DINO-mite Time at Night at the Museum!

This Friday, seventeen children brave a dreary Iowa evening to come to the museum and dig for dinosaurs, at the last Night at the Museum for 2012.  In Iowa Hall, they race each other across the museum (while wearing “dinosaur feet” slippers) and wait for the others to arrive. Some of them know quite a bit about dinosaurs already – able to name the difference between a Tyrannosaurus rex, a velociraptor, a steogosaurus – others (like me) know comparatively little. 

After the races subsist and pizza and juice devoured in Bird Hall, the children begin the first dinosaur related activity – becoming miniature paleontologists. We take a moment to talk about what a paleontologist does: they dig up prehistoric animals, like fossils or woolly mammoths, out in the field, then study them in their labs.  Most of all, we talk about why a paleontologist does their job: why dig up old animals when there’s so much new to explore? Why take the time to carefully retrieve the bones from the wild, clean them off with care, run tests on them and make models for museums?

Each child gets a plate covered in sand and fossils – they have to use a plastic spoon to carefully retrieve their fossil from the sand. Some children dig right in, pounding the sand to try and find their fossil, but others, in true paleontologist form, take more time, scraping past the layers of dust to come up with a dinosaur head (albeit plastic).  Like real paleontologists, they want to know what kind of dinosaur they have – sure, the dinosaurs have been in the sand (although only for a day or two, not millions of years), but that doesn’t mean the children can’t learn from them.  Real bones found in the wild, and even their plastic counterparts, have much to tell us about an Earth that’s radically different from today. We’ll never get to see it in our lifetimes, but we can always make a good guess, which is what paleontology is about.

Later on – after trips through Bird and Mammal Hall, as per tradition – the children come back to the discovery hub to try their hand at fashioning their own dinosaurs.  The floor covered in all kinds of craft materials, from pipe cleaners to plastic jewels to paper and scissors, the children grab everything they can in a minute and then set to fashioning their own dinosaurs.  Some of them are crafty; others aim for a basic dinosaur that can “get the job done.” All of them twist their pipecleaners and add their clothespins, trying to make the best dinosaurs possible.  (Children are infinitely better at these kinds of things – my dinosaur is only a dinosaur if you tilt your head to the left and squint; my dinosaur will not be roaming the wild anytime soon.) 

The amount of children at Friday’s Night at the Museum points to our never-ending fascination with dinosaurs – and the world of the dinosaurs by proxy.  One child asks why the dinosaurs went extinct, and others name off the theories: a volcano, an asteroid, disease, the food chain bottoming out.  Yet the truth is that we’ll never actually know.  When so much of science and history are based on facts – certain chemicals do certain things when mixed together, or certain events happened at one particular time and place – the dinosaurs, and their faraway, forest world, elude us, no matter how much we uncover.  After all, we only have the bones they left behind, and the rest is guesswork: but it’s fascinating guesswork nonetheless.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Meskwaki- An Important Piece of Iowa's History

When we think of natural history, we tend to imagine fossils and fish, animals with ferocious teeth or giant claws, old bones and shark teeth. I think of Rusty and his friends – the mastodon, the woolly mammoth – and the Devonian section. 

But natural history is more than just the history of extinct animals – it’s a way to catalogue our world, even as it changes.  At the tail end of the Iowa Hall gallery – past the prehistoric fish, the swampy jungle, and Rusty himself – you’ll find a diorama of a Meskwaki settlement, circa 1850, or right after Iowa became a state.  It’s an important marker of Iowa’s past, and filled with interesting artifacts to explore.

 

In the main diorama, an old man teaches a young boy how to carve wood – they sit inside a winter lodge, which the Meskwaki built every winter, using a wooden frame and a covering made of dried cattails.  Nearby, a woman makes a dye (although it looks like she’s cooking).  Her cotton dress, and the wool blanket inside the lodge, point to ongoing trade with settlers – after the first forays of Marquette and Joliet, the first explorers to set foot on Iowa soil, trade among Native Americans and settlers was inevitable. 

Yet I find the more interesting artifacts in the nearby cases.  Beaded artwork abounds – the beads were obtained via trading, but the artwork itself is entirely Meskwaki.  Bows and arrows – even toy arrows for young boys to practice with – and children’s toys cover the bottom of the gallery. And perhaps the most interesting artifact is the necklace made of bear claws and fur.  Only worn by tribal leaders, the bear claw necklace is made from twenty to thirty bear claws, but the claws have to come from a specific paw, so that each bear claw necklace comes from four or five bears.

It’s easy to get distracted by Rusty and Dunky, the vast dioramas that seem to take us to another time – sometimes, the Meskwaki exhibit seems like yesterday in comparison. But what happened yesterday is just as important as what happened last week, or three weeks ago, or three million weeks ago. Iowa’s history is both prehistoric and historic – made up of both the fossils and geodes we unearth from the soil, and the people who came to live here before us, who left traces of their life behind, so we might someday know about who walked in our footsteps.  Shells and arrowheads, projectile points and milling stones: just as fossils and bones tell us about the animals who prowled around, so too do these artifacts.

After all, we weren’t the first ones to set up shop in Iowa. Who wouldn’t want to know about those who came before? That’s what the museum is for.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

How to Stump a Set of Scientists

To say we were stumped when a visitor stopped by with this object on Friday would be an understatement.  As you can see from the picture, it’s mostly spherical, about 5½” in diameter, and shiny, as if its been polished.  You can’t tell this from the picture, but it’s pretty lightweight, and the impression you get if you pick it up is that it’s hollow.  It was found floating in the Des Moines River about 60 years ago, and the owner stumped museum staff with it then as well.  This time, he asked staff at the UI Paleontology Repository and the Museum of Natural History before someone at the Office of the State Archaeologist finally solved the puzzle. 

We think this is an enterolith, or intestinal stone, presumably from a horse (our research suggests that they are common in horses, but found in some other animals too).  Enteroliths are a lot like gallstones or kidney stones in people, and also something like pearls in oysters.  They form in a horse’s intestines when the chemical conditions are right.  Most enteroliths seem to be formed of a mineral called struvite (ammonium magnesium phosphate), which forms crystals in concentric rings around some starting “seed” (as a pearl does around something like a grain of sand).  Horses seem to get them when they’re eating relatively high concentrations of protein (for example from alfalfa), which generates ammonium ions, and magnesium.  So enteroliths are more common in some places than others because the minerals in soil and water are different and because common food sources are different.  Small enteroliths can be passed naturally, but large ones need to be removed surgically.  According to an equine vet we asked about this, they are often much larger than this one, and they’re usually quite solid and heavy—they are, after all, stones!  That means we haven’t quite solved the mystery of this enterolith (if that’s what it is), because it feels light and hollow.  We wonder whether the mineral crystals inside the enterolith could have been dissolved by immersion in the river, leaving the hard shell… and if any chemists, veterinarians, or taphonomists out there want to do this experiment, we look forward to hearing what you find.

-Written by MNH Associate Director Trina Roberts
 

Examples of other enteroliths

A Visit to Undersea Iowa

A trip through Iowa Hall is very much a trip through Iowa’s past – step in the galleries and you’ll see Iowa before it became farmland, before highways and roads began to criss-cross the state, before Iowa City was even a city at all. 

After many, many trips through Iowa Hall myself, I’ve decided that some exhibits in the gallery are easier to fathom than others.  We know of the Native Americans who used to live on the land, before settlers came; we can even believe that Rusty, tall and large as he is, used to live in an Iowa covered by glaciers.  (After all, sometimes the winter feels like the Ice Age.) But it’s harder to believe that Iowa was once a tropical swampland, and that it was once underwater, harder still.

The Devonian exhibit is the first in Iowa Hall, and it’s a true glimpse into an Iowa that’s long gone: Iowa from 360 million years ago, covered in shallow, sunny waters, filled with ancient cephalopods and armored fish? It’s true.

The armored fish in question would be Dunky – short for Dunkleosteus – a prehistoric fish who used to rule the seas. We think sharks today are scary, but a shark would have paled in comparison to Dunky (there is a shark in the Devonian exhibit, but it’s far smaller), who as an adult would have been two stories tall and the length of a school bus.  He could open his jaw as wide as it would go, and it would create so much pressure that anything in the vicinity would have been sucked in – this even included other fish.

Trilobites, the first animals to develop eyes, were around in this period, too – although they went extinct at the end of the Devonian, the exhibit is home to many – as are ammonites, which also went extinct.  Ammonites, which look similar to cephalopods, had huge, hollow shells, and the ammonite could slide its body in and out, controlling its buoyancy and position in the water.  If it’s hard to believe these animals really existed, it’s harder to believe they once lived in Iowa, a place very much out of water – but the fossils never lie. 

Dunky and the trilobites aren’t the only things in the exhibit – there are plenty of animals that today you might find on coasts or coral reefs. Huge expanses of coral, like what today you might find in Australia, cover the exhibit, as they would have covered the ocean floor (coral, interestingly enough, is actually an animal).  My favorite, however, would have to be the crinoids, or sea lilies.  They look like underwater flowers, but are actually delicate animals that use the ocean currents to catch small, microscopic organisms to eat.

But it’s this varied, sometimes unbelievable history that makes Iowa’s past interesting – it’s the idea that Iowa hasn’t always been farmland and rolling hills, but instead a glacial paradise, a quasi-rainforest, or a shallow sea.  And that’s why, even after countless trips, Iowa Hall is still a fascinating place – we’ll never get to see Iowa as anything but prairie and farmland, but step through Iowa Hall and you’ll get amazingly close.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

A Night of Fun at Creepy Campus Crawl

For weeks, the word – or words – of the day have been “Creepy Campus Crawl,” the Halloween event that the museum puts on every year.  This year’s theme is Nintendo, and the museum is flush with talk of Mario and Luigi, Pokemon and Zelda, stations and activities.  Just as they have every year, children start to pour in right at 6:30, dressed as characters from Nintendo, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, or whatever character they can dream up.  (One child comes dressed as a vampire bat.)

 In the front lobby, they meet some of the most classic Nintendo characters - entering a raffle with the Ice Climbers, throwing fireballs with Mario and Luigi, meeting Princess Peach.  Packing peanuts – the snow that the Ice Climbers have to climb – litter the floor, to be tracked all around the gallery, but nobody seems to mind.  Today, the museum is hardly the Museum: it’s instead a place of characters and costumes and candy, and everybody knows it.

When they leave the front lobby, the children make their own Pokemon in the Devonian and Pennsylvanian, aided by the Pokemon trainers, who have put together an impressive array of characters.  Although the Ice Climbers might not be familiar to all children, Pokemon is hard to miss.  Elbowing each other for room at the tables, the children color in their own Pokemon cards – some very detailed, some a quick dash - and then hand them to their parents to carry.

 

In the Meskwaki area, decorated with fluffy clouds to represent the world of Kid Icarus, the children wrap aluminum foil around paper plates to make mirror shields, assisted by Palutena and Medusa, the main goddesses from the game.  When they finish, Pit, the game’s hero, shines a flashlight on the shield to make it shine, and the children head to the Ecology section to build rockets with the Pikmin.   

There’s more fun to be had downstairs – where the Geoscience department has set up shop – and in Bird and Mammal Halls – where you can find rupees with Zelda and play skeeball with the cast of Earthbound – but no matter where you decide to go, there’s always something to do.  Each child leaves with an assortment of crafts – shields, Pokemon, rockets – and an evening well-spent.  And since Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year, it’s only the start of an extravaganza.

 

Halloween is that rare holiday where, for a few hours, you can pretend to be someone else.  No matter the strength of the disguise – after all, the scary looking ghoul is always a child underneath – it’s about the fun of playing pretend, of dressing up, of trick-or-treating and pumpkins and ghosts.  For a few hours, you can climb with the Ice Climbers or write yourself into the Legend of Zelda; it only happens once a year, which makes it all the more worthwhile.  

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Night at the Museum Visits Space!

It’s a cloudy night in Iowa City, but that’s not stopping this Friday’s Night at the Museum, which focuses on the night sky and stars.  The usual standbys are on the schedule – pizza, Hageboeck Hall of Birds and Mammal Hall in the dark – but today’s program features a visit from the Cedar Amateur Astronomers, who’ve brought their telescopes all the way from Mount Vernon and set up shop on the Pentacrest.

Before there’s any stargazing, however, the astronomers have lots to teach – people have been gazing at the stars for hundreds of years, all of them wondering what was out there.  The children learn of astronomers of old times – Eratosthenes, Ptolemy – who thought the planets revolved around the sun.  They learn of astronomers of (slightly) more recent times – Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler – who built telescopes to see farther into the sky.   (The children play with cardboard telescopes for several minutes, looking at everything they can.) It’s easy to think of astronomy as unfixed, unchanging, that for all of history people have looked out onto the stars and come to the same conclusion, but our conceptions of astronomy are constantly changing, as we learn more about the moon and the sun, the constellations and the brightest of stars. 

After a jaunt through Mammal Hall and some snacks in the Biosphere Discovery Hub, the children don their fall jackets and head outside to the Pentacrest, where the astronomers have set up two telescopes.  It’s cloudy, so there aren’t many stars; instead, the children use the telescopes to look right into the Old Capitol.  (Still, some of them find Venus, shouting, “It’s Venus!” and “Hi, Venus!” as they wait.) Not all of them have used telescopes before, and they come back for second and third looks, captivated by the view the telescope gives them – they’ve all seen the Old Capitol before, but not this way.

As soon as everyone’s back in the auditorium, the astronomers load a computer program that’ll let the children see the stars without clouds.  Once they understand what they’re seeing, the children want to see everything – they want to see the stars in all the seasons, from every angle.  The computer program also maps lines on top of the constellations – sometimes the constellations are hard to pick out, composed of bright stars and some very dim ones – and once the astronomers show this feature to the children, they’re hooked.  It’s nature’s very own game of connect the dots, and who can pass that up? They want to see the Big Dipper, the Northern Star, Sagittarius and Gemini, the bear and the fish; they even want to see Andromeda, the closest galaxy to ours.

There’s something about the stars that’s impossible to ignore – why else have we looked at them for so long? We love mysteries – how we love the thrill of the unexplainable – but what’s more, we love to solve them.  Yet the night sky is that one mystery that can’t be solved.  We’re finding clues, making patterns, but the real answer is forever hidden.  And maybe that’s okay. 

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Ethnographic Collection

When it comes to the museum’s collections, Rusty tends to steal the show.  He’s always the first animal we think of, followed by the other animals and birds scattered across the museum galleries: when people ask me what’s really at the museum, I always tell them about the walruses in Mammal Hall, or Dunky, the Devonian age fish in Iowa Hall (after Rusty, of course).

But if you take a trip around Iowa Hall, you’ll find a whole host of other artifacts in the archaeology section – clay pots, beaded jewelry, and who could forget the bear claw necklace? 

And although we’ve written of the birds and animals in museum storage, there are also plenty of ethnographic items in the museum vault, right next to Hornaday’s birds.  Open up the white drawers and you’ll find items from all kinds of far-flung places: beaded vests, ceremonial objects, children’s playthings.  They come from multiple continents – places hard to get to, or hardly there at all – and decades long gone.  Most of all, they come from cultures I’ve never seen and people I’ve never met: looking in the drawers is looking at another place and time.  And wherever, whenever, the item comes from, it’s always somewhere very different from downtown Iowa City or its surrounding corn (and soybean) fields. 

We put a lot of stock in the written word: at museums, I always search for the paragraph or two of explanation accompanying an exhibit, sometimes before I’ve even glanced at the objects.  And the shelves of memoirs and autobiographies at the local bookstore speak to our faith in the written records people leave behind. But these artifacts in the museum vault have no convenient blurbs, no letters or diary entries attached to them – maybe a tag indicating where and when they come from, but not much more.  They speak for themselves, and invite us to fill in the blanks.  Who sewed all those beads? Who carved that arrow? Who really used that toy? And why?

Even if we research and learn more about the artifacts – the ethnographic items in the main gallery, for example, all have a sentence or two of explanation – the questions still stand.  After all, every item in the collections has its own fascinating, and perhaps unfathomable, history.  Each item’s been passed from person to person, hand to hand, over the course of months or years, until it makes its way to our collections, so that you or I can wonder where it came from, and try our hands at filling in the blanks.

 

(And that applies to the rest of the collections, too: where’d those walruses really come from?)

 

 

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Insects are invading the museum!

It’s yet another Friday night at the museum – rather, it’s another Night at the Museum, this one bug themed.  Children gather in the front of Iowa Hall, excited to spend an evening talking about the creepy, crawling critters that skitter across kitchen floors and conquer their backyards.  Previous programs have focused on things like penguins and the Galapagos Islands – fascinating in their own way, but not something you’ll see at home.  By contrast, bugs are everywhere, and the children’s excitement is palpable.

Although we have several bug activities planned – creating a “bug jar,” for example – tonight’s program features a presentation from the Iowa State University’s Insect Zoo.  After pizza and punch, the children head to the Biosphere Discovery Hub, where two entomologists have filled an entire table with bug jars and butterfly cases. 

They first bring out mealworms – which flip if you tap their heads accordingly – but the real action starts with the beetles.  Small, black, and mobile, the beetles bounce around the tables as the children try to identify the three parts to an insect: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen.  Some of the beetles crawl along outstretched fingers, jumping from hand to hand and occasionally trying to make a dive to the ground.

After the beetles come hissing cockroaches; these cockroaches are far bigger than the ones you might see at home, about the length of a pinky finger, and of course, they hiss.  Cockroaches, the children learn, are decomposers – they eat things that are rotting, giving them a more important role in the ecosystem than at first glance.  The cockroaches zoom around the tables.  The children try tapping their shells so they can move faster – sometimes they don’t budge, other times they nearly fall off the table.

We often see cockroaches—or other bugs—as unruly pests, and nothing more: the moment we see them scurrying around the kitchen, we reach for the kitchen and squelch it.  The Insect Zoo, by contrast, gives the children a chance to see them up close, to really investigate its antennae, or the pattern of its shell.  Every animal, every creature, is intriguing and intricate, but these little things get overlooked in everyday life, in the rush of getting the bug out of the kitchen.  Tonight, however, there’s no squelching.

When the entomologists pass out 
millipedes, the children look to see how the thin, orange legs—all 300 or 400 of them—propel the millipede around an outstretched finger, and how the millipede attaches itself, like Velcro, to whatever surface.  Later on, the children learn about a ‘walking stick,’ another decomposing insect.  One of the presenters holds a walking stick in her outstretched hand, and it falls from her hand at least five times – but it keeps on walking anyways.  The children look at a praying mantis in a glass jar, and come up to the front table to look at butterflies in cases.

But it’s the tarantula that takes the cake.  Cockroaches and beetles are everywhere, but it’s not every day you can touch a tarantula.  

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Nature's Small Wonders Pack a Vibrant Punch!

By Catherine Babikian

Take a look around Mammal or Hageboeck Hall of Birds and you’ll find a cornucopia of fascinating animals, from little sparrows and finches to impressive walruses and bison.  Although these halls are home to plenty of animals, even more reside in museum storage.  The Museum of Natural History has far more animals in its possession than it has room for display – the attic of Macbride Hall is teeming with beautiful animals from all over the world.

Many of these animals were collected by William Temple Hornaday and given to the museum after his death.  A zoologist and graduate of Iowa State University, Hornaday traveled far and wide to collect animals – the deserts and beaches of Australia and the jungles of New Zealand and Malaysia among them.  His birds are splashed with bright blues, deep crimson reds, and hints of green and purple, a real change from the grays and whites of Iowa birds.  Hornaday might not have thought of it this way, but he was collecting colors and patterns as much as he was collecting birds.

 

In 1886, at the height of westward expansion, Hornaday began to collect buffalo from Montana: he expected that buffalo would be extinct by 1900, and wanted to collect specimens for future generations.  The impending extinction of the buffalo pained him, and he became an ardent conservationist.  He was friends with Teddy Roosevelt – Roosevelt once gave Hornaday a jaguar skull he’d shot, which the museum has in its collections – and together they formed the American Bison Society. 

For Hornaday, museums weren’t just places to deposit old things; they were places for the future to learn about the past, even if the past was long gone.  Although buffalo are not extinct today, Hornaday collected them so that we would still know our past – the Museum of Natural History does the same thing. Although not every animal in the museum’s collections is on display, it still reminds us of another place, or another time. 

My favorite birds are a set of hummingbirds collected by Hornaday – we don’t know where they’re from, but they sure are beautiful! Sometimes you don’t have to be a walrus or a bison – or even a giant sloth named Rusty – to be breathtaking.  Sometimes the smallest things are worth the most notice.  Hornaday surely knew it.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian

Welcome Back!

Welcome back students! It’s great to see so many faces back on campus. I hope everyone had a wonderful and relaxing summer break! This semester at the Museum of Natural History is full of exciting opportunities for students and faculty. 

Are you interested in volunteering or need to complete a service learning requirement? Well, the museum is the place for you! We provide opportunities for students to work in the gift shop and education department. You can also help out with children’s programming, museum tours, and public outreach – like the UI Homecoming Parade, FRY Fest, Creepy Campus Crawl, and more! For more information about volunteer, please contact Ashlee Gloede, Assistant Education and Outreach Coordinator – ashlee-gloede@uiowa.edu. Also check out our booth at the UI Volunteer Fair on Wednesday August 29^th from 11am-3pm in the IMU.

If you are not interested in volunteering, that’s okay too. The museum offers a wide range from programs from children’s birthday parties to adult lectures. And it’s also a fun place to hang out between classes. We are open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 10am-5pm, Thursdays 10am-8pm, and Sundays 1pm-5pm. For more information about the museum, please call 319-335-0606 or email uimnh@uiowa.edu. This week only we will be open until 8pm on Wednesday! Stop by and meet Rusty out Giant Ground Sloth.

Over the summer, the museum became involved with a mammoth excavation in Southern Iowa. For the past two years John and the family have kept the discovery of the mammoth relatively quiet, but they recently decided to enlist the help of UI experts to aid in the excavation.  So far more than thirty bones have been recovered, including an impressive femur, multiple ribs and vertebrae and a few toe bones. We will be visiting the site periodically throughout the semester, so if you are interested in volunteering at a dig please contact Sarah Horgen – sarah-horgen@uiowa.edu – for more information. I would highly recommend this once in a life time opportunity! 

There are many organizations and groups to join on campus, and sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming. Tomorrow is the Student Organization Fair at Hubbard Park from 11am-3pm., which you can meet and talk with the different organizations on campus. A great organization to join is the Campus Museum Collective. This organization is dedicated to strengthening the position of campus museums within the University community. It seeks to assist campus museums in efforts of outreach, while fostering a robust collective of individuals committed to the advancement of these important institutions. If you are interested in joining, please email iowa.cmc@gmail.com to get more information. 

Have a wonderful semester and remember to stop by the museum!

-Written by Assistant Education Coordinator Ashlee Gloede

Hoover’s Hometown Days

Public outreach is very important for the museum. Each year the museum’s education staff visits a variety of places throughout the entire state of Iowa to promote the museum, its programs, its collections, and more.

 

A few weeks ago (August 3 and 4), West Branch celebrated Hoover’s Hometown Days.  This is an annual celebration held at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. The weekend is filled with live entertainment, Hooverball competitions, birthday cake, and over 70 exhibitors and vendors. And it’s not Hoover’s Hometown Days without extreme heat! Well this year we were thrown for a loop; not only was it extremely hot but we also got to experience 50+ miles an hour wind, lightning strikes, and a torrential downpour.  But I am getting ahead of myself!

We had a booth at Hoover’s Hometown Days to promote and spread the news about the museum’s upcoming programs and exhibits. Many families stopped by our booth to tell us how much they enjoy visiting our museum. Our favorite thing to hear! We were also able to inspire new families to visit the museum. Throughout the morning the weather seemed to be getting muggier and muggier, and the sky was starting to turn a dark shade of blue (which is never a good sign). Moments later, park rangers began announcing the upcoming forecast of 50 miles an hour wind and rain. We quickly began to pack up all our promotional materials and replicas. We were told this would be a quick storm, so we left everything inside our tent. 

As soon as all our things were packed away, the rain started. The closest shelter we could find was on the porch of the Superintendent’s office.  The wind and rain really started to pick up. And with one huge gust of wind our tent along with the OSA’s tent were picked up and blown several feet away. Since the storm had no intention of stopping, all we could do was stand on the porch, soaking wet, watching the horrible storm blow through Hoover’s Hometown Days. 

Luckily no one was hurt by this storm and 

we will never forget Hoover’s Hometown Days 2012!

-Written by Assistant Education Coordinator Ashlee Gloede

Lion King at the Museum!

Did you know that Iowa City once had a zoo? Indeed, City Park used to have a zoo, City Park Zoo. Not much is known about the zoo, but it did have a variety of animals: chickens, monkeys, rabbits, raccoons, bears, and of course, the lions.  A young girl who frequented the zoo in the 1930’s remembered taking old bread to feed the animals.  With her back turned to the lion cage, she remembered one lion lunging at the bars, rattling the cage, and scaring her group.  She also remembered that if she left the windows open in her house on a summer night, she could hear the lions roaring in the distance – not something you hear every day in the city or in Iowa. 

 

 In the 1920’s Harry Bremer, Iowa City resident, brought two lions to the United States from Africa. For a short time, Mr. Bremer actually kept the lions in the carriage house on his property at 1036 Woodlawn Avenue, less than 1 mile away from Macbride Hall.  Inside the carriage house, there is still evidence of the lions; there are metal posts in the ground where the pair were likely chained.  Later, Mr. Bremer donated the lions to the City Park Zoo.

   What happened to the lions? The male lion unfortunately died in the extremely hot weather of July 1931.  He was only 2 ½ years old.  This explains why he does not yet have a full mane.  After his death, the male lion was brought to the Museum of Natural History. The female lion lived in the City Park Zoo well beyond the death of her companion.  She died in February of 1939 and was then donated to the Museum of Natural History where she was reunited with her companion. 

These two lions are a huge part of the museum’s history, as well as the history of Iowa City and its residents. In celebrating this history, the museum is hosting a free program for children and families on Saturday August 11^th from 5pm-8pm. Families can lead an African expedition through the museum, tell jokes with our hyena, and make lion crafts! Following the program, the Summer of the Arts Free Movies Series will present Disney’s “The Lion King.”

In addition to the museum’s program, the Johnson County Historical Society and Hills Bank are hosting a Barn Tour on Saturday August 11^th. The group will be exploring urban barns in Iowa City including the barn were the lions once lived. These barns were either built in the city as a carriage house/barn or have become absorbed by the city as it has expanded. Pre-registration is required. Visit the Johnson County Historical Society’s website for more information - http://www.johnsoncountyhistory.org/

-Written by Assistant Education Coordinator Ashlee Gloede

Thomas Macbride

Thomas Macbride

This week celebrates Thomas Macbride’s 164^th birthday! For you frequent museum goers you might recognize his last name. Like many influential professors and researchers in the UI’s history, Macbride Hall was named in honor of Thomas Macbride in 1934. The building was originally called Hall of Natural Science and was constructed in 1904.  

 

 

Botanical specimens collected by Macbride

July 31^st is a day of celebration and remembrance of Thomas Macbride. He was a highly accomplished individual. He joined the University of Iowa in 1878, and in five years began teaching botany.  He became the head of the Department of Botany in 1902. He had a huge love and passion for the outdoors and its preservation. He is known as the father of Iowa conservation for his role in forming the state park system (Lake Macbride State Park was also named after Thomas Macbride for his continual dedication to botany and The University of Iowa). 

 

Macbride (center) with his peers

  

Thomas Macbride and his fellow botanist, Bohumil Shimek, were major contributions to the study of botany, as well as the Museum of Natural History’s botanical holdings. 

Learn more about Thomas Macbride in the Iowa Hall Lobby

Botany of Shakespeare

-Written by Assistant Education Coordinator Ashlee Gloede

National Park and Recreation Month

July is the perfect time for outdoor exploration (well, if you can stand the heat!). Local and national recreation areas and parks are great places to start your summer of adventure. 

In 1985 the National Recreation and Park Association designated July as National Recreation and Parks Month. July is the best time for friends, family, or groups to rediscover their local parks or visit news ones. Monday was a beautiful (but hot) day, but that did not stop the Education staff at the Museum of Natural History from visiting the Devonian Fossil Gorge in Coralville. This trip was full of discovery and new adventures! For some people this was their first trip to the Devonian Fossil Gorge. If you haven’t visited the Gorge, I would highly recommend you take an afternoon adventure or a family outing to this wonderful area, especially if you like learning about Iowa’s past and finding fossils. 

This holiday isn’t only about outdoor exploration, but also about recognizing and acknowledging those who work in the parks. The men and women working or volunteering in the parks make our experience entertaining and memorable. Like any place whether it’s a museum or park, it takes a lot of care and effort to make it a beautiful and enjoyable place for families and friends to visit. 

 

Have you visited a park yet? If not, don’t worry there is still plenty of time before the summer is over! Iowa has tons of great parks and recreation areas to visit. Here is a list to get you started:

-          Hickey Hills Park, Iowa City

-          Lake Macbride State Park, Johnson County

-          F.W. Kent Park, Johnson County

-          Coralville Lake and Devonian Fossil Gorge, Coralville

-          Backbone State Park, near Dundee

-          Wildcat Den State Park, Muscatine

-          Waubonsie State Park, Sidney

-          Volga River State Recreation Area, Fayette

For more information about parks in Iowa visit the Iowa DNR website.

And don’t forget about your furry friends! They love outdoor exploration just as much as you do!

-Written by Assistant Education Coordinator Ashlee Gloede

Field Trip to Trowbridge Hall

Trowbridge Hall is home to the University of Iowa’s widely recognized Geoscience Department and the Iowa Geological and Water Survey, yet it also houses a little-known collection that is on display in its very halls. Within this historic building resides a collection of both hard-to-find and familiar minerals from around the state and around the world and whose histories are as varied as their colors and shapes. 

One example is this specimen of selenite found in Oklahoma. Selenite, otherwise known as Gypsum (CaSO₄*₂H₂O), is a common sulfate evaporate mineral found in warm, arid regions. Gypsum is typically clear to white in color but can sometimes come in brown tabular shapes as show in the specimen to the right. Gypsum is also a very soft mineral often used in plaster and cement, but another form, referred to as “alabaster,” is used in stone and monument carving. 

Realgar is an arsenic sulfide mineral (AsS), pictured right, which is only common in certain areas with low-temperature hydrothermal activity. Realgar can appear to be blood-red with prismatic crystals, but once exposed to sunlight and weathering, begins to change to the typical yellow and granular structure associated with sulfur deposits. This substance was once used in early fireworks manufacturing in China to produce the brilliant white colors that are now produced by many powdered metals such as magnesium. Realgar was also used by the ancient Greeks and Romans as a type of rat poison and red pigment in paints. 

 Heulandite is a silicate mineral with a lot going on. The chemical composition contains calcium, sodium, aluminum, silicon, oxygen and water molecules, a large mix of atoms for such small crystals, and is formed in the cavities commonly found in the volcanic rocks called basalts and in lower-temperature hydrothermal settings. These crystals are commonly tabular and radiate out from a single point in a cavity.

The mineral above is an interesting specimen with a long history and a dangerous side. Cinnabar is a mercury sulfide (HgS) with a beautiful red to purple color and a rhombohedral to tabular shape typically crystallizing in areas of lower temperatures around volcanic hot springs alongside opal. As many now know, mercury is a very sever hazard to humans and animals, and cinnabar is a common mineral ore for mercury, yet people in ancient China did not realize this information. In the Taoist tradition, priests would create mixtures with cinnabar to provide to emperors and elite leaders in order to prolong their life; however, we now know that cinnabar has the complete opposite effect, inflicting the imbiber with mercury poisoning.

These minerals mentioned here, and many other illustrious specimens, can be seen on display in the hallways of Trowbridge Hall on the University of Iowa campus. Please contact the Museum of Natural History with any questions about the location or about any of the minerals on display.  

-Written by MNH Education Staff Member Lee Falkena