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

Sitting Beneath Mullet Pond

Count me among those who never expected to find a whale hidden at the heart of Iowa City. The ocean is 1113 miles away due east, and yet farther to the west. But, here I am and here is the whale. The massive skeleton of a whale, at least, hanging above my head.

Sitting and typing on this wooden bench amongst the dozens of other skeletal specimens that inhabit one end of Mammal Hall, I look up through its cavernous ribcage and into the skull, an arching maxilla with a jaw like two tusks, altogether about the size and shape of a helicopter cockpit. It is a 42-foot long, 4,400 pound, century-old right whale, and I am peering into its skeleton, counting the fifty vertebrae that span its steel rod spine and marveling at its many-knuckled hands not so different from my own.

It is a lady whale, and her name is Mullet Pond.

Mullet Pond, after the coastal landmark whereupon North Carolina whalers proudly beached the leviathan on Valentine’s Day, 1898.

Instructor and former museum employee Will Thomson documents the tale, how it took over forty men of the Red Oar Crew to harpoon her and bring her ashore, and how they rendered her there on the beach. She “yielded over 750 pounds of baleen and over thirty barrels of whale oil.”  An East Coast taxidermist would travel 150 miles to bargain for the bones—flesh-stripped bones with an aroma like a “factory that had been turned into a home for unexpurgated skunks”—and then he would send them inland by train, disguised as fertilizer material for cheaper freight, to museum father Charles Nutting, professor of zoology at the State University of Iowa. But this was only the beginning. For 12 years the skeleton of Mullet Pond would be stowed away in a campus attic, unassembled, boxed in crates, and largely forgotten, awaiting the construction of Macbride Hall and the industrious knack of exhibit designer Homer Dill, who would order the hundred-odd pieces and mount them to the ceiling of the gallery above my wooden bench.*

Barred and bolted straight into the rafters, it is hard to think that Mullet Pond could have been anything less than eternal fixture of Macbride Hall, perhaps even the skeleton of the building itself, just missed by the plaster and paint. But she is not. She was brought to this building. She has an origin, a story that precedes her arrival here in landlocked Iowa.

And this I find fascinating—not just the long narrative of the whale, but more so the fact that she has one to begin with. Mullet Pond was once a skeleton in a body. She was a living, swimming, geyser-breathing animal. Even in a gallery full of exhibits designed to display taxidermy within its natural scene, it is too easy for one to forget that these specimens are more than sculpture behind glass. Though they are extracted from nature, the same flesh once blushed with blood. They must not be utterly disjoined from the world just because they are now on display to it. Notice the hole in rib of the moose—it is the mark of a bullet. See the form of a young human being—it once had a name, a face, a mind. None of the exhibits have been exhibits forever. They are the time-frozen vestiges of real stories.

In the stories, an entire museum is given a new sense of life.

-Nathan Kooker, MNH Volunteer 

 

*

Thomson, Will. "A Whale for Iowa." Palimpsest 1987: 50-59.