Blogs from our Scientific Researchers

Carnegie Museum of Natural History is home to active research and vast scientific collections. Our scientific researchers regularly contribute to the blog at the museum.

November 12, 2025 by Erin Southerland

Making Sense of Fossils from a Maryland Cave: A Carnegie Contribution

by Pat McShea

cave bear skeleton mount — In Cenozoic Hall the mounted skeleton of a Cave Bear from France lends perspective to a backing mural of large Ice Age mammals. Many of the museum’s Ice Age fossils were found closer to home, including some from a cave outside Cumberland, Maryland.

For paleontologists who specialize in interpreting fossil evidence from the Pleistocene, deposits in some Appalachian caves offer windows into the period of the past commonly referred to as the Ice Age. A recent Smithsonian Scholarly Press publication summarizing the discovery, collection, preparation, and interpretation of fossils from a cave in western Maryland strongly supports the window-into-the-past metaphor. The 305-page volume, a product of eleven co-authors, bears the long descriptive title, Middle Pleistocene Cumberland Bone Cave Local Fauna, Allegeny County, Maryland: A Systematic Revision and Paleoecological Interpretation of the Irvingtonian, Middle Appalachians, USA. Remarkably, this chronicle of fossil collecting expeditions mounted by five different organizations over more than a century is dedicated to John Edward Guilday, a Curator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History from 1951 until 1982, and the field crew of museum staff and volunteers who for decades assisted his research efforts.

The collective nature of knowledge presented in the publication makes the dedication particularly appropriate. The fauna list for the site’s vertebrate fossils alone includes 109 creatures ranging in size from mole to mastodon, and the deposition of these remains, over a period of several thousand years, happened more than 700,000 years ago. Deciphering information from such a rich fossil assemblage requires a detailed understanding of other fossil-rich caves, and Guilday’s deep knowledge of findings from sinkholes in Pennsylvania and caves in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, enabled him to recognize and interpret evidence for such past regional events as range extensions and contractions for various species and repeated changes in climate.

black and white photo of John Guilday — *John Edward Guilday in an undated photograph by his wife Alice Guilday.*

The inclusion of the Carnegie Museum field crew in the dedication is particularly apt because Guilday never visited Cumberland Bone Cave or many other sites he studied. His life and career, which included serving in a battle-tested US Army infantry unit during World War II, were immeasurably altered in 1952 when at the age of twenty-seven he contracted polio. The virus tremendously reduced his strength, necessitating the periodic use of an iron lung in his home for the rest of his life. Guilday’s visits to the halls and offices of his established workplace were rare during the next three decades, but with the ceaseless assistance of his wife Alice, the creation of a functional paleo lab in the basement of the couple’s home, and the physical and intellectual contributions of a tireless field crew, he earned a reputation as one of the research strengths of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

In making a thorough case for the importance of Cumberland Bone Cave to our understanding of past mid-Appalachian environments, the new publication also realistically presents much of the paleontological work at the site as a salvage operation. Little is known with certainty about how the cave, a multi-chambered cavity within a limestone ridge a few miles northwest of Cumberland, was discovered or explored. The story of its recognition as a fossil site is, however, well documented. Beginning in 1910, the Western Maryland Railroad cut a passage for a new line of tracks through the cave-bearing limestone ridge, destroying a significant portion of the subterranean feature. In 1912, when fossilized bone found among excavated rubble was presented to a paleontologist in Washington, D.C. at what is now the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, professional fossil collecting efforts were quickly organized.

black and white photo of cave entrance — *View of cave entrance on the south side of the railroad cut from the north side. Source: 1913 photograph by Raymond William Armbruster, Smithsonian Institution Archives.*

A well-illustrated 15-page chapter chronologically profiles the subsequent paleontological investigations of still intact cave chambers, including the intermittent work by a Carnegie Museum of Natural History team between 1964 and 2006. The summary hints at the physical challenges of work in the cave’s tight quarters, notes the cooperation of the railroad company on several occasions when heavy equipment was required for excavation, and emphasizes the current importance of determining exactly where, within this railroad bisected site, particular crews collected fossils. This tally of organized human efforts, along with later chapters listings the fossils collected from the site, raises the very same question that puzzled dozens of investigating paleontologists: How did the remains of such a varied set of ancient creatures come to be deposited in Cumberland Bone Cave?

The author team presents three scenarios. 1) For creatures such as bats, bears, wolves, and peccaries, who used portions of the cave for dens or hibernation chambers, a natural death within their shelter could have eventually led to fossilization. 2) Vertical fissures connecting cave chambers to the ground surface above them functioned as pit traps, occasionally capturing creatures unlikely to otherwise visit the cave. 3) In actions ranging from roosting owls coughing-up pellets of vole bones to wolves bringing larger prey to waiting pups, predators who relied upon the cave for shelter repeatedly brought prey remains into the system. A fourth scenario, involving bones washed into the cave, was rejected because recovered fossils lack evidence of water wear and sand and gravel are absent in cave matrix.

The publication’s clarity in explaining ancient deposition and other complex puzzles related to Cumberland Bone Cave will hopefully serve an audience outside Pleistocene Paleontology. The physical labor, disciplined thought, and wide sharing of information outlined in the narrative and referenced in a 23-page biography, make the work a landmark example for any teacher or student interested in the methods of science. Fortunately, the publication is widely available. Copies can be electronically downloaded for free from Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.

cover of a book about Cumberland Bone Cave

Cumberland Bone Cave is no longer an active research site, but the fenced entrance of its main entrance draws the attention of bicyclists passing near the four-mile mark of the 150-mile Great Allegheny Passage trail.

Pat McShea is Educator Emeritus at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Uprooted: Inside the Museum’s New Exhibition on Invasive Plants

by Patrick McShea

museum label comparing grains of rice to seeds — An Uprooted display compares seed production differences between native and invasive plants.

Plants travel across time and territory as seeds. The movement of seeds, each one a tiny embryo packaged with stored food in a protective coating, can generally be attributed to one of five forces – gravity, wind, flowing water, spring-like ejection from the parent plant, or transport by animals, whether deliberately or accidentally.

In Uprooted: Plants Out of Place, the new exhibition examining invasive plants from multiple perspectives, seed dispersal by humans, a subset of the fifth force, receives attention for its landscape altering impact. The exhibition occupies two sites within the museum, the Hall of Botany, and the third-floor balcony above Kamin Hall of Dinosaurs. In between, floor-mounted exhibition emblems serve as wayfinding guides between the sites. Visitors who follow these raindrop-shaped directional aids should consider the short walk and elevator ride or stair climb to represent the frequently unnoticed journeys by a whole category of organisms we mistakenly consider to be rooted and immobile.

The Uprooted emblem guides visitors between the exhibition’s two locations.

Just inside the entry to the Hall of Botany, an exhibition panel for Uprooted provides a definition of “native” that is crucial to understanding issues related to invasive plants. Plants don’t buy houses, but they do have ‘home’ ranges where they have grown for a long period of time. We call plants found in their home ranges native. Visual examples can greatly aid in the comprehension of a new term, and here the surrounding life-sized dioramas depicting plants native to Pennsylvania woodlands, Lake Erie beach margins, Florida swamp land, the Sonoran Desert, and an alpine meadow on Mount Ranier, provide tremendous, and frequently colorful, reinforcement.

On the same panel, below the bold-faced clarification, Passengers, not drivers, visitors are presented with another key definition: Introduced plants that cause harm to the environment or humans around them are called invasive species. Four such invasive species and their attendant problems are profiled in nearby free-standing displays that feature preserved plant material in the form of herbarium sheets, maps documenting invasive plant establishment and rapid expansion, examples of a single plant’s seed production, and explanations of why each was brought, as seed, cuttings, root stock, or whole plant, to our region of the world. Three of the species were deliberately introduced here because of perceived potential benefits. Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) was introduced because of its beautiful flowers. Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) was a favored root stock for grafting and hedgerow creation. Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) was valued as a culinary and medicinal herb. Stiltgrass (Microstegium vimnea), the fourth profiled plant, was introduced accidentally during an early 20^th Century period when large quantities of the whole plant, including seedheads, served as disposable protective packaging for porcelain shipped from Asia.

In sharing the stiltgrass story in the Hall of Botany, Uprooted makes powerful use of the unique space. On the left edge of the diorama that has depicted early summer beneath the canopy of a mature hemlock/northern hardwood forest for over 50 years, visitors will find a suggestion for a scene altering exercise. Imagine stiltgrass growing in this forest for several years – what would it look like? Would it be very different from what you see now? Because the information below this thought prompt notes the tendency of stiltgrass to choke out wildflowers and tree seedlings by forming dense mats, an initial mental alteration of the diorama scene might simply involve a drastic change in the look of the forest floor. However, for visitors who first study details in the meticulously recreated landscape and notice such details as the ovenbird standing just in front of its distinctive domed nest (lower right front corner), the sense of loss will be compounded.

A more hopeful and action-oriented approach awaits visitors on the third-floor balcony section of Uprooted. Here a video loop briefly introduces people from three local organizations working to mitigate the negative impacts of invasive plants, an interactive panel guides visitors to make informed purchases from plant nurseries, and an array of plant portraits by Japanese photographer Koichi Watanabe summarizes his study of conflicting cultural perspectives surrounding the plant known to science as Reynoutria japonica and locally termed Japanese knotweed. In the text panel explaining his approach, Watanabe provides a quote that is a fitting summary for this innovative exhibition: When people move, plants move with them.

Patrick McShea is Educator Emeritus at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Natural History Collection Managers: The Stewards of Time Travel

by Serina Brady and Mariana Marques

For centuries, naturalists have collected the living world with the primary goal of understanding the diversity and complexity of our planet. In vast shelves and cabinets located in natural history museums, we find a diversity of specimens used daily by researchers, students, naturalists, and conservationists from around the world. These collections are not just archives of the past, but they also play a crucial role in addressing present-day challenges. By documenting the diversity of life, natural history collections provide a wealth of information that can be used to tackle issues such as climate change, pandemics, pathogen dispersals, deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss. They can be considered the world’s most comprehensive and complex library, serving as a valuable resource for understanding and addressing the health of our planet.

Each specimen can be seen as a unique document or book recording an aspect of life on Earth at a particular time and place. They testify to the existence of a given species in a given locality and at a particular time, and they have a fundamental role as a guarantee of the scientific method: they allow objective observation that can be replicable. Natural history collections are an unparalleled source of information. For instance, a single bird or reptile specimen can provide data on its species, its habitat, its diet, and even its health. This wealth of information continues to allow researchers to understand better the past, the present, and the future of biodiversity, as well as the health of our planet – from local communities to the entire Earth.

*Carnegie Museum of Natural History Alcohol House, Collection of Amphibians and Reptiles. ©Photo by: Luis Ceríaco.*

*Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Collection of Birds. ©Photo by: Luis Ceríaco.*

These collections are usually housed in natural history museums. These museums are research, conservation, education, and public outreach hubs. Their collections are not limited to public exhibitions; in fact, the majority are housed in storage locations, generally out of sight and knowledge of the public. The process of collecting and storing these specimens is methodical. Each specimen is carefully collected, identified, and cataloged, then stored in a controlled environment to ensure long-term preservation. This process ensures that these specimens, often fragile and irreplaceable, are protected and can continue to be used for research and education for future generations.

Natural History Collections: a Tool to Face Global Changes

How can a specimen collected more than 100 years ago still be relevant today? Historical collections, like the one housed at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, provide baseline data points. These initial measurements or observations serve as a starting point for future comparisons. By providing a snapshot of life on Earth at a particular time and place, these specimens allow us to study change over time. The first and most crucial step is to gather those baseline data points!

From their early days, natural history collections’ primary goal was to inventory all life on Earth. However, with new cutting-edge technology, researchers can recover different data from historical specimens, data that the original collector didn’t even imagine. For example, when birds were collected from the U.S. Rust Belt, collectors didn’t realize that the specimens would be used to infer information about the history of pollution. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, the collectors of salamanders in the Appalachian woods didn’t even realize that some of those specimens were already infected with a pathogen that is devastating some of the world amphibian populations today.

However, because specimens were collected, we can now map the expansion of this pathogen through time or trace the amount of black carbon in the air over time through birds’ feathers to help fight and understand climate change. Part of the job of Collection Managers like us is not just to preserve and maintain the existing collections, but also to anticipate and predict the questions future researchers will be asking. This proactive approach ensures we gather today’s data to answer tomorrow’s questions. Specimens collected over a century ago are actively used today to answer questions about current and future environmental changes.

Specimens at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History collected during the early 1900s continued to have a significant role in research questions. These specimens give researchers insight into environmental changes through time, such as soot deposited on bird feathers or the presence of pathogens such as the chytrid fungus on amphibian populations across a specific time and place. Top: Two Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) specimens, one from 1895 (bottom) and the other from 1993 (top), showing the change in air quality over time (DuBay and Fuldner 2017). © Photo by Luis Ceríaco. Below: Amphibian specimen of Common Mudpuppy (Necturus maculosus) being swabbed by a student from the University of Pittsburgh (Richards-Zawacki Lab) to detect the presence of the amphibian chytrid fungus – Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. ©Photo by: Rachel Verdi.

New applications of technologies, such as computed tomography (CT) scans, provide novel insights and usages for specimens. CT scans allow a complete 3D model of a specimen, including access to its internal morphology without damaging it. Using next-generation sequencing, scientists can use fragmented and degraded DNA for advanced analyses such as phylogenetic and phylogeographic analysis. These specialized methods allow us to study species’ evolutionary relationships and geographic distribution. These advanced techniques are just some of the ways natural history collections are being used to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge.

CT scans provide details of internal anatomy, presence of parasites, reproduction, etc., without damaging the specimen. CT scans are a significant technological advance for fields such as taxonomy, developmental and evolutionary biology, and studying functional morphology for natural history specimens. © Edward Stanley, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida (oVert – OpenVertebrate project).

A Biodiversity Backup

Continuing to grow our collections is not only scientifically essential but undeniably needed. Currently, 1.8 million species have been formally described to science, although worldwide experts predict that around 8.75 million species still await to be discovered, described, and named. Given current extinction rates, we are racing against time to describe the remaining 86% of the world’s species, many of which may become extinct before we know they even existed!

New species of birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and insects continue to be discovered worldwide, sometimes based on specimens tucked away in a museum for decades! These collections are not just archives of the past but also living libraries that continue to grow and evolve as new species are discovered. Each new discovery adds to our understanding of the natural world and underscores the importance of these collections in documenting and preserving Earth’s biodiversity. These new specimens contribute to our most significant and longest dataset of the natural world. But just as a library that stops acquiring new books, a natural history collection that doesn’t add new specimens will eventually lose its scientific value and relevancy. If we don’t continue to add physical proof of today’s biodiversity, we create unfillable gaps in one of our most powerful natural history data sets. Today is tomorrow’s past, and natural history collections act as a biodiversity backup of our planet!

Serina Brady is Collection Manager of Birds and Mariana Marques is Collection Manager of Amphibians and Reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

What’s in a Name? The History of the Naming of the Eastern Mole

by John Wible

In the tenth edition of the “Systema Naturae” (1758), the Swedish botanist and natural historian Carl Linnaeus recognized eight orders of mammals, all of which include species that today are not particularly closely related. His order Bestiae included pigs, armadillos, hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and opossums. Of these, the hedgehogs, moles, and shrews are considered today to form a natural group, with the others coming from very far-flung branches of the mammal tree of life.

For the shrews, Linnaeus named three species of Sorex, Sorex araneus, Sorex cristatus, and Sorex aquaticus, with their habitats Europe, Pennsylvania, and America, respectively. Sorex araneus is recognized today as the common shrew (see image), distributed in Great Britain, much of the European continent, and far into Russia. However, the other two are not shrews, but are moles! Today, we recognize these as the star-nosed mole, Condylura cristata, and the Eastern mole, Scalopus aquaticus (see image). The former has a broad distribution in Pennsylvania with the latter only in the eastern part of the state.

common shrew and a worm — *Common shrew,* Sorex araneus. Photo credit: Soricida, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

close-up of an eastern mole — *Eastern mole,* Scalopus aquaticus. Photo credit: Kenneth Catania, Vanderbilt University, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Just before the shrews in the tenth edition, Linnaeus named two species of moles, Talpa europaea and Talpa asiatica, with their habitats Europe and Siberia, respectively. Given the remarkable similarity in body form between the Old World and New World moles, it is surprising that Linnaeus did not recognize these four species (Sorex cristatus, Sorex aquaticus, Talpa europaea, and Talpa asiatica) as closely related.

Regarding the Eastern mole, subsequent nineteenth century authors realized Sorex aquaticus did not belong in the shrew genus Sorex. However, it was bounced around between several mole genera, including Talpa, and it was not until 1905 that the Latin binomial we use today, Scalopus aquaticus, was first used, 147 years after Linnaeus! The formal naming of species is not static, but evolves over time as we discover more about our natural world that causes us to reconsider and reevaluate past practices. Changing the shrew aspect of the common name lagged behind the formal one, as it was not for quite some time that the shrew moniker imparted by Linnaeus disappeared. A halfway point is in the famous 1846 “The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America” by John J. Audubon and Reverend John Bachman, where they called it the common American shrew mole.

From the short text in the “Systema Naturae” where Linnaeus named Sorex aquaticus, his motivation for identifying the Eastern mole as a shrew is unclear. Equally or perhaps more enigmatic is his motivation for using the specific name aquaticus. A direct translation of Sorex aquaticus is “water shrew,” with the strong implication that this mammal lived in the water or at least spent considerable time in the water. However, Linnaeus did not travel to America and so never saw Sorex aquaticus in the wild. The Eastern mole is a fossorial (burrowing) animal that spends most of its life underground with enormous forepaws for digging. Skin covers its tiny eyes, although it does perceive light and dark, and it lacks an external ear. Maybe its enlarged forepaws were viewed as flipper-like by Linnaeus. Yet, these paws resemble those of the Old World Talpa named by Linnaeus as true moles. In 1936, mammalogist A.V. Arlton stated, “The term “aquaticus,” as applied to our common species refers to the webbed hind feet, which indicated to some early writers a possible use in swimming” (Journal of Mammalogy, 17, p. 355). Unfortunately, Arlton did not name names for these early writers! Consequently, his statement cannot be fact checked. The bottom line is that in his description of Sorex aquaticus, Linnaeus did not mention webbing for either the fore- or hind feet. And ultimately, as the namer of the species, it is Linnaeus’ motivation that we need to know.

There are some general rules for naming new species. For example, you can’t name a new species after yourself. In the Linnean era, the general trend was to apply Latin or Greek descriptors that would capture some aspect of the organism in question, a tradition continued today by most authors. For instance, our species, Homo sapiens, was named by Linnaeus and it translates to “wise man.” While we might debate the appropriateness of that as the binomial for our species, there is no debate that Sorex aquaticus is inappropriate for our ground dwelling Eastern mole.

John Wible is Curator of Mammals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The Moon Snails Neverita duplicata and Euspira heros: Cannibal Predators of the Sea! … who also enjoy a nice algae salad

by Sabrina Spiher Robinson and Tim Pearce

Imagine you’re a clam, hanging out in your cozy little hole under shallow ocean water, with your siphon out, just filtering lunch out of the water current, happy as a…you. Then, all of a sudden, something flips you gently out of that hole.

You pull in your siphon and your foot, clamp shut your valves. You’re pretty tough to get open, strong adductor muscles keep your two shells held tightly together, and you’ve survived danger by closing up shop and waiting before. And nothing seems to be trying to pry you open, even though something has wrapped itself around you, and is now pulling you down into the sand with it. Then:

scrape scrape scrape

Or imagine you’re a young moon snail, Neverita duplicata – one of the most common species of moon snails that live on the eastern seaboard of North America. You’re a gastropod with a lovely round grayish shell, such that people call it a “shark eye,” and you’ve got a huge foot that can come out of that shell and cover almost all of your body – or all of your prey’s body! But at the moment you’re just cruising along the sand, slurping at a bit of detritus. Suddenly, you’re enveloped by something. You instinctively pull your body into your shell and tightly close your door-like operculum for safety. Then your aperture is covered by…something familiar? Then:

scrape scrape scrape

It doesn’t matter how tightly the clam clamps, or how mighty the young snail’s foot, both are going to come to the same fate, slowly.

scrape scrape scrape

Eventually, your shell is penetrated. A rasping radula – a mollusk’s organ containing its teeth – has bored a hole through your shell with the help of a gentle acid secreted by a gland by the mouth, and then you feel a burning: gastric juices are being pumped through the hole to begin to digest your flesh. Your killer begins to slurp you up, right where you lie, wrapped up in their hug, as you’re slowly eaten alive.

The young moon snail might have figured out who its killer was before the end: that’s how it eats too. The thing is, moon snails are cannibals, the larger preying on the smaller.

There are hundreds of kinds of moon snails all over the world, but the ones that are probably most familiar to beach goers on the eastern coast of the USA are two species also commonly called “shark eyes” – Neverita duplicata and Euspira heros. From the top, they’re hard to tell apart (the spire on E. heros is a little pointier than on N. duplicata) but once you flip them over, it becomes easy to distinguish them: N. duplicata, the Atlantic moon snail, has a big callus over its umbilicus, and E. heros, the Northern moon snail, doesn’t. Technically, only the Atlantic moon snail has a shark eye shell, but since they’re often mixed up with Northern moon snails, the term shark eye is sometimes applied to them too.

N. duplicata, left; E. heros, right. *Photo credit: Sabrina Spiher Robinson*

These two moon snails aren’t the only marine gastropods that drill their prey and digest them alive to suck them up for dinner – lots of marine gastropods are predatory drills. But moon snails have distinct boreholes that allow people to identify when a shell has been bored specifically by a moon snail – scientists can even tell the difference between the Atlantic and Northern species’ holes. These “countersunk” holes look like little funnels, wider on the outside of the shell than on the inside. Other kinds of drilling snails leave behind straight-sided holes.

These unique boreholes allow scientists to track the evolution of moon snails from the Miocene to recent times. One group of researchers found that moon snail cannibalism might have driven a kind of coevolution between and among moon snail species. Because one moon snail can make dangerous prey for a fellow moon snail predator, over time moon snails seem to have learned to drill other moon snails at a spot on their shells that allowed the predator to cover the prey’s entire aperture, preventing the strong foot of their prey from fighting back. This means boring through a thicker part of the shell, however, so it takes longer to hold down and bore through the prey snail’s shell. But the record of natural selection in fossils throughout time suggests the added cost must be worth the benefit of moving target drilling zones. Meanwhile, small moon snails almost always lose out to larger ones when attacked, so both N. duplicata and E. heros have evolved to get bigger and bigger over time – although a bigger snail is also a more enticing snack target. Same-sized moon snails don’t even bother to attack one another, suggesting that a fellow moon snail is just too dangerous a prey when the winner of the battle between snails is a toss-up. As evidence that these are often battles between predator and prey snails, there are many incomplete boreholes found – a moon snail started attacking another moon snail, but only managed to get the job halfway done before the prey moon snail escaped. [1]

To be fair, moon snails aren’t just vicious cannibals – they also enjoy the snail equivalent of a nice salad. Another study that analyzed the tissues of moon snails revealed that their bodies have the chemical signatures of omnivores. The technique is called stable isotope analysis, wherein scientists use the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in an animal’s body to determine its diet, in broad terms. Carbon exists in three isotope forms, meaning the number of protons is the same in all three atoms, but the number of neutrons is different in each (carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14); Nitrogen also has three isotope forms, nitrogen-14, nitrogen-15, and nitrogen-16. The vast majority of carbon on Earth is carbon-12, which is a stable isotope, as is carbon-13, meaning they do not decay over time; nitrogen-14 and -15 are stable, and make up the vast majority of nitrogen atoms. Different plants and animals have different ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes. The ratios of isotopes in plants and animals differ and these differences transfer to the body of the consumer, and so the isotope ratios of a meat-eating animal will differ from those of a vegetarian animal, and an omnivorous animal will be different again. Scientists were surprised to find that wild moon snail isotopes suggested they also ate non-animals, so to check their findings they fed captive moon snails nothing but clams, and then tested their isotopes – which looked exactly as one would expect in an all-meat diet. Apparently the wild moon snails were actually eating things other than meat, probably algae. This was a big deal, since so much of the literature on moon snails is about their predatory drilling! [2]

Moon snail shells are a relatively common find on east-coast beaches (and another moon snail, Euspira lewisii, is a common find on the west coast), but if you’re at the beach this summer, there’s more to look for than just shells – moon snails also leave behind very distinctive egg nests, often called “sand collars.” The fertilized female snail nestles into a little hole in the sand (as all moon snails do during the day when they’re not feeding) and produces a sheet of mucus, which she mixes with sand and pushes up to the surface, as she does so, the sheet curls around her shell and eventually right around to form a ring. This fusion of mucus and sand grains solidifies, she attaches her thousands of eggs to it, and then covers those with another layer of mucus and sand. Once the eggs are ready to hatch after a few weeks, when the next high tide comes along the eggs let go thousands of little larvae called veligers, which will drift off to finish developing into baby snails who will eventually settle into the intertidal zone and start lives for themselves. Once the eggs hatch, the collar becomes brittle and disintegrates, but if you find one that’s still plastic-y on the beach, leave it! There are thousands of tiny baby vicious predators in there waiting to hatch! Awww.

*A sand collar full of shark eye eggs. Image credit: Blenni, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

Sabrina Spiher Robinson is Collection Assistant for the Section of Mollusks and Tim Pearce is Head of the Section of Mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

References

[1] Gregory P. Dietl and Richard R. Alexander, Post-Miocene Shift in Stereotypic Naticid Predation on Confamilial Prey from the Mid-Atlantic Shelf: Coevolution with Dangerous Prey PALAIOS Vol. 15, No. 5 (Oct., 2000), pp. 414-429

[2] Casey MM, Fall LM and Dietl GP, You Are What You Eat: Stable Isotopic Evidence Indicates That the Naticid Gastropod Neverita duplicata Is an Omnivore. Front. Ecol. Evol. 4:125. (2016) doi: 10.3389/fevo.2016.00125

Mineral Gazing

by Debra Wilson

Have you ever gazed up at the sky and noticed a cloud that looks like a face, or an animal, or an object? You can apply the same concept when you visit Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems! Many minerals on display have nicknames because of how they resemble certain animals, objects, or even characters from movies or TV shows. As you walk through the exhibits, let your imagination wander and search for minerals that look like things. Here are some to get you started.

Silver mineral that looks like an American flag — *“The Flag” – Silver in the Native Elements case of the Systematic Mineral Collection*

Image of the American flag that says "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...rememeber Dec. 7th!" — *Photo credit: Allen Saalburg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.*

Nessie silver mineral — *“Nessie” – Silver in Minerals from the Former Soviet Union exhibit*

Loch Ness monster sculpture in the water — *Photo credit: Immanuel Giel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

snowball calcite on quartz — *“Snowball” – Calcite on quartz in the Maramures District of Romania exhibit*

snowball held in mitten-covered hands — *Photo from Shutterstock.*

Inch Worm berthierite on quartz — *“Inch Worm” – Berthierite on quartz in The Maramures District of Romania exhibit*

photo of an inch worm — *Photo credit: gbohne from Berlin, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons*

The Scream septarian concretion — *“The Scream” – Septarian concretion in the Weathering Processes exhibit*

"The Scream" painting — *Image credit: Edvard Munch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

the oyster natrolite on quartz — *“The Oyster” – Natrolite on quartz in the Deccan Plateau of India exhibit*

oyster shell with a pearl — *Photo from Shutterstock.*

French fries laumontite — *“French Fries” – Laumontite in Masterpiece Gallery*

cup of French fries — *Image by ha11ok from Pixabay*.

As you enter Hillman Hall, check out the minerals in the Entrance Cube, their nicknames are on the labels. There are many more minerals on display throughout the hall that have acquired nicknames. Here’s just a handful of other nicknames for minerals in the exhibits, see if you can find them. Good luck and enjoy your mineral gazing!

Nickname	Exhibit
The Bat	Igneous Rocks
Polar Bear	Weathering Processes
Sea Slug	The Maramures District of Romania
The Chariots	The Maramures District of Romania
Smog Monster	The Maramures District of Romania
Sea Serpent	Pennsylvania Minerals and Gems
Pine Trees On a Cliff	Oxides
BBQ Chips	Masterpiece Gallery
Cookies and Cream	Masterpiece Gallery

Debra Wilson is Collection Manager for the Section of Minerals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Making Sense of Fossils from a Maryland Cave: A Carnegie Contribution

by Pat McShea

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What’s in a Name? The History of the Naming of the Eastern Mole

by John Wible

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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The Moon Snails Neverita duplicata and Euspira heros: Cannibal Predators of the Sea! … who also enjoy a nice algae salad

by Sabrina Spiher Robinson and Tim Pearce

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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Mineral Gazing

by Debra Wilson

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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