RW Moriarty Science Seminars

Future-proofing Museum Collections: Collections Care and Access at Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Monday, December 9, 2024, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Earth Theater and online via Zoom

Featuring Kathy Hollis, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

This lecture is free. Museum admission is not required.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History stewards a collection that is more than a repository of specimens—it is a dynamic archive of the natural world, each item telling a unique story about our planet and our place in it. From butterflies and trilobites to preserved snakes and ancient pottery, these collections are primary data about the natural world. Future-proofing collections—ensuring preservation and accessibility for generations—has long been the duty of natural history museums. Yet, shifting research methods, global environmental and technological changes, and evolving perspectives within the museum profession have all changed how collections must be cared for and made accessible. Recent projects have laid a strong foundation for the future, but without a museum-wide strategy, their full potential remains unrealized. In 2022, Carnegie Museum of Natural History set bold, 10-year goals through its opportunity assessment “Evolving Natural History: A Roadmap for the Next Decade,” which includes strategic objectives for future-proofing collections. To bring this vision to life, Carnegie Museum of Natural History is undertaking a comprehensive strategy—one that is focused on collaborative teamwork, building our technological capacity, and modernizing collection management practices. By implementing this strategy, the collections in our care can become a true public resource for our community and collaborators to inspire, educate, and engage for generations to come.

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.

 

Genomics, Informatics, and Conservation

Monday, November 11, 2024, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Earth Theater and online via Zoom

Featuring Keith Crandall, George Washington University

This lecture is free. Museum admission is not required.

Omics technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, metagenomics, etc.) have revolutionized insights into organismal diversity, evolutionary history, and functional diversity – all critical elements of effective conservation, management, and sustainability practices. Advances in new data types require novel computational tools to effectively take advantage of such data and integrate with additional relevant data (e.g., demographic, economic, climate, geologic, etc.). The Crandall Lab develops tools for omics data analyses (especially DNA/RNA sequence data) and integration with other data types. Some of these tools and applications will be demonstrated with ongoing research projects around microbiome research, conservation, and sustainability with links to ongoing international projects including FutureEarth, World Registry of Marine Species (WoRMS), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and associated Species Survival Commission (SSC).

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.

Photo Credit: Tyger Williams, TNS

How Geckos Rule the Night: From Ancient Amber to Modern Stowaways

Monday, October 21, 2024, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Earth Theater and online via Zoom

Featuring Aaron Bauer, Villanova University

This lecture is free. Museum admission is not required.

With more than 2300 extant species, geckos are one of the most species-rich groups of living reptiles and can be seen as an evolutionary success story. Their distinctive body plan was established approximately 150 million years ago and they had already diversified extensively by the Late Cretaceous, as demonstrated by 100-million-year-old amber fossils from Myanmar. Most geckos are nocturnal, and this is likely one of the keys to the success of the group. The evolution of diverse architectures of adhesive toepads has also promoted diversification in gecko lineages. Although constrained in some aspects of their morphology and ecology, modern gecko diversity is promoted by the combination of substrate specificity and low vagility, resulting in extensive allopatric speciation. As a result, many gecko genera are speciose, but individual species are restricted to small areas of occurrence. Paradoxically, a few species of geckos have evolved traits that not only permit them to occupy larger areas, but also make them successful invasive species. These few “super-colonizers” have been spread between continents through human activity, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the development of modern shipping routes.

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.

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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