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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.

June 30, 2020 by wpengine

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 4th and 5th!

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 under a leaf

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.

firefly larva
Creative Commons © 2019 Ken Childs

firefly larva
Creative Commons © 2012 Derek Hauffe

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.

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June 29, 2020 by wpengine

Mesozoic Monthly: Protostega

June 20th 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.

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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

New to this series? Read Part 1 and Part 2.

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.

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June 24, 2020 by wpengine

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.

Seymouria sanjuanensis fossils
Five skeletons of Seymouria sanjuanensis preserved together were discovered in north central New Mexico by Dave Berman in 1982. These specimens are on display in CMNH’s Benedum Hall of Geology, in the “What is a Fossil?” case. Photo by the author, 2013.

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.

Keep Reading

The Bromacker Fossil Project Part VII: Eudibamus cursoris, the Original Two-legged Runner

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Amy Henrici, fossils, Museum from Home, Science News, The Bromacker Fossil Project, Vertebrate Paleontology

June 22, 2020 by wpengine

The Zebra Mussel and the Shopping Cart

Zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) are eastern European freshwater bivalves that invaded North America. Something unusual about their biology facilitated this invasion.

In marine waters, many benthic (living on the bottom) animals add their babies to the plankton, the mix of small and microscopic organisms largely adrift in the water column.

The situation is different in freshwater where almost all benthic animals lay their eggs on the bottom. (Freshwater plankton exist, but the organisms that compromise it spend their whole lives as plankton.) I don’t know why marine and freshwater animals differ that way, but they do. Zebra mussels are a major exception to this rule; they live in freshwater, but they put their babies (larvae) in the plankton.

How did zebra mussels invade North America? Partially loaded ships require ballast to safely navigate at sea. Decades ago, ships were loaded with rocks and dirt (and slug eggs) as ballast, and when they reached their intended port these materials were removed and replaced with cargo. That is why so many invasive slugs (essentially all your garden slugs are non-native) arrived first in seaports and spread from there.  Ballast tanks that can be easily filled with water and drained are a design feature of modern ships, and depending upon some ship’s departure points, their ballast water sometimes contains larval zebra mussels. For many years, ships were slow enough that zebra mussel larvae arrived in North America dead, but eventually reductions in ocean crossing time worked in the invaders’ favor.  In 1988 some larval zebra mussels arrived alive in the ballast water pumped out into Lake St. Clair near Detroit. By 1990, zebra mussels had infested all the Great Lakes and now they occur in more than half of the 50 United States.

Fig. 1. Freshwater snail (Elimia livescens) colonized by zebra mussels (left) and uncolonized (right). From Douglas Lake, Michigan 30 Aug. 2015 (photo by T.A. Pearce).

The economic and ecological devastation caused by zebra mussels is legendary. Zebra mussels make threads (byssal threads) for attaching to hard objects. They clog intake pipes of city water supplies and power station cooling pipes, requiring costly removal. They compete with native mussels and young fish for food and can smother or hinder movements of our native mussels, snails (Fig. 1), and crayfish when they settle in large numbers.

Fig. 2. Replica of shopping cart covered in zebra mussels.

A noteworthy item that became encrusted with zebra mussels is a shopping cart that was dredged out of Lake Superior in 2012. A replica of the shopping cart was on display during the We Are Nature exhibit at Carnegie Museum in 2018 (Fig. 2).

Lest you think I am biased against zebra mussels, I will note two possibly positive things you can say about them. First, they filter water efficiently and because they pump up to a liter (quart) per day, they cleaned up the formerly polluted water in Lake Erie. But even that can be negative, because they removed so much plankton from the water that our native species now have a hard time finding enough to eat. Second, because zebra mussels selectively concentrate certain toxic metals, including uranium, they have potential to be used in bioremediation efforts to clean water of this radioactive pollutant (Immel et al. 2016). But those are the only good things you can say about them. Mostly, they wreak havoc.

Literature Cited

Immel, F., Broussard, C., Catherinet, B., Plasseraud, L., Alcaraz, G., Bundeleva, I. & Marin, F. 2016. The shell of the invasive bivalve species Dreissena polymorpha: biochemical, elemental and textural investigations. PloS One, 11(5): e0154264. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154264

Timothy A. Pearce, PhD, is the head of the mollusks section 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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June 19, 2020 by wpengine

Behind the Scenes with the Baron de Bayet and L. W. Stilwell Collection, Part 2:  The Wild West a Century Ago

black and white photo of Deadwood from a distance
Figure 1:  Deadwood, Dakota Territories 1879.   Image courtesy of the Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission, City of Deadwood Archives.
black and white photo of a Deadwood street
Figure 2:  Deadwood, Dakota Territories 1879.  Image Courtesy of Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission, City of Deadwood Archives.

Fancy yourself on the hottest day in summer in the hottest spot of such a place without water — without an animal and scarce an insect astir — without a single flower to speak pleasant things to you and you will have some idea of the utter loneliness of the Bad Lands.”   Thaddeus Culbertson, 1850

When Lucien Stilwell stepped off the stagecoach on September 25, 1879, he was not your typical visitor to Deadwood.  Photos of Stilwell in later years show a thin scholarly figure with glasses. In 1879, Deadwood, Dakota Territories was known for gold prospecting, gambling and lawlessness.  Just three years prior, Wild Bill Hickock had been shot in the back while playing poker here.  It would be a few more years until Seth Bullock, first sheriff of Deadwood, would begin to bring order to town.

As Stilwell stepped off the stagecoach, he was leaving a fifteen-year career in the grocery and grain business in Cairo, Illinois.  A yellow fever epidemic blanketing parts of the United Sates prompted him to uproot his life.  He arrived just one day before a fire destroyed over 300 buildings and displaced over 2000 people in Deadwood.   According to Michael Runge, City Archivist of Deadwood South Dakota, photos of Deadwood in 1879 (Figures 1 and 2), were taken just before the great fire.  If you look closely at Figure 2, you can see a law office, hardware store, liquor store, and city market.

Despite the great fire and the dangers of Deadwood, Lucien W. Stilwell found a job at a bank, brought his family to town and built a home.  Along the way, he became fascinated by the fossils in the surrounding Black Hills.   He began a careful study of the region and developed relationships with other fossil collectors.   Eventually, he turned his hobby into a side business.

photo of faculties fossil
Figures 3 & 4:  CM 33067 – Baculites collected by Stilwell.  Baculites, translated as “walking stick rock”, are an extinct group of straight cephalopods that swam the seas 75 to 80 million years.  “Sutures” or growth lines are formed when the animal adds new shell material as it grows.  Sutures assist paleontologists in the identification of the genus and species.

Prior to leaving the bank in 1890, Stilwell began selling Badland fossils and minerals.  In a correspondence to the Baron de Bayet of Brussels dated January 12, 1889, Stilwell said, “I tried to catch your meaning in your last letter.  As I understand it, you wanted one of every specie and variety of fossils I had, excepting the large and costly specimens of mammals.”    

In one letter to Bayet, Stilwell wrote, “I put in a number of baculites, all of which have some different interest.  One is to show fine sutures another to show iridescence to rare degree, another to show size, another to show form so differing as to be a specie of baculite by another name…”   Albert Kollar of the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology explained that in circumstances when the exact stratigraphic locality is questionable, having the original fossil labels as seen in Fig. 4 are critical to accurate fossil identification.  Stillwell was a capable researcher because of his grasp of the geology and paleontology of the Badlands region.  Figures 3 and 4 show a baculites sold by Stilwell to Bayet.  There are 100 Stilwell fossils in the 130,000 specimen Bayet collection.

The next post in this series will explore why dealers such as Lucien W. Stilwell, found so many fossils in the Badlands.

Many thanks to the generous assistance of Michael Runge, Archivist for the City of Deadwood, South Dakota.

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.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Albert Kollar, Benedum Hall of Geology, invertebrate paleontology, Joann L. Wilson, Museum from Home, Science News

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