whereas Palmer described the shells.] Palmer wrote that her new species was very close to the species Acirsa elegans, named by Henry Lea in 1841. She even named her new species after Lea (henryleai is a patronym**) and illustrated Lea’s species next to her new one, to allow comparison. So we must look elsewhere for why this is a wentletrap. A quick Google search shows me that there are many living Acirsa species, none of which have the costae so characteristic of other Epitoniidae. What defines the family is the soft anatomy inside the hard shells of the snails, which is distinct and adapted for their specialized lifestyle. Wentletraps are predators or parasites on Cnidaria – sea anemones and corals – which they pierce using a needle-like tooth to suck out the bodily fluids. So here’s a good example of a fossil species (without anatomy) being classified in a family based on anatomy, on the basis of its external resemblance to a species living today. Paleontologists frequently do this, as do neontologists (scientists who study living organisms) when a Recent snail is known only from its shell (this also happens frequently). It’s not cheating – it’s extrapolation based on best evidence.

Katherine Palmer was a young Ph.D. at the time of this paper’s publication. She received her degree in 1924 from Cornell, where she studied under Gilbert Harris. She married another Cornell professor, Ephraim Palmer, in 1924, and stayed in Ithaca. As the paper indicates, she never saw the collecting site from which she studied and named these tiny fossils. There were five other new species in this material – they were named adamsi, juliae, and pricei (after the three collectors, John Adams, Julia Gardner, and Armstrong Price), gazleyensis (after Gazley Creek), and harrisi (after Gilbert Harris). Dr. Palmer liked patronyms! Katherine Palmer was appointed Director of PRI, succeeding her mentor Harris, in 1952.

*See Fossil of the Week 8/19/09 - Cerithium gainesensis for a definition of "holotype."

**See Fossil of the Week 1/20/10 – Texas Scallop for a definition of “patronym.”

Text by Paula Mikkelsen

February's Featured Events

We would like to invite you to celebrate Charles Darwin’s Birthday (February 12) during our weeklong celebration of his work and his ideas. This year we have themed our events around biodiversity as 2010 was declared the International Year of Biodiversity by the General Assembly of the United Nations. We'll be hosting a series of panel discussions, lectures, a day of family fun, and an evening birthday party. Check out our schedule below!

Schedule of Events

Tuesday, February 9
PANEL DISCUSSION: “Evolution and Biodiversity on Land”
at 5 pm in Cornell’s G10 Biotech

Wednesday, February 10
PANEL DISCUSSION: “Evolution and Biodiversity in the Sea”
at 5 pm in Cornell’s G10 Biotech

Thursday, February 11
LECTURE: "Saving all the Pieces: Evolutionary Benchmarks for Conservation" with Dr. Harry Greene, Cornell University, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
at 5 p.m. in Cornell’s Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall

Friday, February 12
LECTURE: “Constructing Biodiversity: From Darwin to the Cambrian Explosion” with Dr. Douglas Erwin, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
at 5 pm in Cornell’s Lewis Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall

RECEPTION: A lively birthday gathering with appetizers, desserts and wine featuring a sneak peek of our upcoming exhibit. 7 pm to 9 pm at the Museum of the Earth. Tickets $10. To purchase tickets call 607.273.6623 x11, click here, or visit us at any of the other Darwin Days events.

Saturday, February 13
FAMILY DAY: Darwin Family Day from 11 am to 3 pm at the Museum of the Earth. Take a voyage through the Museum with fun crafts, experiments, and presentations along the way! Included with Museum admission. Free for members.

LECTURE: “The Arms Race at a Snail's Pace: Coevolution between Predator and Prey in the Fossil Record” with Dr. Greg Dietl, Director of Collections, PRI at noon in the Museum of the Earth’s classroom. Included with Museum admission. Free for members.

Learn more about Darwin Days at www.ithacadarwindays.org

Natural History at Noon Series

Saturday, February 6
"What are the Most Important Ideas to Understand about the Earth?" with Don Duggan-Haas, Education Research Associate, PRI

Saturday, February 13
"The Arms Race at a Snail's Pace: Coevolution between Predator and Prey in the Fossil Record" with Dr. Greg Dietl, Director of Collections, PRI

Saturday, February 20
"From Meat to Beet: Earth’s First Herbivores and the Evolution of the Modern World" with Dr. Richard Kissel, Director of Teacher Programs, PRI

Winter Recess 2010
Ithaca's Winter Recess celebrates public school teachers and school employees with entertainment, activities, family fun and discounts throughout the community. Visit our website for a listing of the special programming we'll be offering. For more information on Ithaca's Winter Recess and to see what other events are happening in the area, visit www.ithacalovesteachers.com.

Museum admission is half-price all week for teachers with a VIT pass and for their guests with a Teacher's Pet pass.

Winter Free Days
The Museum of the Earth will be offering three days of free admission this winter. Free days are part of our Community Accessibility Program (CAP). The CAP was developed to ensure that those of limited resources and those with special needs have access to Museum exhibits and programming.

Free Days:

• Sunday, January 17
• Sunday, February 21
• Sunday, March 21