On air: Ray Troll and Kirk Johnson spread the paleo-love

Whenever I walk into the Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway exhibit gallery, my first thought is “wow, fossils are cool!” I’ve heard that same sentiment expressed by kids and adults alike who are visiting this new Burke exhibit. But I’ve never heard two people more enthusiastic about fossils and what they tell us about the past than Ray Troll and Kirk Johnson, authors of the book Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway and co-curators of this exhibit.

This morning, KUOW aired an interview with Ray and Kirk talking passionately about their love of fossils. It’s hard not to get excited about paleontology when you listen to these two chat with Weekday host Steve Scher. Listen to the interview here and I dare you to not find yourself caught up in their infectious enthusiasm for studying prehistoric times.

Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway is at the Burke Museum until May 31. Don’t miss the chance to see some of the best fossils from the Burke Museum’s collections, including saber-toothed cats, killer pigs, and ammonites, paired with the colorful, whimsical art of Ray Troll.

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

Filling in for Mammalogy: Part 2

A few weeks ago, I blogged about what it was like as a graduate student to temporarily be put in charge of managing an entire collection of mammals. The job comes with a lot of responsibility, including facilitating the visits of researchers who study specimens from the collection.

While I have interacted with visitors to the collection before, this was the first time that it was my responsibility to make sure they had what they needed, knew where to find the specimens they were looking for, and ensure that all the proper paperwork was filled out. Interacting with these researchers and hearing about their work (not to mention watching them take the data they needed) was definitely one of the most interesting parts of my job.

A budding young researcher uses a special tool to measure the size of a rodent during a behind-the-scenes tours of the mammalogy collection.

The first visitor was Jonathan Calede, a graduate student at the University of Oregon. Jonathan is studying the diet of burrowing rodents that lived during the Miocene. This doesn’t sound difficult until you find out that the only specimens he has to study are tiny fossilized rodent teeth! Luckily, the Burke’s mammal collection provides modern rodents for researchers like Jonathan to study. Since we know what modern mammals eat, their teeth serve as great comparisons.

Jonathan has taken some specimens back to Oregon with him, but most of his work was done in the mammal collection itself. First he chose which specimens to study and cleaned the teeth with ethanol. He then made molds of the teeth using the same blue molding compound that dentists use. When the mold is dry it can be peeled off and later filled with epoxy to make a cast of the teeth.

The second researcher was Casey Self, a University of Washington biology graduate student. Casey is also studying teeth and their relationship to diet, but in modern bats rather than rodents. She uses the Small Animal Tomographic Analysis facility (SANTA) in the Department of Pediatrics to micro-CT scan the bat skulls and measure the volume and surface area of the tooth roots. Because Casey cannot remove the teeth from the skulls (as that could compromise the specimens in the collection), this is a non-destructive, highly accurate alternative. Casey has used the collection many times before and will definitely be back to complete more research in the future.

The final visitor was Jacob Fisher, an archaeology PhD candidate at the University of Washington. Jacob uses the mammal collection to identify prehistoric faunal skeleton remains from Five Finger Ridge, an archaeological site occupied during the Fremont-period (AD 450-1350) in central Utah.

During his most recent visit to the mammal collection Jacob focused on identifying rodents, which provide important data on the past environmental conditions at the site. There are larger questions that Jacob is trying to answer with his research. In his words: “the goal of my research is to understand how people impacted the environment, and in particular how underlying motivations for hunting by men may result in resource depletion of some game animals.”

All of the Burke Museum’s collections, not just mammalogy, support interesting research. I am glad I had the opportunity to help a few of those researchers in my time filling in for our regular mammalogy collections manager.

Posted by: Justine Walker, Mammalogy

Burke Researcher Catalogues Deep Sea Fish

One of our own Burke Museum researchers has been offered a prestigious award in order to contribute to a major scientific collaboration: building the “Encyclopedia of Life.”

Burke doctoral candidate Chris Kenaley, who works with Curator of Fishes, Ted Pietsch, has been offered two awards from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Specifically, Chris will be working on cataloging the diversity of fish in the largest and least-studied biome on Earth, the deep sea. The work Chris and his colleagues contribute to the EOL’s goal to document all 1.8 million species known to science will answer important, unanswered questions, such as how many times fishes have invaded the deep sea.

Chris received funding to lead an international team of scientists in May at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in order to work on documenting all of the known fishes that live 200-meters-deep and below. He has also been awarded an EOL Rubenstein Fellowship, where he will be contributing to the international effort to create a webpage for each known organism on Earth.

Much of the work Chris will be conducting has never been done before, and there is no doubt that the contributions Chris makes to the EOL project will be used for generations to come. Congratulations!

Posted By: Andrea Barber

Photo: Chris Kenaley

Save the Date: Environmental Writer's Workshop

Greetings from Burke Education! This is a short save-the-date notice for our 2010 Environmental Writer's Workshop. It will be held May 15, 2010.

I am excited about the instructors who have agreed to work with us. They are Jack Nisbet, Lynda Mapes, and Susan Zwinger. They bring years of experience as writers and teachers. Each is an attentive observer who weaves together history, nature, and field time into well-crafted, thought-provoking writing about place.

As we did last year, the workshop will include time at the museum and at the Center for Urban Horticulture.


Watch the Burke events calendar for a more formal announcement with details on time and cost or contact us now and we will e-mail you more information about the workshop once the details have been set. In the meantime, read on for a short biography on each of our knowledgeable instructors.
More...
Lynda Mapes has been a daily newspaper reporter for 25 years, at four newspapers on both sides of the country. For the past 11 years she has been at the Seattle Times, where she specializes in coverage of Indian Country, natural history, and regional environmental news. She is also the author of two books, Washington: The Spirit of the Land, about landscapes of Washington, and Breaking Ground, published in May, 2009 about the inadvertent discovery of one of the largest, oldest Indian villages ever discovered in Washington State. She believes good writing begins with deep observation, and richly attentive presence in the moment.

Spokane author Jack Nisbet writes about the intersection of human and natural history. His books include Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Visible Bones, and The Mapmaker's Eye. His latest work is The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Pacific Northwest.

Susan Zwinger is a widely acclaimed writer and teacher. A poet and nonfiction writer, who keeps elaborate illustrated journals, she has written The Hanford Reach, The Last Wild Edge, Stalking the Ice Dragon, Still Wild, Always Wild, and co-authored Women in Wilderness. She is currently teaching for the Whidbey Island Writers’ Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction, Colorado College, The Nature Conservancy, and the Yellowstone National Park Institute (Poetry and Ecology).

Posted by: David Williams, Education

Favorite New Acquisitions: Part 2

Yesterday, we posted a blog about some of our curators’ favorite new acquisitions over the last year. In the second part of this mini-series, we look at some of the staff’s favorite prehistoric acquisitions at the Burke in 2009.

Paleobotany curator Caroline Stromberg’s favorite specimens of 2009 are unidentified fossil flowers from the early Middle Eocene (50 million years ago) McAbee Flora, Cache Creek, British Columbia. Fellow paleobotany museum research associates Rick and Tad Dillhoff donated these fossils as part of a larger collection. “These little fragile flowers are among my favorites because they look just like delicate ink drawings on the rock and they give us a rare glimpse of everything in life's history that we don't know about: all the millions and millions of now extinct and unknown species that once lived on this planet.”

Liz Nesbitt, Curator of Paleontology’s pick is a fossil seastar from Olympic National Park that is currently on public view at the Burke. Located in the new acquisitions case as a single display, the seastar is approximately 15-million-years-old, and it is the only fossil we have from that area. This find is particularly significant because seastars are exceptionally rare in the fossil record. The seastar was collected by Olympic Park Scientists and the Burke is keeping the fossil for the park in trust.

Christian Sidor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology’s favorite new acquisition is a 49-million-year-old brontothere skull, belonging to the genus Palaeosyops. A distant relative of tapirs and horses, the skull was found by Bruce Crowley in Southwestern Wyoming in the Bridger Formation.



Why is it his favorite? “It is almost perfectly three-dimensionally preserved, which is quite rare for fossils, and I think it is destined for exhibit at some point.”

We hope you enjoyed learning about a few of the many interesting pieces we have at the Burke. For more information on our collections and research, click here.

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

Filling in for Mammalogy: Part 1

What happens when the Burke’s Mammalogy collections manager leaves town for six weeks? He asks an able graduate student to look after the place! Before taking his leave, collection manager Jeff Bradley asked me to fill his large shoes while he was gone. I am a graduate student in the Museology Program here at the University of Washington and I have been training with Jeff for over a year, learning how to prepare mammal specimens and care for the collection.

Before Jeff left, he ran me through a crash course on all the things I might need to know in his absence. My weekly duties included checking the insect traps for any intruders, emptying the dehumidifier in the cold storage room, relabeling storage cases, and preparing a collection of small mammals from the Olympic Peninsula. Preparing a specimen involves skinning and stuffing the animal, taking tissue samples and measurements and preparing bones for their short stay in the dermestid beetle colony where muscle matter is removed. If prepared properly and stored in ideal conditions (like the ones in our collection), these specimens will endure for many years to come. I also made sure that volunteer Chandler Coles had bones to wash and prepare for numbering and that fellow museology graduate student and intern Crystal Welliver had mammals thawed out and ready to prepare.

Photo: Justine Walker working with the Burke's Mammology collections

During this time my inbox slowly filled with email requests, as mammalogy collection emails were forwarded to me. Many of these emails contained straightforward questions, asking if a group of students could tour the collection and on what date, for example. Some, however, were more appropriate for Jeff to answer, such as:

-Does the Burke want a couple of dead skunks?
-Can the paper archives of a collection be viewed?
-My personal favorite, where does someone go to obtain a steady supply of “road kill?”

I did my best to provide temporary answers and to politely inform the inquirers that they would have to wait for a formal response from collection manager Jeff once he returns. And I thank every one of them for their patience and understanding!

Check back soon for more stories from my time filling in as mammal collection manager.

Posted By: Justine Walker, Mammalogy

Hey, we’ve got a “quasquicentennial” on our hands

No, it’s not a new fish or mammal species; it’s a 125th anniversary!

This week the Burke Museum officially begins celebrating 125 years as a museum. That’s something to celebrate. To kick off the 12-month celebration, we’re creating special signs, themed events, and posting fun facts about our history on our Website.

The theme is: Celebrating 125 years: Inspiring young naturalists then and now

This theme is directly derived from the obscure but interesting fact that the Burke Museum was actually created by a small group of teenagers in the 1880s. These Seattle teenagers started the Young Naturalists Society, collecting mammals, fossils, and cultural artifacts.

And they dreamed big. They went on to found our museum—and generations of students have been inspired by the Burke ever since.

We want to hear from you… tell us what YOU collect!


* Specifically, in 1885 the Young Naturalists Society” decided to build its own museum. They signed an agreement to locate the building at the territorial university (now the UW).

Posted by MaryAnn Barron Wagner

Breaking New Ground

Reviving ancient relationships between the sea and the canoe, the Burke Museum recently hosted for the first time ever a delegation of indigenous Ainu guests from Japan as part of a grant-funded community collaboration between NW Coast Native American tribes, the Burke Museum, and the Hokkaido Ainu Association of Japan. Lisa Marie Oliver of the Quinault Indian Nation participated in the week-long Ainu visit and had wonderful news to share:

“The Ainu Delegation's first visit to Seattle was a great experience had by all. Each visit to tribal museums and cultural centers opened new dialogues and revealed shared experiences. It was truly an unforgettable and life changing experience for all involved. Many laughs were had and hugs were never in short supply. Although tears were sometimes shed during painful discussions by tribal members and the Ainu delegation, the bond that was formed between them because of these shared experiences can never be broken.”

“Many tribal members now consider the Ainu their relatives; what a wonderful, powerful, and beautiful sentiment! Many involved learned so much from the Ainu delegation and in return they learned that they are not alone in their struggles for political, social, and economic freedom. The wounds that were so visible when discussing painful histories (on both sides) may never fully heal but with an understanding of each other and the knowledge of knowing the Ainu are not alone in their fight to retain their culture, language, and land may help with the pain. I will never forget the beautiful people I've met and the amazing experience we all shared during these 9 days. An ocean may separate our homelands, but our spirits will forever be walking side by side.”
- Lisa Marie Oliver, Quinault Indian Nation

Note: The Museums & Communities Collaboration Abroad (MCCA) is a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State in partnership with the American Association of Museums (AAM).