RW Moriarty Science Seminars

Imperial Order: How the Herbarium Shaped Botany from the Enlightenment to the Early United States

Monday, October 7, 2024, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Earth Theater and online via Zoom

Featuring Molly Hardy, National Endowment for the Humanities

This lecture is free, museum admission is not required.

A product of the Enlightenment, the herbarium cabinet lays out strictures for the natural world, and it became the way that botanical information was organized, but it also came to organize botanical thinking. Through its reordering of nature into the taxonomic system of categories and relationships within those categories, the herbarium takes the ecological system as it exists in the natural world and effectively makes a new system. This new system is what Dr. Hardy calls an “information ecology,” one in which the plant must first become a singular, individual unit— a species specimen—that then can be ordered to function in Botany’s taxonomic systems.

The talk begins with a look at Carl Linnaeus’ plans for the herbarium cabinet, laid out in his botanical treatise, Philosophia Botanica (1751). Linnaeus eschewed the bound book for a piece of furniture filled with plants dried on sheets and organized according to his botanical system. This new information architecture ordered flora in a way that reflected Botany’s inextricable ties to empire. The herbarium reflected the philosophical thinking underlying Linnaeus’ work, and then, the herbarium came to shape botanical thinking by atomizing plant communities and mechanizing plant specimens for ease of ordering and reordering, storing and retrieving.

Dr. Hardy next turns to Botany in the early United States, where the Linnaean system of botanical order was adopted. A century after Linnaeus, Asa Gray, a self-proclaimed “closet botanist,” praised the herbarium as the indispensable tool for the burgeoning field of plant science in the United States. The individuation of species, required for the herbarium to function, became Gray’s life work as he toiled tirelessly to classify and name the plants collected as the new nation expanded west. Plants from these peripheries of the American empire came east to be organized, and ordered, in Gray’s herbarium at Harvard.

Click here to register to attend virtually via Zoom. Registration is not necessary. Museum admission is not included with the lecture. Visitor Services staff can direct you to Earth Theater on arrival.

Searching for Thylacines (Tasmanian Wolves or Tigers) in Natural History Collections

Monday, September 23, 2024, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Earth Theater and online via Zoom

Featuring John Wible, Curator of Mammals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History

This lecture is free. Museum admission is not required.

Europeans settled Tasmania in 1803. One-hundred and twenty-seven years later, the last thylacine was shot in the wild in northwest Tasmania, and on September 7, 1936, the last known thylacine died in captivity at the Hobart Zoo. What happened during those 133 years that resulted in the extermination of this largest marsupial carnivore? Multiple factors are responsible, including public misperceptions that led to private and government bounties. Science, natural history museums, and zoos played a role, with a mad dash to obtain specimens before there were no more.

Some 500 thylacine specimens are in museums today, including one relatively complete skeleton in the Section of Mammals, Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The origin of the CM specimen is a mystery; it was accessioned in 1942 along with 211 specimens discovered during a storeroom reorganization. Inspired by the CM specimen, John Wible’s bucket list is to study in person as many of these thylacines as possible, documenting variation in skull morphology.

Click here to register to attend virtually via Zoom. Registration is not necessary to attend in person. Museum admission is not included with the lecture. Visitor Services staff can direct you to Earth Theater on arrival.

R.W. Moriarty Science Seminar Presents: “Leveraging the Digital Extended Specimen Model of Extensible Biodiversity Data for Advancing Collections-Based Research and Education”

In recent decades, digital data has been added to the physical objects housed in natural history collections around the world, allowing researchers, educators, and policy makers easy access to centuries of information about Earth’s biodiversity. In addition to an influx of digital data, efforts to digitize collections have also supported an increasingly engaged collections community.

Digital data provide the opportunity to link information about biodiversity across databases, such that analysis beginning with a two-hundred-year-old plant specimen, for example, can lead a researcher to associated environmental, genetic, and climate data pertinent to informing their scientific research. This extensible network of information has been termed the Digital Extended Specimen (DES), and once fully implemented will provide an efficient, standards-based, interdisciplinary approach to collections-based research.

In support of a DES and other initiatives, US collections professionals have been organizing around the concept of a Biological Collections Action Center. An Action Center has the potential to provide the infrastructure for maintaining, expanding, and supporting myriad activities that are currently disparate, institution-specific, or otherwise siloed. These two components – enhanced collections data and an active professional community – have led to advancements that are likely to continue to shape this community for another decade or more.

Speaker: Libby Ellwood, iDigBio.

This event will take place Monday, May 20, 2024 at Noon in person at Earth Theater.

Seminar 169

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R.W. Moriarty Science Seminar Presents: “Nittany Lions, Peruvian Chinchillas, and Mammalian Cognition: 25+ Years of Collaboration Between Penn State and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History”

Speaker: Carolyn Mahan, Penn State.

Since 1994, I have worked with the Section of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) to explore conservation issues and to ask evolutionary questions locally and globally. In this lecture, I will explore these projects starting with my initial project to return the “Original Nittany Lion” to The Pennsylvania State University. The original lion—a taxidermy specimen from the mid-1800s—was the inspiration for the Penn State mascot and was being stored at CMNH after being displayed at the Chicago’s World Fair. It took 100 years for it to find its way back to Penn State. I also have explored the plight of the short-tailed chinchilla—a critically endangered species of rodent native to the high Andean plateau. Its fur was so valuable that no specimens exist in any mammal collections in the western hemisphere. Curators and collection managers at CMNH helped discover specimens for me to study in the collections of Europe. Finally, I examined cranial capacity of small mammals and brown bears using skulls curated at CMNH. Cranial capacity, as a surrogate for cognitive ability, permits my research team to better understand wild mammals’ abilities to adapt to novel, human environments in the United States and Europe.

This event will take place Monday, April 15, 2024 at Noon in person at Earth Theater.

Seminar 169

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R.W. Moriarty Science Seminar Presents: “Minerals as the Bedrock of the Energy Transition”

Speaker: Barbara Dutrow, Louisiana State University.

Minerals, the fundamental solid material comprising planet Earth, are critical to solving some of society’s most pressing challenges, including global warming and the climate crises. Minerals provide the essential chemical constituents needed for the lower carbon energy transition and are a key for technological advances. Their myriad crystal structures inform new technologies that capture the mineral’s unique properties to provide solutions to, and advance development of, new materials. Other minerals act to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, lowering dangerous greenhouse gases.

This presentation focuses on three aspects of minerals centrality to the lower carbon energy transition: their ability to act as sinks for carbon dioxide; their unprecedented need as suppliers for chemical elements critical to a vast number of current and future technologies; and their use as templates for advanced functional materials that are more energy efficient. Central to these themes is the role that minerals play as a part of the solution to these crises.

This event will take place Monday, February 26, 2024 at Noon in person at Earth Theater.

Seminar 166

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