Enjoy the Museum from Home via our Blog

Can't make it to the museum in person? We've done our best to help cultivate resources for you to enjoy from home. Activities for the whole family, different ways to experience our exhibitions and more are included in these blogs.

July 2, 2020 by wpengine

Mystery Spit

spittlebug froth on a leaf — Spittlebug froth on the stalk and leaf stem of a sneezeweed plant.

You’ve likely noticed the stuff at this time of year even if you didn’t have a ready name for it – grape-sized globs of frothy white foam on all kinds of plant stems.

The bubbles are made by the nymph stage of a large group of insects known commonly as frog hoppers, and scientifically as members of the widespread insect superfamily Cercopoidea.

Because the activity of the nymphs is so noticeable, they’ve earned their own common name – spittlebugs.

spittlebug on a leaf — A spittlebug temporarily removed from its frothy shelter.

The nymphs, which hatch in the spring from eggs laid the previous summer, are sap drinkers. They pierce plant stems to access the juices produced by the growing plant, drink deeply, and after processing vital nutrients, turn their waste stream into a protective shelter. Although spittlebug froth visually resembles spit, it contains no saliva. The bubbles are mixture of the tiny creature’s urine and a sticky fluid produced in an abdominal gland.

The frothy layer keeps the soft-bodied insects from drying out and it also serves as a predator barrier. Because spittlebugs produce urine in amounts more than 150 times their own body weight, their bubbly shelters generally offer ample protection.

Research about spittlebugs has been conducted at University of British Columbia. Information about this research, including a short video narrated by New York Times Science Writer James Gorman can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/science/spittlebugs-bubble-home.html

Patrick McShea works in the Education and Visitor Experience department of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Fourth of July and the Firefly

drawing of firefly that says World Firefly Day July 4-5, 2020

Although many fireworks shows are cancelled this Fourth of July, this is a great opportunity to get out over the holiday weekend and enjoy nature’s very own light show during World Firefly Day, on July 4^th and 5^th!

Fireflies, AKA lightning bugs, are neither flies nor bugs. They are actually a type of beetle with soft wings and the ability to bioluminesce (light up).

There’s a good chance you will see (or have already started seeing) firefly light displays this summer. There are six genera of fireflies that you are likely to encounter in Pennsylvania. Three are diurnal and don’t light up as adults (Ellychnia, Pyropyga, and Lucidota). Their light organs are absent or reduced in the adult stage. The remaining three genera are nocturnal and use light displays as adults. One is Pyractomena, which is a spring-active firefly that has already finished displaying for the year. That leaves Photinus and Photuris as the hosts of nature’s fireworks this Fourth of July. If you pay close attention to the flash patterns you’re seeing in your yard or get a chance to see one up close, you’ll probably be able to tell which one it is!

Photinus fireflies (top) are flattened in appearance and their heads are usually concealed from above, whereas Photuris fireflies (bottom) are hump-backed and you can often see their heads from above.

firefly on a leaf during the day — Creative Commons © David Cappaert, Bugwood.org

firefly on gray fabric — Photo credit: Andrea Kautz

Flash patterns vary by species, as do the timing and location of the display. Some species display low to the ground, while others display high in trees. Some are active at dusk, and others after dark. The most common firefly in the eastern U.S. is Photinus pyralis which has a lazy J-shaped flash pattern. Other flash patterns you may have seen are single or multiple rapid blinks. The displays you see are male fireflies advertising to females, who respond inconspicuously with their own flash pattern from a lower perched position. Some “femme fatales” in the genus Photuris will actually hunt by flashing in response to males of other species to lure them in, and then eat them!

Speaking of hunting, firefly larvae (below) are predators that live in moist soils, feeding on slugs and snails, which is a great method of pest control! Adults of some species are predators, but others drink nectar from flowers or simply do not eat at all.

The light-producing behavior has its origins in the larvae, which use the glow as a warning to predators that they are toxic. Other animals use bright colors to achieve this, but this wouldn’t be effective for nocturnal species in darkness. Adult fireflies light up to warn predators, but also to communicate with members of their own species, specifically potential mates. The distress signal is different from the mating signal, which you may notice if you capture a firefly in your hand and it starts to blink repeatedly.

We hope you get a chance to celebrate both the Fourth of July and World Firefly Day this year by witnessing some natural firework displays in your own back yard! We encourage you to share your experiences on the Fireflyers International Network Facebook page.

Andrea Kautz is a Research Entomologist at Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Mesozoic Monthly: Protostega

June 20^th was the first day of summer! The weather here in Pittsburgh is already beautiful. It’s enough to make one dream of a socially distant beach! Summer, of course, is sea turtle nesting season: during the next several weeks, female sea turtles all across our planet’s Northern Hemisphere will return to the beach where they hatched, drag themselves onto land, and lay their eggs in the sand. It would have been an incredible sight to see Protostega gigas, one of the largest sea turtles of all time, hauling itself onto the beach to lay its eggs! For June’s Mesozoic Monthly, we’re going to “dive in” to the paleontology of this giant reptile.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s spectacular skeleton of Protostega gigas is a composite made from the fossilized bones of two different individuals. Come see it on display in our Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition when the museum reopens at the end of this month. But don’t forget to purchase your timed ticket in advance!

All turtles, including sea turtles like Protostega and tortoises like the Galápagos giant tortoise, belong to the group Testudines. This group originated during the Triassic Period, the first of the three time periods of the Mesozoic Era (aka the Age of Dinosaurs). Turtles split from other reptiles to form their own group before crocodiles and dinosaurs evolved! This means that turtles are not descended from dinosaurs, no matter how primordial some tortoises may look. Turtles differ from other reptiles in many ways, the most noticeable being their iconic shells.

A turtle shell is formed of two main parts: the carapace, or top shell, and the plastron, or bottom shell. The shell is made of bone fused directly to the spine and ribcage, so a turtle cannot crawl out of its shell without leaving its skeleton behind! Another major difference between turtles and other modern reptiles involves skull anatomy. Turtles have anapsid skulls: the bony case that protects their brain lacks any external openings behind their eyes (known as temporal openings). All other extant reptiles plus birds are diapsids, meaning their skulls have two holes behind their eyes. Mammals differ from both conditions because we have only one temporal opening, making us synapsids. Traditionally, the anapsid condition of turtle skulls has been taken to indicate that they are the most primitive of living reptiles. More recently, however, many paleontologists and biologists have uncovered evidence that turtles are in fact diapsids whose evolutionary course led, for some reason, to a secondary closure of their temporal openings. According to these scientists, the closest relatives of turtles among today’s diapsids are either lepidosaurs (lizards, snakes, and kin) or archosaurs (crocodilians and birds).

A bird’s (or pterosaur’s!) eye view of Protostega gigas (left) swimming past two long-necked elasmosaurid plesiosaurs in shallow waters of North America’s Western Interior Seaway roughly 85 million years ago. (This scene is set in what’s now Kansas!) Art by Julio Lacerda; see more of his beautiful work here.

Reptiles, mammals, and birds all belong to a group called Amniota, and the key defining feature of amniotes is a protective layer around their eggs that allows this vulnerable life stage to survive on land. Having eggs that did not have to be laid in water meant that animals could move to less-wet habitats, a significant step in evolution! Unfortunately for sea turtles, which spend most of their lives at sea, this means they must return to land to lay their eggs. An amniotic egg would “drown” in water because the embryo still needs access to air. As a sea turtle, Protostega would have faced these same reproductive challenges, plus one more: it was huge!The largest modern turtle, the leatherback sea turtle, can grow over seven feet (2.1 meters) long; Protostega dwarfs it at 9.8 feet (3 meters)! If you’ve ever seen video of a sea turtle crawling onto the beach to nest, you know that it’s an awkward process. Imagine seeing a turtle that weighs at least a ton try to do the same! Although surely clumsy on land, Protostega was a graceful swimmer, using its four rigid flippers like wings to “fly” through the water.

Protostega lived in the Western Interior Seaway, an inland sea that stretched across much of North America during the Cretaceous Period (the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era). The seaway was warm, shallow, and teeming with all kinds of aquatic life: the perfect habitat for an omnivorous sea turtle. Because sea turtles are ectothermic (sometimes erroneously called “cold-blooded”), they cannot regulate their own body temperature. Instead, Protostega relied on warm water temperatures and sunlight hitting its back to keep warm. Although we don’t have a fossil record of the coloration of Protostega, we know that today’s large sea turtles are counter-shaded, with heat-absorbing, dark-colored backs and pale undersides. In an ocean environment where both predator and prey shift positions in the water column, this combination aids concealment. From below, a light-colored underside blends with light-saturated water. From above, a dark back blends with dark water. Camouflage in the water was an important feature when living alongside so many sizable predators. Protostega fossils have been found with bite marks from the large shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli, and it almost certainly was also on the menu for the mighty mosasaurs as well. Fortunately for us, we humans can enjoy the ocean knowing that few creatures are interested in eating us!

Lindsay Kastroll is a volunteer and paleontology student working in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum staff, volunteers, and interns are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Indiana Jones and the Rosetta Stone

Have you ever watched a film about archaeology and wondered how characters like Indiana Jones or Evelyn from The Mummy (1999) can run their fingers along a carved wall or slab, translating Egyptian hieroglyphs smoothly as they go?

The ability to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing today is all thanks to the Rosetta Stone. You may have heard of the Stone before, perhaps in the context of a popular language learning software, or you may know about the Stone itself, but do you know why it was such an incredible archaeological find?

The Rosetta Stone is a black granodiorite (similar to granite) slab standing 4 feet tall, 2 ½ feet wide, and 11 inches thick. It is part of a larger stele, a stone or wooden slab erected to commemorate occasions, act as territorial markers, or for funerary purposes. The Stone bears three blocks of text written in three different languages- Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Ancient Greek.

The Rosetta stone was carved during the Hellenistic period and moved at some later point. It was eventually used as construction material for a wall of Fort Julien in Rashid (or Rosetta). It was rediscovered there in 1799. While the history of its discovery is not particularly well-documented it is typically attributed to Pierre-Francis Bouchard, a French soldier on a Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. The Rosetta Stone was taken by British troops after they defeated France and transported to London. It has been on display at the British Museum since 1802.

black and white image of boat in the water

The reason the Rosetta Stone is so significant is because it was the key that unlocked our understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, giving us a window into the ancient civilization. The text on it is pretty mundane and of no great historical significance. It is a decree (called the Decree of Memphis), outlining the achievements and good leadership of King Ptolemy, who ruled Egypt from 204-181 B.C.E. The decree was made and copied onto several stelae which were placed in temples throughout Egypt, the Rosetta Stone being just one of them. Since the discovery and eventual translation of the Rosetta Stone, several other more intact stelae inscribed with the Decree of Memphis have been found.

Ancient Greek was already well known to scholars, so the translation of that section happened fairly quickly, though unknown religious and administrative jargon delayed the process. Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon published the first translation of the Greek text in 1803. Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, there had been little success in translating Demotic and even less in translating hieroglyphs. Having all three languages together was an incredible resource for scholars because for the first time, they could study whether there was a direct link between the languages, and use their translation of the Ancient Greek text to translate the other languages on the stone.

Swedish scholar Johan David Åkerblad had already been working on translating an unknown script found in Egypt. He called this script “cursive Coptic” though it did not share many similarities to Coptic, a language derived from the Greek alphabet and used in Egypt through the 17^th century C.E. The language he was studying was actually Demotic, and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone aided his research. He, along with Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, set to work translating this larger text. Having the Greek text side by side, they were able to locate where names lined up, and begin deciphering Demotic. Åkerblad proposed an alphabet of 29 letters, half of which were correct, but they failed to identify the remaining characters.

The translation of the hieroglyphic text similarly revolved around proper names. As early as 1761, scholars believed that characters enclosed in cartouches (or ovals with a line at one end) were proper names. By sorting through the Greek text and comparing where names would most likely be Thomas Young, foreign secretary of the Royal Society of London, was able to discover phonetic characters that aligned with Greek names. This discovery was incredibly important, as Young found these phonetic characters were similar to the Demotic characters in proper names, and then further discovered about 80 other similarities between Demotic and hieroglyphic writing. This shows that Demotic is actually a mix of phonetic characters and ideograms, which is what prevented Åkerblad and Silvestre de Sacy from progressing further with their translation, they had assumed Demotic used only phonetic characters.

series of letters and symbols in various languages

In 1814, Young corresponded with Jean-François Champollion, a teacher at Grenoble who had done scholarly work on Ancient Egypt. Champollion was able to construct an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphs, which was announced publicly on September 27^th, 1822. From there, Champollion went on to develop an Ancient Egyptian grammar and hieroglyph dictionary, which was published after his death in 1832. Other scholars drew upon the work done by Åkerblad, Silvestre de Sacy, Young, and Champollion to delve deeper into the text on the Rosetta Stone and create a full translation.

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark takes place more than 100 years after Champollion’s dictionary was published. We can assume that during his studies and explorations, Indy studied this dictionary, and any others that followed, giving him the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs at any moment. While Indiana Jones is a fictitious archaeologist and scholar, we have real scholars to thank for the fact that we can enjoy films about this character today!

Jo Tauber works in LifeLong Learning at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

June 25, 2020 by wpengine

Behind the Scenes with the Baron de Bayet and L. W. Stilwell Collection Part 3: The Wild West Formed Million of Years Ago

photo of Badlands National Park — Figure 1: Badlands National Park today, National Park Service photo, 2014. This view of the Badlands topography illustrates the erosion that took place over the last 2 million years.

The Lakota called the Badlands “Mako Sica” or “land bad.” The early French-Canadian trappers referred to it as “les mauvais terres pour traverse” or “bad lands to travel through.” Seventy-five million years ago, this area was a lush underwater seaway filled with creatures such as mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, diving birds, fish, baculites, and ammonites (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Taxa that swam in the Western Interior Seaway from *Dinosaurs in Their Time* exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Photo by Patty Dineen.

The Stilwell fossils of Cretaceous age (Figure 3) were deposited in a black mud that accumulated on the sea floor from 82 to 70 million years ago (Figure 4). The Pierre Shale is part of the extensive Western Interior Seaway of North America (Figure 5). Museum visitors can view a changing geographic representation of the seaway on a wall-mounted flat screen monitor within the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibit. The seaway extended from the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and southern Gulf Coast, north through Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and the Canadian Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. This vast waterway terminated in the Artic region of Canada. At the time of the Pierre Sea, the ice sheet-free greenhouse to hothouse paleoclimate was much warmer than it is today, creating the highest sea levels in earth’s history. Sea level rises and falls were primarily controlled by the presence or melting of glaciers in the polar regions, the shifting of the continents, and the uplifting of proto-Rocky Mountains by plate tectonics.

Figure 3: Western Interior Seaway fossils on display at Carnegie Museum’s *Dinosaurs in Their Time* exhibit. Stilwell fossils are highlighted in blue.

Figure 4: Outcrop photo of Pierre shale.

Figure 5: Western Interior Seaway approximately 75 million years ago. Red dot locates Deadwood, South Dakota today.

Fast forward to the Wild West of the 1890’s, and dealers such as Stilwell found and sold fossils to museums and private collectors. Knowledge of Badlands fossils spread as far as Europe, and by 1889 Bayet wanted some for his own collection.

Next, in our final post of this series, we will delve into the Stilwell-Bayet correspondence in search of clues about how fossils were bought and sold over a century ago.

Joann Wilson is an Interpreter for the Department of Education and a volunteer with the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology. Albert Kollar is Collections Manager for the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

The Bromacker Project Part VI: Seymouria sanjuanensis, the Tambach Lovers

New to this series? Read The Bromacker Fossil Project Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

Seymouria sanjuanensis fossils — Two exquisitely preserved, nearly complete adult skeletons of *Seymouria sanjuanensis* that were discovered in the Bromacker quarry in 1997. Photo by Dave Berman.

At lunchtime on the last day of the 1997 field season, Thomas Martens discovered the two exquiste specimens shown above, the only fossils found that year. Thomas had uncovered a piece of the hip region with some attached vertebrae that resembled, once again, those of the ancient amphibian Seymouria. Because our work time was limited, we estimated the length of the specimen and rushed to extract it from the quarry. When we flipped the block over, a few pieces of rock fell out, revealing a series of vertebrae of a second individual in the block. We were thrilled to learn that Thomas had discovered two specimens of Seymouria. We put the rock pieces back in place and quickly finished plastering the block. There was just enough time for Dave, Stuart Sumida, and I to return to our hotel, clean up, quickly pack, and meet Thomas, his family, and his fossil preparator Georg Sommer for a celebratory dinner. What a great way to end the field season.

Working in tight quarters to quickly extract the *Seymouria* specimens discovered at lunchtime on the last day of the field season. Clockwise from right: Georg Sommer, Dave Berman, and the author. Photo by Stuart Sumida, 1997.

Seymouria had already been known from the Bromacker quarry. Thomas had discovered and identified two skulls in 1985, fossils he brought with him when he came to Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) in 1993 to study for six months with Dave Berman under a CMNH-financed fellowship. Both skulls were of juvenile individuals. Of the two known species of Seymouria, Dave and Thomas were excited to discover that the Bromacker skulls were nearly identical to those of Seymouria sanjuanensis. The 1997 lunchtime discovery of the two complete adult specimens confirmed the identification of the Bromacker Seymouria as S. sanjuanensis.

The first discovered species of Seymouria was Seymouria baylorensis, from near Seymour, Baylor County, Texas, from which its name was derived. Seymouria sanjuanensis was first found in San Juan County, Utah, by Dave Berman and the field team he was leading as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dave’s advisor, Dr. Peter Vaughn, named it Seymouria sanjuanensis in reference to the county of discovery. Another discovery of five specimens of this species preserved together was made by Dave in New Mexico in 1982.

Comparison of the skulls of *Seymouria baylorensis* (top) and *S. sanjuanensis* (bottom). The individual bones of the skull are color coded. Skulls scaled to same size. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Seymouria baylorensis is geologically younger than S. sanjuanensis and has a more robust skull, larger and fewer teeth of variable size, and a subrectangular postorbital bone compared to the chevron-shaped postorbital of S. sanjuanensis.

Seymouria is considered a terrestrial amphibian that only returned to water to breed. Its strongly built skeleton provided the support needed to move on land. With its numerous, slender, pointed teeth, S. sanjuanensis most likely ate insects and small land-living vertebrates. We know that the Bromacker Seymouria didn’t consume fish, because not a single fish fossil, scrap of fish fossil, or fish coprolite (fossil poop) has ever been found at the Bromacker quarry. Study of the rock deposits preserving the fossils at the Bromacker indicate a lack of permanent water, which would explain the absence of fish.

Growth series of skulls of *Seymouria sanjuanensis* from the Bromacker Quarry showing (left to right) early juvenile, late juvenile, and adult growth stages. Photos by the author, 2006.

Conditions for breeding must have been favorable in the Tambach Basin, the ancient basin where sediments preserving the Bromacker fossils accumulated, because several juvenile specimens of Seymouria are known. The smallest is a skull measuring about ¾ of an inch long. In a study led by our colleague Josef Klembara (Comenius University, Slovak Republic), we determined that the smallest individual was post-metamorphic—in other words, no longer a tadpole—based on the presence of certain ossified bones in the skull. In tadpoles, these skull elements are cartilaginous; that is, they haven’t yet turned to bone.

The discovery in Germany of the same species of Seymouria previously known only from New Mexico and Utah has important implications in terms of paleobiogeography (the study of the distribution of species in space and time). At the time S. sanjuanensis was alive, the continents were merged to form the supercontinent Pangaea. The presence of S. sanjuanensis across Pangaea, north of a roughly east-west trending mountain range, indicates that climatic or physical barriers (e.g., deserts, inland seas, mountain ranges) didn’t prevent its dispersal.

Map showing the arrangements of the continents in the Early Permian. The locality where *Seymouria* occurs in present-day New Mexico, Texas, and Utah and the Bromacker locality in present-day Germany are indicated. Map modified from Scotese, 1987.

The two Seymouria specimens preserved together were a big hit in the local region in Germany. Museum der Natur (MNG) exhibit preparator Peter Mildner nicknamed them the “Tambacher Liebespaar” (“Tambach Lovers”) after a painting entitled “Gothaer Liebespaar” (“Gotha Lovers”) on exhibit in the Herzogliches Museum of the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein (also the parent organization of MNG). This name caught on and is fondly used by our German friends and colleagues. Peter even made a fleshed-out model of the two Seymouria specimens in their death pose. The proprietor of the hotel in which we stayed hung a copy of the model of the Tambach Lovers and a framed collage of newspaper articles featuring the Bromacker on a wall in one of the hotel rooms, which she named the “Präparation Suite” (i.e. “Preparation Suite” in reference to the preparation of fossils). I often stayed in this room.

The painting entitled “Gothaer Liebespaar” (“Gotha Lovers”), which is on display at Herzogliches Museum of the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, Germany. Image from Wikimedia Commons and provided by Thomas Martens.

Tambach Lovers postcard — Postcard showing the Tambach Lovers. The postcard was made for and sold by the Museum der Natur, Gotha. Photo of the postcard by the author, 2020.

Stuart Sumida (left) and Heike Scheffel, proprietor of the Hotel Wanderslaben where we stayed (right), with the model of the Tambach Lovers in the “Präparation Suite.” The framed collage to the right of the model holds newspaper articles featuring the Bromacker project. Photo by the author, 2003.

A cast of the Tambach Lovers specimen and a model of Seymouria sanjuanensis are exhibited in the Fossil Frontiers display case in CMNH’s Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition. Be sure to look for them once the museum re-opens. And stay tuned for my next post, which will feature the unusual bipedal reptile Eudibamus cursoris.

For those of you who would like to learn more about Seymouria sanjuanensis, here is a link to the publication describing the 1997 specimens: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1671/0272-4634(2000)020%5B0253%3AROSSSF%5D2.0.CO%3B2.

Amy Henrici is Collection Manager in the Section of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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