Fossils and... LEGOS?

If you’re like me, you have fond memories of playing with LEGOs as a kid. Hours upon hours spent creating fortresses to keep out monsters or making search and rescue helicopters to help save your city from the latest natural disaster.

These stackable toys are fun, but did you know they also serve an important role at the Burke Museum? Our paleontology fossil preparators use LEGOs to help make casts of real fossils in the Burke's collections.

Fossil casts allow for 3-dimensional lightweight copies of a fossil to be made for educators to use in their classrooms and for researchers wanting to study a particular specimen from the Burke's paleontology collections.

Why we use LEGOs
The tight fit of the LEGOs doesn't leak the silicone we pour around the fossil to make a mold.



An Ammonite fossil covered in silicone. The silicone
is the “mold” the plaster is poured into to make the cast.

Another benefit of using LEGOs is that we can build a close perimeter around oddly-shaped fossils like this Gorgonopsian’s canine and partial lower jaw:

Even though it’s only a part of one section of its jaw,
this fossil is pretty big and oddly shaped – a great
example of why we use LEGOS.

After creating the silicone mold of the fossil, we pour plaster into the mold to finish the process of creating a 3-dimensional cast. Here's what the end result looks like:


The real fossil will stay at the Burke but thanks to LEGOs and the rest of the casting process, the silicone mold can be used several times to create additional casts.

Do you have LEGOs to donate?
“LEGO DUPLO” (like the ones in the photos) are the most useful for making fossil casts, but we will happily accept donations of LEGOs of any type.

If you have any unwanted LEGOs at your house that you'd like to give a new career in our fossil prep lab, please drop them off at the Burke Museum admission desk during the month of September 2013. Thanks!

What the heck is a shoe pot?

The Burke’s Ethnology division cares for amazing collections that often demonstrate the innovations and ingenuity of human cultures. Rebecca Andrews, Ethnology Collections Manager, highlights the process of researching these interesting pieces once they’ve been donated to the museum by taking us on one of her endeavors:

What the heck is a shoe pot?

Recently the Ethnology division received a very large donation of nearly 600 pieces of utilitarian Mexican pottery. The collection includes pots (ollas), water jugs (cantaros and tinajas), pitchers (jarras), grinding bowls (mocajetes), stew pots (cazuelas), cups (jarros) and bowls (cajetes). As part of the cataloguing process, I’ve been sorting, researching, and describing the pots, and was amazed to come across a very different kind of pot.

Shoe-shaped pots, or patojos as they are known in Mexico, are ceramic vessels in the shape of, well, a shoe. This is the catch-all name for the pots which are also called bird-, duck-, boot-, slipper-, moccasin- or foot-shaped. These are asymmetrical vessels with the opening at one end, and usually a handle extending from the rim of the opening. In Spanish, these vessels are called patojos, patos, zapittlos, botas and zuecos, but commonly known as patojos. These are culinary vessels, used for cooking. The pointed end is shoved between hearth stones over the hot coals, and the contents can be stirred or ladled out easily from the open end. Patojos are known ethnographically only in two areas of Mexico: Oaxaca, Puebla (and also in the country of Chile), however pre-historically the pots were used by several indigenous peoples over a much wider area of Mexico.

This shoe-shaped pot was donated to the Burke Museum by Frederick Hart. It was made in Mixistlan, Oaxaca, Mexico, and was collected in 1971. Catalog #2009-117/536.


For more information, see Dixon, Keith A. 1976. 'Shoe Pots, Patojos, and the Principle of Whimsy' Vol. 41, No. 3:386-391. Society for American Archaeology.

Posted by: Rebecca Andrews, Ethnology

How to Preserve Marine Algae

During a recent behind-the-scenes tour of the Burke Museum Herbarium, the museum’s curator of botany Richard Olmstead and herbarium collections manager David Giblin told me about the collections, research and scientific contributions from their collection. One thing that stood out to me is that preservation of plant specimens is a delicate art. In the video below, Richard discusses the methods used to preserve marine algae. The process results in beautiful scientific specimens that can be studied for countless years to come.



Find more behind-the-scenes videos and get insider access to the Burke Museum on our Youtube page!

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

A Day in the Life of a Museum Collections Manager

Many of the people on our staff do not hold jobs that are primarily focused on exhibits or public programs, which are the two ways most members of the general public tend to interact with the museum. For all of the exciting things happening in the public spaces of the Burke, there are just as many exciting things going on behind the scenes in the museum collections spaces. Our collections managers and curators across 11 divisions are devoted to caring for over 12 million objects and specimens at the museum that represent the natural and cultural heritage of this region and for making those objects and specimens accessible to researchers and others.

A few weeks ago, Rebecca Andrews, collections manager in ethnology here at the Burke, approached me about making a video that showcases some of the many things she must consider each day in order to best store and protect the Burke ethnology collection of 45,000 objects.

I followed her around for an hour and put together this short video, "A Day in the Life of a Museum Collections Manager." It shows a side of the museum that many people never get to see!



NOTE: If you are having trouble viewing the full video, watch it here.

Watch more behind-the-scenes videos about the Burke Museum collections here.

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

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

New video: Packing the Burke's Geology Collection

A few months ago, we wrote about creating a safer home for our ethnology and geology collections. Following that post, I spent some time with Ron Eng, geology collections manager, learning more about the process his staff and volunteers are going through to pack up the 2 million-piece geology collection in preparation for the new storage compactors that will be arriving at the museum in the future.

Take a look:



Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

Q: How does one go about moving 650 pieces of ceramic pottery from the Burke Museum to a new storage facility?

A: Very, very carefully!

As the Ethnology Department staff prepare to move the pottery collection to a new storage facility, one student looks back on the project with fond memories.

Posted by: Sarah Bishop, Ethnology

The packing project took our staff 4 months to complete, over 40 HUGE bags of biodegradable packing peanuts and resulted in a nearly 10-foot-high "box mountain" in the Ethnology storage area.

So, out of all the artifacts we have here in Ethnology, why move the pottery collection to this new storage space? The ceramic and pottery collections are not prone to insect damage and are relatively stable to small environmental changes (temperature and relative humidity). But it is also easier to care for similar types of objects when they are all stored in the same area, so a decision was made to put all of the pottery together. This will make it easier for researchers, students, artists and scholars to access and study the collections, and make comparative analysis between pottery styles.

Improper handling is the number one cause of damage to ceramics and pottery, so proper packaging for transport is extremely important. We tightly packed each ceramic object in biodegradable packing peanuts and sheets of Ethafoam (polyethylene foam). Each pot was wrapped in tissue paper to keep all of its pieces together in case of physical damage during transport. Extremely fragile ceramic objects needed to be stabilized before moving to prevent further damage. After each pot was packed, we wrote down the box number on inventory sheets so we could track which pots are in each of the boxes. This inventory is very important to ensure no artifacts are lost during the big move.

More...
After sealing each box with packing tape, we stacked them in the Ethnology Collection to await transport to the storage facility. After several games of Tetris at the video arcade the previous weekend, I was inspired to create "box mountain." The tower is secured (and protected from damage from earthquakes) with copious amounts of packing tape and is raised above the floor by two-by-fours to protect the ceramics in case of flooding. This stack of boxes saves invaluable collections space for us in the Ethnology Division. Now that the pottery collection is all packed up, it is currently awaiting transport to its new home!

Meanwhile, the collections manager and curator had to secure some necessary funding to purchase storage equipment for the pottery collections to be housed in. It is important to have strong equipment for the heavy pots to sit on, and large storage cabinets with closed doors to reduce dust. And of course, having been through minor earthquakes in the Seattle area, we need to make individual storage mounts for each piece of pottery so it doesn't roll or shake around too much.


Photos: Burke Museum collections staff and student assistants take great care in moving the museum's pottery collection to another storage facility. Sarah Bishop (bottom right) thinks creatively about how to store all of the boxed pottery pieces while they await transport.

The Ethnology Detectives

Posted by: Karin Hoffman, P.I

Let me set the scene.

It’s a cold, foggy night. A confident yet distraught woman dressed in a black knee-length wool coat, broad-brimmed hat and delicate heels walks slowly up a set of wooden stairs to the second floor. Smoking a cigarette she approaches a closed door. She knocks, then enters the office of Karin Hoffman, P.I.

I always thought it would be fascinating to be a private investigator – digging up secrets from the past, anticipating a person’s next moves, or working to discover the story behind a statue of a falcon reputed to contain priceless jewels. I guess that’s why I was drawn to museums. Every day collections managers and curators are challenged to uncover the history of an object, often times relying on little prior knowledge of the artifact.

Our ethnology division recently faced such a challenge. A set of antique rifles was donated to the Burke and right away the collections team knew the rifles were keeping a secret. Take a look at what they discovered:

Mad hatters wanted!

Guest Writer: Lynn Sullivan, Museology graduate student

When most of you think of the Burke you probably think of fossils and artifacts, but I want to let you know that if you look hard enough you might see a white rabbit that can lead you down a hole into your own version of Alice in Wonderland. My rabbit hole led me to the ethnology collection where, for the past quarter, I have adopted my own Wonderland-esque persona in doing my practicum with Collections Manager extraordinaire Becky Andrews. The role I chose was the mad hatter or more specifically the mad hat-mount maker! Many of the hats in the ethnology collection are stuffed with acid-free tissue paper which does not support the fragile hats properly or help them maintain their form while in storage so they need to have a “mount” created to keep them propped up. Following in the footsteps of another intrepid Museology student, I have sought to make as many hat mounts as is humanly possible over a period of 10 weeks. Was I foolhardy...yes. Did I have fun getting in touch with my inner craft person…YES! Did I conceive of a new standard for good days vs. bad days…yes (btw, a good day is one where you don’t cut yourself or glue your fingers together).

But what is hat mount-making you may ask… I shall tell you!

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First one starts with collecting the necessary archival building supplies (ethafoam, coroplast, tyvek) and tools (gloves, pencil, tape measure, and utility knife). Then the side-kicks must be rounded up, because it just isn’t mount-making without…

Sticky (the worlds slowest-heating-has-more-glue-stuck-to-it-than-comes-out-of-it-glue gun), Cutty (the only ethafoam knife that you will ever need, so coveted that students have been known to rush out at 5am on Black Friday to buy their own), and Maki (the sushi knife of death, mortal foe to flat ethafoam that must be carved out).

With this ramshackle gang of characters as back-up, I begin the process of fitting a square peg in a round hole. First thing you should know, ethafoam sheets come in large rectangular planks. Northwest Coast cedar-bark and spruce root hats tend to be more…ahh…how to put it …ROUND! Yes, one must cut tapered circles out of square planks. After doing this several times, you should eventually manage to have your own leaning tower of ethafoam that must be glued together in exactly the right place so that it all perfectly supports the hat. Any attempt to glue more than one piece at a time will inevitably lead to disaster. Once your little beauty is perfectly glued you will realize that more foam must be shaved off the sides to actually make it fit how it fit about 2 minutes earlier. Without further delay, you must swath that baby from top to bottom in tyvek in order to keep the ethafoam from rubbing against the hat. Next cut a piece of coroplast mat to the perfect size and glue the mount on the mat. Place hat on mount, return hat to shelf, and repeat with the next hat.

What I learned most from this experience is that no, I’m not crafty, but that any time given to the Burke and its wonderful staff is a gift in itself. Working with staff at this museum teaches you more than you could ever learn in a book. The staff is smart, dedicated, and always willing to take time to help you get better at your job.

And if you are really lucky… you too may wind up making a hat mount that can also be used for next year’s Star-trooper Halloween costume.