Pat McShea, an educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, recently gave an excellent TEDx talk in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. Listen to his story, titled “People are part of Nature,” below.
Patrick McShea
Herons and Henry David Thoreau
by Patrick McShea
Two hundred years after the birth of naturalist Henry David Thoreau, his writing continues to challenge us to be better observers of animals, plants, weather patterns, sounds, and landscapes.
Although the Concord, Massachusetts native would insist that such emulation occur outdoors, selected quotes from his works can add much to our appreciation of details preserved in museum exhibits.
Consider, for example, Thoreau’s precise word-rendering of a subtle shade of color. He described the plumage of a great blue heron’s wing as “a tempered blue as of the sky and dark water commingled.” In Population Impact, museum visitors can verify the accuracy of the poetic description while viewing the great blue heron taxidermy mount displayed in the third-floor exhibition.
A more challenging exercise involves viewing the recently restored, century-old diorama of nesting green herons now displayed at the first-floor level of the Grand Staircase.
In an 1840 journal entry about observing a green heron along a New England river, Thoreau expressed envy for the wading bird’s experience of the world:
“It has looked out from its dull eye for so long, standing on one leg, on moon and stars sparkling through silence and dark, and now what a rich experience is its! What says it of stagnant pools, and reeds, and damp night fogs? It would be worth while to look in the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours and in such solitudes. When I behold that dull yellowish green, I wonder if my own soul is not a bright invisible green. I would fain lay my eye side by side with its and learn of it.”
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 of working at the museum.
Turtle Bottoms
Upside down is an unnatural state. Yet within the museum’s display of Pennsylvania turtles, four of 14 taxidermy mounts are bottom side up. With strained necks and legs positioned in frozen flail, the four reptiles, each representing a different
turtle species, appear in perpetual effort to right themselves.
Their awkward stance reveals clever exhibit design. A turtle’s bottom shell, or plastron, differs drastically from its upper shell, or carapace, in size, shape, color pattern, and surface texture. The overturned turtles instantly convey this visual information to attentive viewers.
At Carnegie Museum of Natural History, displays of Pennsylvania’s amphibians and reptiles can be found on the Daniel G. and Carole L. Kamin T. rex Overlook.
For addition species information visit: http://www.fishandboat.com/Resource/AmphibiansandReptiles/Pages/default.aspx
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 of working at the museum.
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Blog author: McShea, PatrickPublication date: July 14, 2017
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Poisonous, Venomous, Toxin
by Patrick McShea
With the opening for The Power of Poison just weeks away, museum educators have been re-examining familiar displays for connections to our summer blockbuster exhibition’s major themes. This self-study process produced some surprising results. For example, a diorama depicting American black bears in a rocky corner of the Allegheny National
Forest is a good place to review meanings for the terms poisonous, venomous, and toxin. The bears in this scenario become mere directional reference points for locating a relevant supporting cast.
A blooming mountain laurel shrub is rooted in a rock crevice just beyond the rump of the smaller adult bear. The plant, Pennsylvania’s official state flower, is poisonous, meaning that it contains substances that create undesirable interference with another organism’s physiological processes. All parts of mountain laurel are poisonous if ingested. The chemical culprits are two toxins, or specific molecular compounds, known as andromedotoxin and arbutin.
A bear’s width beneath the mountain laurel, an eastern timber rattlesnake lies coiled on a level rock. This ambush predator is one of three venomous snake species native to Pennsylvania. The modifier indicates amazing adaptations for capturing prey—the ability to produce, store, and inject venom, or poisonous fluids, in a lightning fast strike.
In the diorama’s far left foreground a ruffed grouse, Pennsylvania’s official state bird, perches warily on a worn stump. In discussions of poisons, the species merits an historical footnote. Accounts of people being poisoned after eating ruffed grouse from the 19th century linked symptoms to the bird’s diet of mountain laurel buds during periods of heavy snow cover. When regulations ended winter grouse hunts, poisoning reports sharply declined.
When The Power of Poison is on display (May 27–September 4, 2017), exhibits throughout the museum with poison connections will be marked with distinctive tags. The summer blockbuster exhibition itself is an immersive
experience that lets you venture down a jungle path or step into fairytale on a journey through science, history, and literature to explore poison’s power in the natural world.
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 of working at the museum.
The American Pika
by Patrick McShea
Just when our interest in a previously overlooked creature has been effectively sparked, we are abruptly informed of dire threats to the species’ continued existence. As a museum educator, it is sometimes hard to avoid such set-ups, particularly when the looming threat to the featured wildlife is global climate change.
Consider the situation of the American Pika. These Guinea pig-sized creatures occur across the more mountainous areas of western North America in a range that progressively increases in elevation as it stretches southward from British Columbia to New Mexico. Pikas rank high on any scale of visual appeal. In several national parks, the sight of a pika barking its “squeaky toy” alarm call from a boulder top lookout is one of the hard-earned rewards for hiking above the timberline.
Habitat requirements for these rabbit-relatives include piles of sheltering rocks and boulders, flowers and other nourishing vegetation as a food source, and consistently cool temperatures. Within the Hall of North American Wildlife, these habitat elements are depicted in a diorama featuring three Stone Sheep.
Two partially concealed pikas share the three-dimensional alpine scene with the trio of larger and far more mobile hoofed mammals. First-time viewers must survey the landscape to spot the pikas, an action that visually inventories the critical habitat threatened by a changing climate.
The fresh plant stem in the mouth of one pika and the winter food supply of dried plants guarded by another grew in limited zones of adjacent soil. These micro-meadows, which could be traversed by the sheep in a dozen strides, are critical home range for the pikas.
A changing climate threatens to disrupt such delicately balanced pika living arrangements in a least two ways. If warmer daytime temperatures force pikas to forage more at night, predation rates will likely rise, and as snow packs are reduced, the creatures lose a critical winter insulation blanket. For pika populations on mountaintop “sky islands,” there are no good relocation options.
Since 2009 a team of National Park Service staff and academic researchers have collaborated on a research project to both assess climate change threats to pikas and develop strategies to address those threats. More information about this initiative can be found at: https://science.nature.nps.gov/im/units/ucbn/monitor/pikas_in_peril.cfm
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 of working at the museum.
Frog Fossil Hunt in Nevada
Frog fossil from eastern Nevada.
by Patrick McShea
Dinosaurs get all the attention, but fossils of less glamorous creatures also contribute much to our understanding of evolution and extinction. Consider frogs for example. These widely distributed amphibians first appear in the fossil record roughly 190 million years ago. Since then they have
survived numerous events, including mass extinction, changing climate, and the rearrangement
of continents through plate tectonics.
The study of how frogs adapted to changing environments over vast stretches of time is especially important today in light of dramatic declines of many frog species due to rapid climate change, habitat fragmentation, the global spread of disease, and broad changes in land use.
Frogs are not ignored in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Dinosaurs in Their Time. A rectangular display case near the terminus of Diplodocus carnegeii’s exquisitely tapered tail, a cast featuring tiny frog bones from Dinosaur National Monument shares space with the holotype skull of a Jurassic crocodile.
The bones represent a species that must have sometimes dwelled in the literal shadows of sauropod dinosaurs. The species was named Rhadinosteus parvus in a scientific research paper by Amy Henrici, a paleontologist who is the collection manager for the Carnegie’s Section of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Amy has conducted research and published findings on other frog fossils, and regularly serves as a peer reviewer for the research papers of other scientists studying the frog fossils. This fall, at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) in Salt Lake City, Amy will be presenting
information about an ongoing study of frog fossils from eastern Nevada.
My interest in her research and publications is deeper than that of an admiring co-worker. Amy and I have been married for 28 years, and several times I have worked as her field assistant. This fall, I’ll fill that
role again when she conducts post-SVP Meeting field work at two sites in eastern Nevada. As a museum educator I plan to post pictures and updates about the fossil-hunting expedition, so stay tuned! More frog posts are coming.
Grass Frog skeleton in the CMNH teaching collection.
(Eastern Gray Tree Frogs in the Pennsylvania Amphibians display on the Daniel G. & Carole L. Kamin T-rex Overlook.)
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 of working at the museum.