Tramping through the woods in October

Looking through my window at the still-snowy, still-wintry Winnipeg streetscape, I have to remind myself that spring is not far away. Soon the snow will leave and we will again be able to begin one of the most pleasurable of the Museum’s activities: fieldwork. Last year, between various other projects, I worked with Bob Elias (University of Manitoba) and Ed Dobrzanski on gathering information that we could use in a field guidebook for this spring’s Winnipeg GAC-MAC meeting (Geological Association of Canada – Mineralogical Association of Canada).

Most of the sites we planned to include in the guidebook were well known to us, but there was one glaring absence: Bob and I had never seen the type section for the Lower Silurian Fisher Branch Formation, and Ed had visited it just once almost 50 years ago! From the published scientific work we knew where the site should be: all we had to do was to visit and document it. This seemed like a straightforward mission, as we already had maps and a geographic position, but as it turned out we made three trips to the Fisher Branch area before the work was complete.

The first trip, in late May, was after several days of rain. We found the right roads, we located the property on which the site should be located, and we met and received help from the very kind owners of the property. But the roads were continuous mud in places, and we were told that the field track to the site would be impassable that day. We would need to come back later when the weather had been dry for a while.

On the first day out, Ed gathers GPS data from a little patch of bedrock outcrop some distance from the actual locality, while it appears that Bob is not really enjoying the misty weather.

No, the collie did not chase us into the car. It was extremely friendly, and just wanted us to hang around longer!

Bob demonstrates “cow-whispering” skills of which Ed and I had been previously unaware. Bob says later that they were more attentive than his human classes often are, though their attention did not seem to last very long.

This is what the car looked like after we had finished many miles on muddy roads. Ed and Bob are inside, but you can’t really see them through the nearly-opaque windows. That’s the Lundar Goose in the background.

The second day was one of those hot, dry, breezy July days. The air motion was sufficient to cool us and to keep mosquitoes and flies from being too much of a nuisance. We drove through fields almost to the site, without even getting dirt on the car! Tucking trousers into socks to keep the nasty wood ticks from climbing our legs (this may look goofy, but it works), we pushed through the dense brush. We rapidly discovered four nice scarp sections in the trees. The farthest of these looked promising because it showed the best exposure of the Stonewall Formation, which lies under the Fisher Branch. This site, however, turned out to be already occupied: a bear grunted and huffed from the underlying crevice when we got too close!

We quickly decided to measure the next section along instead. Data and rock samples were easily gathered, but we could not get decent photos of the rocks because the view was blocked by foliage whichever way we turned. We would need to return in the autumn, after the trees had lost their leaves.

In the perfect July weather, Bob (right) and I unload gear at the edge of the field. (photo by Ed Dobrzanski)

Success! Bob and Ed on top of a bedrock scarp.

A wood tick that, thanks to the “pants tucked into socks” approach, was discovered on the outside of my clothing.

By mid October the leaves were all gone and the weather was still lovely; ideal for our final “day out” near Fisher Branch. We stopped at Stony Mountain and Stonewall to check out conditions at those localities, then drove north to Fisher Branch by lunchtime. In the field beside the sites we were met by a large herd of cows (perhaps the Interlake should be advertised as “Land of Cows”?), some of which became very interested in our Jeep. The bear was apparently no longer in residence at the farthest scarp, so we were free to examine the rock, take photographs, and gather a set of isotope samples. Later in the afternoon, we tramped up over the hill above the scarp, just to make sure that there was no further unexamined outcrop.

It was a perfect autumn day; the last perfect field day of the year, as it turned out. Our drive to Grand Rapids under rather less pleasant conditions was to follow just a couple of days later.

It is good that Jeeps are designed to take a licking.

The body of the tape measure rests at the boundary between the Stonewall Formation (below) and Fisher Branch Formation (above). That boundary is now considered to also represent the Ordovician-Silurian Boundary, so this site is very significant as the only place this systemic boundary can be observed in southern Manitoba. Length of the tape measure is 1 metre.

The farm includes several wonderful buildings from the original Ukrainian settlement of this area, about a century ago.

Some of the exhibits at the old Manitoba Museum

Winnipeg has a long and complicated history of museums featuring natural history collections. Our current museum was a centennial project, opened in 1970, but we are very fortunate that we possess vestiges of those earlier museums, such as minerals from the Carnegie Library collection and mounted animals from some of the early taxidermists. The most visible and best-documented of these “inheritances” are pieces that were exhibited in the old Manitoba Museum, which occupied part of the Winnipeg Civic Auditorium from 1932 until about 1970.

We have a good record of specimens from the old museum because they were numbered, with the numbers listed in a book. We also have good knowledge of how some of these pieces were exhibited thanks to a set of photographs that are digitally filed at the Museum. I am not certain of the dates of these photos; some seem to be from the 1930s when specific exhibits were being installed, while others are from the 1940s or 1950s and show finished exhibits.

The old museum was not large, but it was clearly a pleasant place to spend an afternoon examining cabinets of archaeological artefacts, First Nations clothing, stuffed birds, and fossils. It was very much a “cabinet of curiosities” of the old school, and a good one. Sometimes when I look at these photos I feel a bit sad, and wish that we had been able to keep that old museum as well as building this newer one.

In a way, though, we have kept some of that old Museum, in the specimens and artefacts we inherited. It is intriguing that, even after all this time, many of those fossils are still the best examples we have for particular groups, and several of them are in the Earth History Gallery or have been selected for temporary exhibits. The most obvious of these is our mounted Cretaceous plesiosaur, Trinacromerum kirki.

The plesiosaur as exhibited in the old Manitoba Museum after 1937

The plesiosaur on exhibit last week

The plesiosaur is now exhibited near a mosasaur skull, with beautiful reconstructions of the pterosaur Nyctosaurus suspended above.

This specimen, collected from the Manitoba Escarpment near Treherne in 1932, was a highlight of the old museum. After several re-mountings (including a more accurate replica skull), it remains a focus of our Earth History Gallery today. Skeletons of large extinct creatures never go out of style, but what other fossils can also be traced to the old museum?

The exhibits there featured some beautiful specimens of cephalopods (relatives of octopus and squid) of Ordovician age (about 450 million years old). Ordovician cephalopods are familiar to many Winnipeggers because cut sections through these fossils are often seen in Tyndall Stone walls. Although the cut fossils are common, complete cephalopods are very rarely found nowadays, because the stone is cut directly out of the quarry walls.

Ordovician cephalopods in the old museum. We have all of these specimens in our collection; look at the next photo for another image of the largest one!

In the early years of quarrying, however, the work was done by hand. Three-dimensional fossils were extracted more commonly, and as a result many of our best large Tyndall Stone fossils come from the old collections. This is particularly striking in the Ancient Seas exhibit, where the finest endocerid cephalopod is one that was on exhibit in the old museum, and where some of the other fossils also came from old collections.

The endocerid from the old museum is one of the highlighted specimens in the Ancient Seas exhibit.

Other specimens from the old museum make appearances almost every time we do a temporary exhibit in the Discovery Room, featuring  geology or paleontology pieces. Right at the moment, the cephalopod case in our Marvellous Molluscs exhibit includes a pair of fossils from that source. Looking at the old photographs, I was fascinated to discover that two “old friends” that shared a case in the old museum are right beside one another in this current exhibit!

There is something very pleasing about seeing them together like this, 70 years or so after that previous photo. In this way at least, the old museum lives on.

A group of Tyndall Stone cephalopods in the old museum. Note the specimens at top right and bottom left.

Part of the cephalopod exhibit in Marvellous Molluscs, with the two old museum specimens in front

When I started this blog a couple of years ago, one of my main intentions was to share the various items and phenomena that are within close reach of my desk, here on the 4th floor of the Museum tower. With that in mind, and since at lunchtime on New Year’s Eve we have reached a point in the year where serious and scholarly content should not be expected, I have decided to provide you with an annotated view of my office door.

In general, this curator’s door is far from curated, in the sense of having organized content. Rather, it is an odd mixture of items that I have randomly decided to exhibit, pieces that other people decided should be placed on my door, and things that seem to have flown in and stuck there all by themselves. With that in mind, the following is an annotated pictorial guide to items that can be seen on my door right now.

1, 2. When I started work at the Museum almost 20 years ago, the “Curator of Geology” plate was already on the door. As I was a part-time term employee for the first few years, I didn’t think that I should waste the Museum’s funds by requesting a personal nameplate. After a year or so, however, we made a “temporary” plate by laminating a laser-printed output to cardstock. I am, of course, still using the temporary plate, as it works just fine and I still like to avoid wasting money!

3, 4. For some unknown reason, the door suggests that my office is both Room 417 and Room 418. The 417 is, however, struck through with pen, indicating that 418 may be the accurate number.

5. When I started here, the Museum was called the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, and the name and logo had been very nicely laminated to my door. I really like our new name, but I also like being surrounded by reminders of history.

6-8. My door seems to have acquired a variety of warning signs, perhaps in the hope that potential visitors will leave me to peacefully contemplate the riddles of the universe (note: these haven’t worked so far!). Actually, numbers 6 and 8 are copies of signs seen near Churchill, and are reminders of northern fieldwork. Number 7 is a joke sign produced by former Curator of Zoology Gavin Hanke, when he was making a “bear warning” sign for the Parklands/Mixed Woods Gallery. Some thoughtful person has, with a pencil, modified “Irate Curator” to “Pirate Curator”, which brings to mind all sorts of interesting images.  Arrr.

9. This sticker promotes the “International Year of the Reef 1997″. Sadly, evidence would suggest that this was one of the less successful International Years.

10. The definition of forthwith came from the brain of my friend Dave Rudkin. With this in mind, I am always happy to state that I will produce a document “forthwith.”

11. This lovely pen-and-ink sketch of the Ordovician branching coral Pragnellia arborescens is by Museum artist and preparator Debbie Thompson. It depicts the holotype of this species, specimen I-206.

12. A photo of the head (cranidium) of a Silurian trilobite from the Gaspé Peninsula of Québec is there to remind me of two things. First, it is an image I took 30 years ago using what is now ancient technology (a large-format film camera), and its tone and beauty demonstrate that new methods are not always the best methods. Second, since it is from a research project that I never completed, it is a reminder not to keep taking on new projects that I will not be able to finish!

13. The obligatory dinosaur cartoon.

14.  This is a Velociraptor-free workplace, and there have been no incidents since this sign was put up almost a month ago.

15. I produced this version of the Canadian flag for my other blog a couple of years ago, after reading Michael Flanders’ pronouncement from the 1960s that our flag looked like a dinosaur footprint.

16. This was a nice poster of a pyrite crystal, but it is sadly becoming greenish and tattered, and I really should replace it!

(photo by Hans Thater)

This has been a year rich in exhibit work, and we are finishing off with a bit of a bang. About a week ago we finished installation of our latest Discovery Room exhibit, a collaboration between Zoology and Paleontology entitled The World is Their Oyster: Marvellous Molluscs. As with the other D-Room exhibits we have produced (such as Jaws and Teeth and Colours in Nature), this was a collaborative effort. It was a pleasure to again work with Randy Mooi on selecting suitable specimens and preparing copy, and to collaborate with our superb collections and exhibit staff to produce the finished exhibit.

Gastropods (snails and their relatives) are the most diverse molluscs, so it seemed appropriate that the gastropod case should hold the greatest variety of specimens!

The idea for this exhibit was quite straightforward: to select suitable specimens from our permanent collection, which would depict the wonderful diversity and variability of molluscs. We also wished to give visitors a bit of information about the long fossil record of molluscs, their evolution, and a few “case studies” of particular molluscs or features.

This seemed like a simple sort of thing to do, but of course the view on the ground is never the same as that from 30,000 feet. Most of our issues were associated with the sheer number of mollusc specimens housed in our collections. We knew that there would be many excellent examples to choose from, but we did not appreciate quite how difficult this would be. There were so many to consider that, whenever we chose one beautiful snail for the gastropod case, it seemed there were at least 10 other good ones that could not be included.

Specimens in the mollusc diversity case

The other issue was that molluscs are just so darned interesting, weird, and complicated in their life stories, dietary habits, and evolution. We kept discovering unusual things that we had not been aware of (or at least, I did; I suspect that Randy already knew some of these things). As a result, more and more new ideas came forward, and it was very hard to decide what we could include in the modest panel copy that accompanies the specimens. We were grateful that Stephanie Whitehouse, the designer, was so clear in telling us exactly how much space we had!

Northern shortfin squid (Ilex illecebrosus), Atlantic Ocean

As issues and problems go, these were obviously good ones to have. And as these photos show, we were able to share a great variety of beautiful and appealing mollusc material. You will just have to imagine what the cases might have looked like if we had been able to include every single specimen we considered worthy of exhibit!

The cephalopod case

A variety of abalones

One of our primary objectives was to exhibit modern and fossil examples of closely related creatures. This photo shows a fossil lightning whelk (Busycon sp.) from Pliocene deposits in South Carolina (about 2.6-5 million years old) beside one of its modern relatives.

The view through a magnifier shows the fossil Conocardium from Ordovician rocks at Garson, Manitoba (a member of the extinct class Rostroconchia; about 450 million years old).

King’s crown conch (Melongena corona), Atlantic Ocean

This fossil scallop Chesapecten jeffersonius, from Pliocene deposits in Virginia (about 5 million years old) is pierced by borings, and has been encrusted by corals and barnacles.

An array of beautiful cone shells (Conus species)

Baetic dwarf olive (Olivella baetica), Pacific Ocean

With the front glass ready to install, Bert Valentin does some final work inside the big case.

The past week we have been very busy installing our temporary exhibit on molluscs (The World is Their Oyster: Marvellous Molluscs), which will open in a few days. While thinking about this exhibit process, I remembered that there are some splendid photos of the installation of our mineral exhibit, courtesy of our designer, Stephanie Whitehouse. So as a follow-up to the post about that exhibit a few months back, here are a few images of the complicated process of assembling specimens and cases!

Janis Klapecki aligns one of the pyrite specimens from the Snow Lake area.

The amethyst, with a weight of about one-half tonne, was somewhat problematic to install! Using the loading dock hoist, it had been placed on a purpose-built steel platform. Now, Marc Hebert and Bob Peacock make sure it stays straight, while Bert Valentin cranks the modified engine hoist that will lift it to case level. The rest of us serve as ballast on the hoist.

The raised amethyst is gently lowered into place in the case. VERY gently.

I vacuum the amethyst before the case is moved into place. Hans Thater holds a light so that every bit of lint can be seen.

Marc and Bert connect the lighting power, while Bob waits to roll the amethyst case into final position.

It is 7 am, somewhere on the curves near Woodlands, Manitoba, and the sky is still completely dark. The rain is coming down harder now and approaching headlights are blurred by the slicked windshield. I usually love the open road, but this driving is far from fun.

We are well past Lundar before the late dawn. The traffic has diminished now and the rain has eased a bit, but the wind is rising. At the Ashern Petro-Can we stop for fuel: unleaded for the Jeep and junk food for the humans. Ed takes over the wheel for the next monotonous stretch.

Today we plan to go to William Lake, well north of Grand Rapids, then back to Winnipeg before the evening has progressed too far: a drive of 1000 kilometres or so. Why are we subjecting ourselves to this, in this unpleasant wet weather?

Tamaracks and spruce south of Grand Rapids

Last summer, in the beautiful warmth of August, we found a greater quantity of interesting rock than we could safely haul back to Winnipeg at the time. In particular, two splendid specimens we discovered on the last day had to be left lying on the outcrop. These were very large slabs, both of which remarkably preserve portions of what appears to be a channel on an ancient tidal flat, filled with fossilized jellyfish! They are the sorts of unusual pieces that the Museum really needs, because they would be very useful for both exhibits and research, and I was determined that we would get them back to Winnipeg before winter.

The slabs as they appeared when we found them last summer. Both show portions of a large channel that is filled with fossil jellyfish.

Then the autumn got busy, very busy, and the trip to retrieve these pieces was placed on the back burner. I began anxiously scanning the calendar and weather forecasts, and determined that October 18th would be the ideal day to make this trip, assuming that it didn’t snow first! Field paleontology is very much a climate-dependent occupation, and we have done this trip north so many times that we know when winter is likely to close our window of opportunity.

So now Ed and I are in a rented Jeep, heading north past the black spruce,  yellow tamaracks and bare-branched aspen. At Fairford there is a tremendous flow of water past the bridge, and the summer’s pelicans are nowhere to be seen. Over the lip of the St. Martin impact crater the road is empty and desolate. Much of it has been repaved recently and is beautifully smooth, but toward the Pas Moraine we hit a rutted stretch and Ed has to slow down to avoid hydroplaning on the long pond under our right-hand tires.

At the old burn south of Grand Rapids, I recall the exact place where we saw a lynx last autumn.  All self-respecting lynxes are clearly hiding out in the dense brush on this nasty wet day!

We stop again at Grand Rapids for fuel. There is more than a half-tank remaining, but it will be a long drive before we are back here again and it is best not to take chances. Fortunately there is someone on duty at the Pelican Landing gas station, because it really wouldn’t be pleasant to “self serve” in the pouring rain.

I am driving now, up the curves and past the beautiful lakes of the Grand Rapids Uplands. We arrive at William Lake just a bit after noon. Now there is snow blasting in on a north wind, and the thermometer is reading a balmy +1 C.   Navigating slowly across the scree, I can see the two large slabs lying right where we left them. After six hours of driving, we now have 15 minutes of physical work: fold down the seat, spread the tarp, slip on gloves, and manhandle the rock into the back. We pause for a few photos, and are grateful that the outdoor work is so brief, because our hands are already frozen and numb.

I move the smaller slab (photo by Ed Dobrzanski) ...

... while Ed freezes his fingers taking photos.

Seeing these slabs in the Jeep, it is pretty clear why we couldn't fit them in with the other fossils and gear during the summer!

Our hands thaw as the Jeep crawls back toward the highway. At the Grand Rapids bridge a solitary pelican flies past; perhaps this one was asleep and missed its flight south? Now we a bit of time for lunch at the Pelican Landing restaurant: smoked meat sandwiches, cream of celery soup, and coffee have never been more welcome. We say hello to a few familiar faces; I guess we are becoming “fixtures” here, but I am not sure when we will manage to get back again. It is an appropriate day for this sort of sombre thought.

Now it is time to confront the long road home. As it turns out, the weather for the drive back will be slightly more pleasant, and we cruise smoothly into Winnipeg just as darkness is setting in. It has been a lot of driving to pick up a couple of rocks, but very worthwhile: within a week it will be winter in the Uplands, and if the pieces had been left until spring they would have been heavily weathered and damaged by the winter’s extreme frost and ice.

 If you visit this page occasionally and have been wondering about when the next blog post would be forthcoming, well, I had been wondering that too. I have begun new posts several times, but in each instance my focus has been pulled away by the same all-consuming activity: my time has been taken up by the completion of a mineral exhibit. This past week, we finally did the installation, so I thought I had might as well set those posts-in-progress aside yet again. Here, instead, are some photos of the exhibit.

Collections specialist Janis Klapecki and designer Stephanie Whitehouse work on the final location of one of the plexiglas specimen mounts.

At the Museum we had long recognized that a mineral exhibit was one of the features most lacking in the Earth History Gallery. Minerals are the basic building blocks of rocks and other geological materials, we have a great diversity of minerals in this province’s rocks, and of course minerals are often beautiful objects that are treasured by many collectors.

The giant amethyst now has its own gallery case (in the next post I will tell you how we got it there!).

For the past several years we have been collaborating with the Mineral Society of Manitoba to acquire specimens suitable for exhibit, and The Manitoba Museum Foundation and the Canadian Geological Foundation had kindly provided us with funding to construct cases. This exhibit is at the front end of the Earth History Gallery, where we only had space for a couple of cases, and the number of specimens and volume of text were quite limited, so this should have been a simple little exhibit project, no?

Beryls from eastern Manitoba (top), along with pyrites, feldspars, and base metal ores

No. Things are never simple when you have to develop an exhibit from scratch. And in this particular instance our design and exhibit staff were working to develop techniques that we had not tried before.  We had examined mineral exhibits in many other places (both in-person and through photographs) and had decided that we needed dark cases with the light really focused on the specimens.

The mid part of the case features a variety of minerals, including a Tanco rubellite (donated by Cabot Corporation) and samples of beautiful Michigan copper (the tree-like specimen was acquired and donated by the Mineral Society of Manitoba, John Biczok, and Tony Smith).

Stephanie Whitehouse, our designer,  wanted to try working more with metal and glass on this case, and she asked the workshop to look at ways plexiglas could be prepared to allow it to glow. Bert Valentin considered new lighting options (though he eventually settled on fibre optics similar to those in the Ancient Seas cases) and Marc Hébert had to develop new techniques to build cases using different construction materials. Lisa May and Wayne Switek constructed specimen mounts that look simple but had to hold the specimens just so. And once all the pieces were constructed, it still took the team most of last week to assemble them and make everything fit. Dealing with the giant amethyst (now informally rechristened The Mammothist) was a big piece of this process, so big that I will give it its own post in the near future!

This splendid millerite is from Thompson, source of some of the best examples of this unusual nickel mineral. It was acquired for the exhibit by the Mineral Society of Manitoba and The Manitoba Museum Foundation. (catalogue number M-3596)

If you visit the Gallery you will still see the old exhibits between the mineral cases and Ancient Seas, but the space is starting to develop quite a different feel.

For the first time ever, the Earth History Gallery has a title!

The holotype of Isotelus rex, MM I-2950

The Manitoba Museum is home to many unusual and unique specimens. Among the most remarkable is the world’s largest complete trilobite, the holotype specimen of the species Isotelus rex. Over the years we have occasionally received requests from other museums for replicas of this striking fossil.

More than a decade ago, before the specimen ever went on exhibit, we had a mould prepared by an outside contractor who also made a number of resin replicas. These were on the shelf and ready to be painted if an order arrived. But eventually those replicas ran out, and when a new order came in from a museum in Japan last year, it was discovered that the original mould was too old and worn to be used again. A new mould was needed, which meant that we would have to remove the specimen from its exhibit in the Earth History Gallery.

The I. rex type specimen, on exhibit with a trackway and other trilobite material.

So we pulled out the case, carefully slid out the fossil (this is tricky, because it weighs about as much as I do!), and wheeled it away to the artists’ studio to be worked on by Debbie Thompson and Betsy Thorsteinson. While the specimen was “on leave” from the exhibit, it was temporarily replaced by one of the existing replicas.

The following photos are Betsy’s documentation of the complex and fascinating replication process. Our artists are tremendously skilled, as indicated by the high quality of work in so many of our galleries, and by the attention to detail in the preparation of these perfect trilobite replicas.

First, the fossil specimen was coated with layers of latex to precisely replicate its surface. This was strengthened with cheesecloth.

A plaster jacket was built up over the latex, and braced with wood.

Once this had dried, the mould was pulled from the fossil. Debbie painted a layer of mould separator onto the latex prior to casting.

Ed suffering through spring snow and winds, during fieldwork on the Grand Rapids Uplands.

Ed Dobrzanski is a “fixture” at the Museum.  He had been a volunteer here before I started back in in 1993, and he has volunteered continuously for the past 20 years. Ed has done tremendous work as an amateur paleontologist, collecting, preparing, studying, identifying, and cataloguing fossils. He has contributed to paleontological field and laboratory work in a great variety of ways. For his all-round efforts, many of us are delighted that Ed has just been named as the recipient of the Katherine Palmer Award, a North America-wide award for amateur paleontologists, presented annually by the Paleontological Research Institution.

An inveterate collector with interests in a great variety of objects, Ed had a long career as a government meteorologist. When staff reductions resulted in an opportunity for early retirement, Ed took advantage of this to turn his volunteer work into a daily avocation. In his time here, Ed has contributed tremendous knowledge to the organization of fossil collections as varied as brachiopods (lamp shells), fishes, and bivalves. He has also donated many specimens to the Museum (and to other institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum), has contributed to exhibit development and public programs, and assists with all sorts of tasks in other departments of the Museum!

Florence Zawislak (L) and Ed discuss a cartful of specimens.

My colleagues and I are fortunate to have Ed as a collaborator on many research projects. He is skilled with the essential field and laboratory tools: whether using a hammer, GPS, shotgun, survey equipment, microscope, rock saw, or lapidary grinder, Ed has considerable expertise. He takes wonderfully precise notes, understands maps thoroughly, and maintains a compendious knowledge of obscure fossil localities. Ed has been a key member of my field teams, and has also collaborated in the field with many other scientists such as Bob Elias (University of Manitoba), Dave Rudkin (ROM), Jisuo Jin (University of Western Ontario) and Jan Audun Rasmussen (Natural History Museum of Denmark). His efforts have resulted in the co-authorship of several papers, a guidebook, and many conference abstracts.

Ed Dobrzanski is a tremendous asset to the science of paleontology in Manitoba and beyond; it is wonderful to see this recognized!

Ed assisted visiting Danish researcher Dr. Jan Audun Rasmussen, who carried out field research in southern Manitoba.

Our elevator display case greets visitors to the Natural History areas.

The spaces that house Museum curators and collections are, perhaps, notorious for appearing to be crammed full of objects. Our work consists of collecting and organizing, and actively-collecting Museum scientists typically have many specimens spread out for study and cataloguing. Our collections rooms contain many thousands of well-organized specimens, but it is tricky to find space for the largest pieces. For this reason, some of our biggest specimens are not stored in the official Natural History storage: ever since I have worked at the Museum, most of our large mammal mounts have been in alcoves along the hallways here. If I wish to, I could say “good morning” to two muskoxen, a grizzly bear, and two mule deer just in the short space between the elevator and my office!

A replica ichthyosaur rests behind a variety of skulls: a large fish, a coyote, and a beaver.

It used to be that, when the elevator stopped at our floor, those inside would glance out to see our creatures, safe in their protective plastic cocoons. Although this may be an interesting sight (if you know what they are), it is hardly a fitting introduction to the great variety of activities here, and it made it look rather like a warehouse. A few years ago, we decided to remedy this; when an old display case came available in the Museum basement, we grabbed it and placed it facing the elevator to house an introductory exhibit.

A grouping of minerals, Tyndall Stone, fossil ammonoids, and bird gravel and "dino stones" (our idea of what pet products would look like if people kept dinosaurs!)

This display has taken years to develop, because we were always getting sidetracked with our real work! We placed a few items into the case right after we moved it, but then it sat untended for some time. Returning to the case a couple of years ago, we added a lot of interesting pieces and planned to include a title explaining what it was about, but again we of course became busy with projects such as the Biodiversity and Colours in Nature exhibits. Then, this past week, we finally managed to “finish” this display, at least for the moment, adding a title panel and several of the wonderful Haeckel posters that had been included in the Biodiversity exhibit.

This replica pterosaur was beautifully painted by Debbie Thompson.

What is the purpose of this case, and why have we decided to feature the particular items that are in there? As well as providing “eye candy” for those who happen to see it from the elevator on their way to other floors, we wanted the case to introduce the basic research and collecting disciplines that occupy this floor: Zoology, Botany, and Geology/Paleontology. Since it is not climate-controlled, and is subjected to dust, light, and vibration, all the items in it are robust. They are generally replicas or are from the stores of “teaching grade” objects lacking basic data.

This angled view of the case shows how it is surrounded by large mammal mounts (under the plastic, that is a muskox on a cart), with a specimen freezer behind.

Although the choices were limited, we were pleased that we could include some of our favourite sorts of items (an ichthyosaur replica, a box of fake “dino stones”), and examples of things related to some of the research that takes place here (Tyndall Stone fossils, snake skin). Undoubtedly the display will continue to evolve in the coming years as we come upon other suitable exhibits for it!