From Iowa to Ireland

As a museum volunteer, I’ve been able to do all kinds of things: clean mammoth bones caked in dirt thousands of years old (more fun than it sounds), lead tours about Iowa’s natural past, teach children about topics like astronomy and dinosaurs, and slowly collect a colorful cornucopia of Rusty shirts. Unfortunately, none of these things can be done on my semester abroad in Ireland, although I did pack a Rusty shirt—however, my semester in Ireland has given me a fantastic opportunity to learn about another country’s past, both natural and archaeological.

At first glance, Iowa and Ireland don’t look alike at all.  After all, Iowa has rolling hills and farmland, bounded by two rivers, but otherwise mostly landlocked; Ireland is a perpetually green island ringed with pebbled beaches and craggy mountains.  But Ireland was once underwater, like Iowa, and a trip to the Ulster Museum in Belfast reveals Ireland’s underwater past: like Iowa, Ireland was home to corals and crinoids, prehistoric cephalopods and ammonites. The water gave way to a more arid climate, and Ireland’s watery past ended up in marine fossils. 

But Ireland was once covered in glaciers, too; it’s hard to believe that a country so green and vibrant now could have once been barren and icy, but just as Iowa was once glacial, so too was Ireland. When the glaciers receded around ten thousand years ago, they changed Ireland’s landscape – where the glaciers gave Iowa its gently rolling hills, it gave Ireland some of its craggiest mountains and shorelines. And just as I teach children about Rusty, who couldn’t survive when the ice melted, Ireland is home to its own Rusty – this giant deer, for example, who was the largest deer to ever have lived, and went extinct around ten thousand years ago. (Ireland was home to plenty of other arctic animals as well, not all of which survive today.)

It’s easy to think that because Iowa and Ireland – or any two places on the globe – are far away, home to different landscapes and people, that they’re profoundly different places, now and forever. But the beauty of the natural world is that it’s always there, no matter where you are; we’re always surrounded by reminders of what came before, and what surrounds us now.

Sometimes those reminders take different forms: a volcano that erupted some 50 million years ago left Ireland’s north coast with a ‘pavement’ of forty thousand interlocking basalt columns, otherwise known as ‘the Giant’s Causeway.’ If you can keep yourself from slipping on wet stone, you can chart a path across the columns, which have withstood the test of time, a monument from a long ago past.

 

 

But elsewhere, the natural world I encounter in Ireland is similar to what I know best - what I get to work with at the museum. The Ulster Museum, for example, is home to plenty of birds, some of which live in Ireland permanently and some of which migrate throughout the year—similar to Hageboeck Hall of Birds, which is also home to birds native, and not native, to our state.  The Ulster Museum is also home to clay pots made by Ireland’s first settlers, and if you placed those pots next to the ones in Iowa Hall, only a trained archaeologist could tell you which came from where.  

Museums are there to tell us about places different from our own: a trip through Iowa Hall is, after all, a trip through a world long gone. But natural history is always with us, and as my travels in Ireland have proven, sometimes natural history is more universal than you think. 

 
-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian