Carnegie Museum of Natural History
One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
Last month, the staff at Carnegie Museum of Natural History hosted students and faculty from the University of Pittsburgh’s Consuming Nature group. We gave them an exclusive, behind the scenes look at the research collection. Dr. Eric Dorfman, the Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin Director of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, hosted the group, who visited the museum to develop ideas and gather information for future teaching and research projects.
Everyone in Pittsburgh knows that Carnegie Museum of Natural History is the place to see some amazing fossils. But did you know they’re not just in our famous paleontology and geology halls? If you look carefully at the walls of our Grand Staircase, there are fossils of small invertebrates visible in the walls!
In the photo below, Carnegie Geologist Albert Kollar pointed out a small snail fossil embedded in the stone.
Keep an eye out for them on your next visit!
Last month, Carnegie Museum of Natural History Geologist Albert Kollar was traveling in France on a research trip, where a local newspaper wrote about his work. Read the translation below.
In the picture, Kollar is photographed with representatives of the SPIA associations of Saint-Quentin, the Friends of the old Tullins, the Archaeological Association of Veurey and Corepha de Vorepp. Kollar is in the middle, crouching.
An American geologist visits the Echaillon
Saint-Quentin-sur-IsèreOn Monday, the association SPIA (protection of the past
industrial patrimony) welcomed for two days Albert Kollar, an American
geologist from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He is the person responsible of the impressive fossil collection (more than
800.000 registered) and the stones. It is in this regard that he came in Isère,
because the columns of the Carnegie Museum are made of “yellow Echaillon”.His objective was to know better the story of this stone
stemming from the region and chosen by the architects of Boston in charge of
the construction of the Museum in 1907.Supported by the associations “Corepha de Voreppe” and “The
Friends of the old Tullins”, and by the Archaeological Association of Veurey,
SPIA reconstituted the story of this “stone of Echaillon”. Then, the American
geologist visited the stone quarries of the Echaillon and the Lignet.Albert Kollar was amazed by the production sites and by the
ingenuity of the techniques used by the past.Despite the multitude of constructions made with this stone,
he was surprised that it was never recorded in the “Global heritage stone resource”,
the Gotha of stones and proposed to provide assistance to remedy it.
by Albert Kollar
The recent blasting (not the 4th fireworks) of rocks onto the railroad tracks along West Carson Street is one of the great geology stories of Pittsburgh. The large boulder pictured in the July 6, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story is sedimentary rock formed more than 300 million
years ago when Pittsburgh was situated near the equator during a time of warm, dry, and wet climate.
The landscape was a broad coastal area similar to today’s southern United States at New Orleans. The rivers back then flowed northwest draining out from the rising Appalachian Mountains forming off the east coast of ancestral North America. The salt water sea or coast line at the time was situated west near Columbus, Ohio.
After the Appalachians formed erosion of the massive mountain of rocks eroded down over millions of years to approximately what we see today as the flat top of Mt. Washington or Grandview Avenue.
Then the Ice Age came and helped form the River Valleys of the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River, forming the new Ohio River at the Pittsburgh point. We know from geology that the steep slope sides along the river valleys are unstable and have been for thousands of years.
Once Pittsburgh was established in 1758 with the fall of French Fort Duquesne, civilization, industrialization, and building of the railroads in 1850 and 1900 into the hillside above W. Carson Street, created more destabilization of the hillside. Now more rocks fall.
Albert D Kollar is a geologist at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.
Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s scientists will be available on Saturday, April 16 to identify objects that visitors have found in nature for Super Science: Specimen ID Day.
These events are a unique experience for visitors, but also an interesting way for our scientists to interact with the public and test their knowledge!
Albert Kollar, Section of Invertebrate Paleontology, said that the number of places that people bring in specimens from is the part of Specimen ID Day that he finds most intriguing.
Kollar said he helped identify specimens collected from Pennsylvania, Ohio, western New York, Virginia, Maryland along the Chesapeake Bay, South Carolina and North Carolina’s underwater shoreline, Indiana, Missouri, and Colorado.
“That was fun and a challenge to review my knowledge,” he said. “Some of it was easy as it worked to my experiences of conducting research in many of those states excluding North and South Carolina.”
He said a little girl who collected fossils from the Falls of the Ohio rocks of Indiana was one of the best specimens brought to him at a Specimen ID Day.
Timothy Pearce, Assistant Curator of Mollusks, said someone brought in a fist-sized shell that looked like a cowry (appealingly shaped, attractive, shiny sea shells), but not like any cowry he had ever seen at a similar event.
“We finally determined that it is actually the earbone of a whale, which is, interestingly, shaped very much like a cowry!” Pearce said. “This was way before we had Google Images, so it took a bit of sleuthing to track it down.”
Students from Shady Side Academy Middle School studied our extensive fossil collection last week to learn about theories of climate, extinction, and evolution.
Albert Kollar, Section of Invertebrate Paleontology, used fossils from different periods of the Paleozoic era to show how trilobites changed and evolved over millions of years.
“Trilobites are popular with kids of any age and belong to a group of animals called arthropods
that include horseshoe crabs and insects,” said Mr. Kollar
The trilobites that the students touched and held come from the ancient rocks found today in the Czech Republic, France, Sweden, British Columbia, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Utah, and Pennsylvania- the home of the 390 million year old state fossil of Pennsylvania.
Arriving at the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology lab, the students received a fossil coloring book to teach them about rocks and fossils in the Pittsburgh area. The class then split into smaller groups, each getting their own try at identifying rocks and fossils from Pennsylvania or making molds of different fossils from the collection with Plaster of Paris.
