Video: how do you get to Antarctica?

Think your holiday travel plans are extreme? Can you imagine if you were traveling to Antarctica? That's exactly what Burke Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology Christian Sidor and two UW graduate students, Adam Huttonlocker and Brandon Peecock, are doing this Sunday, as they depart for a two-month trip to search for fossils in Antarctica. Along with an intrpeid group of paleontologists and geologists from across the country, the Burke team will explore the rocks of the central Transantarctic Mountains for evidence of ancient life.

So how does one actually get to Antarctica? Unsurprisngly, it's not quite as simple as just booking a flight. I sat down with Adam and Brandon the week before their trip to talk more about what it takes travel to the world's harshest, coldest continent. In this short video, they discuss what it will be like to arrive in Antarctica for the first time:


Stay tuned for more stories from their trip.

Posted by: Samantha Porter, Operations

New Curator of Genetic Resources and Herpetology Arrives!

At the beginning of this month the Burke Museum welcomed a new curator of genetic resources and herpetology to the museum, Adam Leaché. Adam first visited the Pacific Northwest in 1997 as a graduate student, when he attended his first major academic conference – the annual meeting of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists – at the University of Washington. Over a decade later, he returns to Seattle with a brand new curatorial position at the Burke Museum and a joint appointment as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Washington.

New Burke curator of genetic resource and herpetology, Adam Leaché, poses with a Komodo dragon.

Dr. Leaché will oversee both the genetic resources collection and the herpetology collection (reptiles and amphibians) at the Burke Museum. He is already planning several collecting trips for the museum, including field trips to West Africa, Mexico, and the deserts of the American Southwest. Dr. Leaché is also particularly interested in expanding the catalogue of specimens collected in the National Parks of Washington State.

In addition to focusing on the growth of the genetic resource and herpetology collections, Dr. Leaché is enthusiastic about developing public outreach programs for the Burke. One of his hopes for his new position is to help bring funding to the museum for the development of exhibits and educational content about ecology and evolution studies.

Dr. Leaché’s own research is focused on systematics, phylogenetics, phylogeography, population genetics, and species delimitation. Over the last ten years, he developed an integrative research program exploring the evolution of North American fence lizards and horned lizards that has resulted in publications across a number of disciplines. During the winter quarter, Dr. Leaché will be teaching an applied phylogenetics course at the UW – a lab course that gives biology students the computational and bioinformatics skills necessary to organize and analyze genetic data.

The Burke is excited to have Adam Leaché on board!

"Psychedelic" fish species makes top 10 new species list

Remember psychedelica? That very unique-looking species of fish with rare, forward-facing eyes like humans and a body colored with swirls of tan and peach zebra stripes?

This frogfish, Histiophryne psychedelica, was described in scientific literature for the first time last year by Ted Pietsch, Burke Museum curator of fishes and UW professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.

Now, H. psychedelica has been named among the top 10 new species described in the year 2009. The International Institute for Species Exploration just announced its annual top 10 list, which can be viewed here.

The fish was first found by divers in the busy harbor of Ambon Island, Indonesia. The species has a flattened face with eyes directed forward, something Pietsch has never seen before in frogfish. Adults are fist-sized with gelatinous bodies covered with thick folds of skin that protect them from sharp-edged corals. Fins on either side of their bodies have, as with other frogfish, evolved to be leg-like, and members of H. psychadelica actually prefer crawling to swimming.

Photo by David Hall/seaphotos.com

The Sahara Before Dinosaurs

Located in the Burke Museum’s lobby, a display currently case holds some important research conducted by Burke vertebrate paleontology curator Dr. Christian Sidor. Specifically, The Sahara before Dinosaurs mini-exhibit displays the objects and research collected by Sidor during expeditions to northern Niger. Research is connected to both science and culture, so the display highlights fieldwork, lab work, and the broader impact of research findings on the public.

During these expeditions, Sidor has been studying the Late Permian period (240—250 million years ago), before dinosaurs roamed the earth. Northern Niger has been the location of his trips because he is specifically examining which plants and animals lived near the equator during this period of time.

Based on information found in the fossils collected, Sidor and his research colleagues concluded that the supercontinent Pangea that existed during the Permian period had a desert-like center. Because of this climatic barrier, the animals in Niger were isolated from the rest of Pangea.

The Sahara before Dinosaurs display will be on view until October 3rd. Come see the display for yourself and view collections that include fossilized remains of Permian reptiles and a giant amphibian!

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

Photos: (Top) The Sahara Before Dinosaurs display case in the Burke Museum lobby; (bottom)Pangea drawing courtesy of USGS

How old are dinosaurs? Older than we thought!

Here’s some breaking news: dinosaurs may have lived much earlier than previously thought!

Burke Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology Christian Sidor and a team of paleontologists recently discovered that a dinosaur-like creature called Asilisaurus kongwe lived as many as 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaurs.

Asilisaurus is part of a sister group to dinosaurs known as silesaurs. Silesaurs are considered dinosaur-like because they share many dinosaur characteristics but still lack key characteristics all dinosaurs share. The relationship between silesaurs and dinosaurs is analogous to the close relationship of humans and chimpanzees. Sidor and his colleagues concluded that dinosaurs might also have lived at the time of Asilisaurus – bumping back the age of the oldest dinosaurs by 10 million years.

The Asilisaurus fossil bones were recovered from a single bone bed in southern Tanzania, making it possible to reconstruct a nearly entire skeleton. The creature would have stood about 1.5 to 3 feet tall and 3 to 10 feet long, weighing between 22 to 66 pounds. The description of the new species appeared in a paper published March 4 in Nature. The lead author is Sterling Nesbitt, at The University of Texas. Sidor is among the co-authors.

An article in the University Week gives more detail about the new species. Christian Sidor was also recently featured on NPR’s Science Friday, in an interview about the discovery. Click here to listen to his interview.

Posted by: MaryAnn Barron Wagner, Communications

Photos: (center) A life recreation of Asilisaurus kongwe. Marlene Hill Donnelly, Field Museum; (right) Christian Sidor excavates a fossil from the Manda beds in Tanzana in 2007, photo by L. Tsuji.

A Trip to Japan…

A few months ago, we posted about a first-ever cultural exchange in Seattle with the indigenous people of Japan, known as the Ainu. Just last year, the Ainu were formally recognized by Japan’s government as Japan’s “first peoples,” and in December 2009, a group of Ainu delegates visited Washington State for the first part of their cultural exchange with several Native communities in this region.

This Friday, Burke Museum curators Deana Dartt-Newton and Robin Wright, will hop on a plane to Hokkaido, Japan with a special delegation of Puget Sound area Native Americans and the UW’s Native Voices film crew to visit the Ainu on their own turf for the second part of this exchange.

The group of 11 will tour Hokkaido’s outlying cultural museums, exchange information about traditional salmon, cedar, and whaling life ways of the Ainu, and explore Ainu cultural revival. The US delegation returns home on March 20, 2010.

On her way out the door, project director, Deana Dartt-Newton commented that, “We are anticipating the rich dialogue that started in December to deepen as we see firsthand the ways Ainu culture has survived and now experiences a resurgence, so similar to the experiences of Northwest Tribal cultures. My work, which looks at ways that museums define Native identity, will be enhanced by a look at historic Ainu representations and how those have changed over time. We are all very excited!”

This exchange has been funded by Museums & Communities Collaboration Abroad (MCCA), which 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.

Check back for photos from Japan on our Facebook page.

Posted by: MaryAnn Barron Wagner, Communications

Studying paleobotany in Patagonia

Grass is something we all take for granted; it covers 1/3 of the Earth’s land surface, and provides many different sources of food for humans and other animals as well. But when did grasses first appear on the planet? How do they respond to varying climates? And, who/what ate them? These are just a few of the questions that Caroline Strömberg, Curator of Paleobotany at the Burke, seeks to answer when she travels to Patagonia, Argentina this month.

Why Patagonia? Paleontologists believe open grasslands first appeared in South America 30-million years ago, long before they emerged on other continents, based on evidence of large, herbivorous mammals called “meridiungulates” that appear in the fossil record at that time. These mammals had long legs and high-crowned teeth that seem specialized for grass-eating.

The research conducted by Caroline and her colleagues Matt Kohn (Boise State University), Rick Madden (Duke University), and Alfredo Carlini (Museo de La Plata, Argentina) can help answer other important questions that are currently affecting the world today. By analyzing the relationship between meridiungulates and vegetation, the gaps filled in the fossil record through the Patagonia research can help us better understand why, and how, both vegetation and animals respond to climate change.

So good luck, Caroline! We look forward to your return and learning more from your findings!

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

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

Burke curator studies new species from Antarctica

A new species that is a distant relative of mammals has been identified by Christian A. Sidor, Burke Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology, along with Jörg Fröbisch and Kenneth D. Angielczyk of the Field Museum. Kombuisia antarctica, a plant eater about the size of housecat, is part of a group of extinct mammal relatives called anomodonts. The Kombuisia antarctica’s name is tribute to where the pre-mammal lived, and by inhabiting Antarctica, the species was able to survive one of the most treacherous times on Earth.

The illustration shows the geographic location of Kombuisia antarctica in Antarctica with a reconstruction of how the animal probably looked like in life. (Credit: Jörg Fröbisch, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, and Christian A. Sidor)

About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, the world went through the largest known mass extinction in history. Scientists are debating what exactly caused the mass extinction to occur, but one of the likely causes is global warming as a result of major volcanic activity in Siberia. During this tumultuous time for the Earth’s living creatures, Antarctica was actually one of the safest places to be.

It may seem odd to think of Antarctica as a good place to live, but during the Permian Period, the continent was vastly different from the way it is today. The continent was further north, and therefore was warmer and did not have glaciers.

Although Antarctica may have been an inhabitable place for Kombuisia antarctica millions of years ago, scientists today face extreme weather conditions. However, scientific findings and discoveries like Kombuisia antarctica are well worth the expeditions. Sidor’s discovery fills gaps in the fossil record and gives us a better understanding of vertebrate survival throughout Earth’s history.

To learn more about Kombuisia antarctica, click here.

Posted By: Andrea Barber, Communications

Artifact ID Day photos

Posted by: Julia Swan, Communications

This past Saturday, I attended Artifact ID Day in the Burke Room. Curators, collections managers, and volunteers from our ethnology, geology, and archaeology divisions gathered for the afternoon to respond to some 200 people looking to have their unknown artifacts identified.

I took photos of some of the most interesting objects I saw, including a bone mug, an Alaskan mask, and lots of baskets and pottery.

Did you miss Artifact ID Day this year? Read this blog entry with tips for getting your object identified by our staff.

A new fish family?

Posted by: Rebecca Whitham

It looks like this handsome fellow...

...might just represent a newly discovered family of anglerfishes, according to Burke Curator of Fishes Ted Pietsch, one of the world's leading authorities on anglerfishes.

Though its missing the tell-tale prey-attracting lure that usually sprouts from anglerfishes' heads, the fish's eyes, flat-face, and leglike pectoral fins clued Dr. Pietsch in that this is most likely an anglerfish.

Pending DNA and morphology studies to confirm this classification, this fish could represent the first new family of anglerfishes described in a long, long time. In fact, according to Dr. Pietsch, in the last 50 years, scientists have described only five new families of fishes and none of them were even remotely related to anglerfishes.

Read more about its discovery over at uwnews.org.

- Rebecca

Photo by M. Snyder, starknakedfish.com/divingmaluku.com.

New podcast with Plateau curator

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin



You'd never guess how high energy a person Burke Blog staffer Karyn Gregory really is based on her perfectly soothing radio voice on the Burke Museum Podcasts!

Check out her latest interview with This Place Called Home guest curator Miles R. Miller (Yakama/Nez Perce). For the museum-lovers out there, Miller talks about his past industry experiences and what you can next expect from him in this field.

(Want more? Follow the interview link to learn how to subscribe to Burke Museum Podcasts.)

Enjoy!
Rebecca

Photo by Storms PhotoGraphic.

The Maker's Story

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin

If you missed the interview on KUOW yesterday, follow that link to hear This Place Called Home co-curator Miles R. Miller (Yakama/Nez Perce) talking with Sound Focus host Megan Sukys about the stories of the Plateau and the cultural differences across the Cascades. (The interview starts at around the 14 minute mark into the program from 1/29.)

The Plateau exhibits opened this weekend with a wonderful members’ reception on Friday night:

I'll be back soon with photos from the public opening this past Saturday.

- Rebecca

"In Progress"

Posted by: Karyn Gregory

One of my colleagues (and friends) in the Museology department has a show opening up this weekend at the Burke: This Place Called Home (along with the traveling exhibit Peoples of the Plateau). He's been working on curating this show nonstop since last Fall. The exhibit installation is finally finished and I managed to sneak in earlier this week and take some photos of the process to give readers a taste of what to expect. It looks...stunning. Hard to believe this is the same space the Y2Y and Giant Squid exhibits were in.

I'm so proud of Miles!

- Karyn

Plateau News

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin

University Week is out now with a wonderful piece on our upcoming Plateau exhibits (opening Jan. 26). Co-curators Miles R. Miller and Jim Nason talk about the significance of these exhibits in promoting cultural awareness across broad audiences. They offer great insight into the work of the museum: telling the real stories of real people using their real voices and authentic materials. It’s no easy job, but it is one they are both passionate about.

- Rebecca.

Photo: Baby moccasins and adult moccasins (Yakama), photo by Mary Levin. On view in This Place Called Home, Jan. 26 – June 8, 2008.

The Fish Lizard is here!

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin

Q: What measures 21 feet in length, ways over a 1000 pounds, and takes 5+ hours to hoist onto a wall?

A: The Burke’s newest fossil – a 125 million year old ichthyosaur! Ichthyosaur means “fish lizard” in Latin, a name that describes well this fully aquatic marine reptile of the Mesozoic.

I didn’t push or lift a thing the whole time, but yesterday I witnessed the installation of this giant fossil from beginning to end, and found myself exhausted just watching the process which took hours.

After icy road delays, our friends at Artech arrived early at the Museum and unloaded the crated fossil, split into three pieces for manageability. First up the ramp was the most difficult piece, the 1200 pound body and center of the fossil. The lighter head and tail pieces flew up the ramp by comparison.

Museum staffers showed up to help with the pushing, pulling, and hoisting of the giant specimens, which were super tricky to maneuver through the doors of the Burke Room. (Sure I could have helped, but then who would have taken the photos?!)

I was surprised by how quickly the pieces went up once they were secured to the chain pulleys. The middle went up first and we finished with the head – a crowning for the day.

Want to watch the whole 5 hours of action condensed into one minute? Check out the video slideshow below.

Lots of cameras showed up to capture the process for local news – check out today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times for feature photos in the B sections. KING, KOMO, and KIRO TV also featured the story on last night’s news.

- Rebecca

Photos

Top: Ichthyosaur in Burke Room

Bottom: Scan from The Seattle Times, 1/16/2008, (The Seattle Times photo by Steve Ringman).

Meet the Mosasaur

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin

The new year brings us a new friend on the UW campus.

Head down to Hitchcock Hall in south campus and you'll find a newly installed 85 million year old mosasaur fossil. And yes, it's real.

The mosasaur is an extinct marine reptile, a dominant predator of the Cretaceous Period. The one on display, newly donated to the Burke's paleontology collections by the Hart family, is probably a species of mosasaur known as Platecarpus.

Next week we install a 21-foot-long (!!!), 125 million year old ichthyosaur in the Burke Room, also donated by the Hart family. The scoop on that with lots of photos will be coming up soon on Burke Blog.

- Rebecca

Photos

Top: Burke Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Christian Sidor (left) and Fossil Preparator Bruce Crowley (Right) put finishing touches on the new mosasaur installation in Hitchcock Hall.

Bottom: Ichthyosaurus painting by Heinrich Harder

Plateau Close-up

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin

Last week I joined the curatorial team for an object photo shoot behind-the-scenes in our Ethnology collections lab. We’re gearing up for the January opening of two shows that look at Plateau Arts & Culture: Peoples of the Plateau (historic photography) and This Place Called Home (cultural materials from the Burke’s Plateau collections).

This Place Called Home guest curator Miles R. Miller (Yakama) is a beadwork artist inspired by the traditional motifs of the Plateau region. He’s pictured here along with a selection of objects from the exhibit, including a stunning buckskin coat (capote) with beaded details, a cradle board, and two hats that showcase two approaches to a similar motif.

These will be the first exhibits to celebrate Eastern Washington Plateau culture at the Burke in over 20 years. Many of the objects will be on exhibit for the first time ever thanks to Miles’ hard work and collaboration with Burke staff. Exciting times.

- Rebecca

Photos by Mary Levin

Spider collecting trip

Posted by: Rod Crawford

Burke spider curator (and author of Spider Myths!) Rod Crawford takes us along on a recent spider collecting trip…

So far this year, every time I had a chance for a spider collecting trip, it rained. But bad luck doesn't last forever. The atmosphere finally became cooperative in mid-April and local natura
list Laurel Ramseyer (recently arrived from Michigan via Massachusetts) wanted to find out what spider collecting was like. Our first joint site was Stone Quarry Canyon south of Ellensburg, a secluded place that I'd found using the great online map and photo resources now available. A washout in the dirt road forced us to walk, not a bad thing with meadowlarks singing and diverse wildflowers in bloom. Starting down the canyon, we were greeted by wolf spiders racing around in the just-turning-green early spring meadows.

The little tree clump (isolated among miles of sagebrush) that I'd found on aerial photos turned out to be Douglas maple, a nice surprise; I'd expected more common trees like cottonwood or pine. At least three rare spider species were among those sifted from the leaf litter. Laurel helped out by looking for spiders under rocks (she says she turned over every rock on two hillsides) while I finished the sifting and worked at sweeping grass and herbs and beating spiders from gooseberry, rabbit brush, and sagebrush.

Laurel spotted the best spider of the day, Misumenops importunus (one of the flower crab spiders) lying in wait for pollinators among the flowers on a gooseberry bush. It was the first record of the species from eastern Washington! Laurel was most impressed by a large male jumping spider, Phidippus johnsonii, with a bright red abdomen, but he could see her coming and refused to be collected. I later found one in a retreat under a board at dusk.

The only humans we saw all day were two young ladies ascending the canyon on muleback and horseback. The natural flora and fauna of the canyon (the latter including many bees, bee flies, and beetles) all contributed to a most satisfying day. And our collections (including three species brought back alive for rearing) filled in yet another of the many blanks on the Washington spider distribution maps.

Of course, immersion in nature means encounters with not only herbivores and predators, but also parasites - cattle ticks were more common than some people would have found quite comfortable. But the true naturalist can't let such small things detract from fullest enjoyment of the first spring field trip!

More photos and other details on this trip can be seen on this album page from the Spider Collector's Journal site.

- Rod

Photos, from top to bottom:
Stone Quarry, photo by R. Crawford
Phidippus johnsonii, male, photo by R. Crawford
Misumeops lepidus on a balsamroot flower, ready to embrace a bee, photo by L. Ramseyer

KUOW Interview Podcast

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin

If you didn't catch In the Spirit of the Ancestors curators Robin Wright and Bill Holm on KUOW's "The Beat" this afternoon, be sure to listen to the podcast. Just copy the following URL to your podcasting software of choice: http://www.kuow.org/podcasts/beat/beat.asp.

- Rebecca