New Research Offers Hope for A Rapidly Disappearing Plant

07.27.10

Cycads — plants with a 300-million-year-old evolutionary history — have suffered staggering declines in recent years.  One species, Cycas micronesica, which is endemic to Guam and other islands, has lost over 90 percent of its population within the a period of four years due to invasive species and habitat loss. But new research from a team that includes Museum scientists recently found that genetic diversity among these cycads offers hope for future conservation efforts.

The team, which includes Museum researcher Angélica Cibrían-Jaramillo, sampled this species on Guam and analyzed their genetic relationships. The results showed that local populations have some genetic diversity and moderate genetic variation with some inbreeding, which is what would be expected in longer-lived plants with similar patterns of seed dispersal.

The research also shows that cycads in the south, where smaller Cycas micronesica seeds float long distances along rivers unhampered by dense forests, are more genetically diverse than cycad populations in the north.

Researchers expect that these findings will provide tools for conservation efforts.

“We hope these results from the plant perspective will fit into the management of invasive insects in general, which is one of the most important drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide and very costly economically,” says Museum Curator Rob DeSalle, who conducts research in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.

Cibrián-Jaramillo, who is also a researcher at The New York Botanical Garden, and DeSalle collaborated with Thomas Marley of the University of Guam, Aidan Daley of the Museum’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, and Eric Brenner of New York University.

For more information, see the Museum’s press release.

Marking Franz Boas's Birthday

07.23.10

This month marks the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Franz Boas, a prominent Museum curator who is often called the father of American anthropology. During his 10-year tenure at the Museum and later as the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Boas established anthropology as a recognized branch of scientific inquiry and debunked prevailing beliefs about the superiority of Western civilization.

Supported by several museums, Boas led research expeditions along the North Pacific Coast of North America and trained a new generation of anthropologists, including future Museum Curator Margaret Mead.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Boas’s birth in 2008, Museum Curator Peter Whiteley – who studies the cultures and histories of Native North America from the 17th century to the present — commemorated this bold pioneer in apaper presented at a colloquium on Engaged and Public Anthropology at the Museum.

Check out a few excerpts below.

On Boas’s early interest in anthropology

“Boas’s attraction to what was to become “anthropology” emerged from a coalescence of interests in physics, mathematics and physical geography, as well
as a deep-rooted family background in social justice… In consequence, Boas’s take on the interpretation of culture was both rigorously
empirical, and assiduously attentive to the discourses and practices of his Native American interlocutors.”

On how Boas transformed anthropology

“Although a few scholars had used the term “culture” in the plural before, it was Boas who truly transformed scientific and, in time, popular understanding by his insistence on individual cultures as opposed to a great, monolithic plod of social evolution from lower to higher forms of culture.”

On Boas’s legacy

“…A paradigm shift in the understanding of human cultures that over time has transformed all global thought on the subject…an explicitly collaborative record of Native American cultural and linguistic forms that in its range and depth is almost incredible…a bottom line commitment to human rights enacted in his own life and practice…[and] a fierce defense of the sanctity of academic freedom to inquire and to speak out as a public intellectual…

Boas’s anthropology, as that of many of his students, notably Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, went against the grain of conventional wisdom and conventional practice, to produce a truly liberating discourse celebrating the varieties of the human condition that has now spread to all corners of the globe and multiple forms of social discourse.”

Bone By Bone: The Delicate Art of Fossil Preparation

07.23.10

Fossil preparation requires an uncommon degree of adaptability and patience. (c) AMNH/D. Finnin

Two decades ago, a chunk of sand containing a nearly perfect 80-million-year-old lizard fossil — just pulled loose from the red desert floor and resting on the hood of a Jeep — exploded into dust when touched by a member of the Museum’s annual summer expedition to the Gobi desert. A preparator knows why: paleontology depends on glue.

“Some of the fossils from Ukhaa Tolgod, this massive dinosaur graveyard found in 1993, survive only because they are so tightly packed in sand,” says Amy Davidson, one of the Museum’s senior fossil preparators, who happened to be on that expedition. In a cavernous room perched over several stories of meticulously labeled fossils, she darts to a beautifully fragile and nearly complete dinosaur skull.

“This fossil was also turning into crumbs,” she continues. “We need to know our adhesives. I stabilized the porous bone and sandy matrix (any material in which fossils are embedded) with just the right strength and solubility to be able to sculpt out the fossil, just like a magician pulls a tablecloth from under the table setting.” Last year, this delicate carnivorous cousin toTyrannosaurus rex was described and named Alioramus altai.

Fossil preparation requires an uncommon degree of adaptability and patience. Museum preparators bring to the task diverse sets of skills from such backgrounds as art, paleontology, and archaeology. They generally learn their craft on the job, drawing from related fields such as object conservation to adapt modern glues, solvents, and other archival materials to stabilize fragile areas or repair damage.
But the basic approach remains the same. Davidson, for example, removes her frameless glasses to face a fossil through her microscope, resting her wrists on a black velvet sandbag, securing a fine needle between her thumb and index finger, and using her third and fourth fingers to lightly touch the specimen. She moves almost imperceptibly, for minutes on end, carefully excavating a jaw from the soft sand. At the ready, laid out on a cutting board, are her preferred tools of the trade: brushes and droppers for dispensing glue, needles of different sizes and shapes for excavating, an air pedal for removing scraps of matrix, and glass jars of carefully labeled adhesives. Read more »

NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER Mission PI Sean Solomon Will Speak At The Museum July 26

07.23.10

Since NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft was launched on a mission to study Mercury in 2004, it has returned stunning photographs of the innermost planet gathered during a series of flybys. (For a recent New York Times story about the surprising discoveries the spacecraft has already made, click here).  Sean Solomon, principal investigator of MESSENGER, will be at the Museum on Monday, July 26, to speak about the new insights gleaned about Mercury’s high-density composition, its geological history, and its magnetic field in a special lecture. He will also discuss what’s next for MESSENGER, which is slated to enter Mercury’s orbit in March 2011. For some of the images retrieved from the mission so far, check out the gallery below.

Read more »

Lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida occurred in August, 2004, launching the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) spacecraft on a 4.9-billion-mile journey to Mercury. The spacecraft, which was built for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, flew by Earth, Venus, and Mercury several times and will have circled the Sun 15 times before going into orbit around Mercury in March 2011. Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA

Lincoln Ellsworth: The Museum's Own Polar Star

07.16.10

Tin cup from Roald Amundsen's ship. © AMNH/C. Chesek

A corridor on the Museum’s first floor just off the Grand Gallery celebrates a relatively unsung hero of polar exploration: the American Lincoln Ellsworth, who was also a Museum Trustee. His bust graces the back wall of the narrow hallway, while the display cases on either side contain artifacts detailing Ellsworth’s efforts to become the first man to fly across both poles, a feat he accomplished in 1935 when he crossed the Antarctic in his plane Polar Star.

Ten years earlier, Ellsworth’s first attempt to fly over the North Pole teamed him with Norwegian Roald Amundsen, whose earlier overland competition with British Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole is chronicled in the Museum’s new exhibition Race to the End of the Earth. Through the special relationship between Amundsen and Ellsworth, the Museum Library’s Memorabilia Collection came to possess items the Norwegian explorer carried with him on his quest to reach the South Pole, including a sledge, chronometer, binoculars, shotgun, and a tin cup from the ship Fram, which are featured in the new exhibition.

Partially underwritten by his father James, a wealthy coal mine owner and banker, Ellsworth’s 1925 attempt to fl y over the North Pole failed. One year later, he and Amundsen succeeded in a dirigible, the Norge, built and piloted by Italian explorer Umberto Nobile. Ellsworth would go on to other expeditions, contributing geological and fossil specimens to the Museum’s collections in the process. He died in 1951 at age 71, but his legacy of support for the Museum and its mission continues to this day through an annual gift from The Lincoln Ellsworth Foundation.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer issue of Rotunda, the magazine for Museum Members.