Sam Noble Museum Blog

It’s National Volunteer Appreciation Week and the prefect time to talk about those people in the museum that make such an impact on staff, visitors and the community: our volunteers.

Every year, the museum dedicates this week to honoring volunteers for the hours they dedicate to natural history, to servicing the community and providing personal knowledge, assistance and experience to our visitors and staff.

In 2011, 161 volunteers dedicated 16,291 hours to the museum through their work as docents, with children in the Discovery Room or with staff behind the scenes.

We honored our volunteers at a reception this week, highlighting a particular volunteer who represented the volunteer core as a whole. He exemplified what it means to be a museum volunteer, serving for almost 12 years donating more than 3,100 hours to the museum. For that, Michael Laing received the 2012 Tom Siegenthaler Volunteer of the Year Award.

I am proud to know Michael and more important, thrilled that he represents a part of the museum that touches our visitors and staff alike. If you are interested in becoming a part of our museum, visit our website and browse the opportunities! (Click here)

I’d like to share a link with you to a new web page created for identifying Oklahoma fossils, www.CommonFossilsOfOklahoma.snomnh.ou.edu.

It’s packed with images of living plants and animals and their respective fossils, details about how paleontologists search for fossils, and ways to identifying Oklahoma fossils and learn about the communities these plants and animals came from.

If you’re in need of help identifying an object or fossil, submit a request, it’s easy!

Feel free to visit the site and learn something new about Oklahoma fossils!

Working at a natural history museum is quite a rewarding experience. My enthusiasm is partially from being one of the most recent hires at the museum. I began in September and have enjoyed working with Dan Swan, curator of ethnology, and his team planning our upcoming exhibit, Warrior Spirits: Indigenous Arts from New Guinea. Nearly 100 pieces from the collections of the Sam Noble Museum and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art will be displayed beginning Feb. 4.

The collections include a variety of cultural objects, including masks, drums and ceremonial garments, many of which were collected during surveys in the 1970s assessing petroleum and mineral resources. U.S. soldiers also contributed items collected while Allied Forces manned listening stations in New Guinea during World War II.

Here is a sneak peek at the people and culture surrounding our upcoming exhibit:

The people of Papua New Guinea are mostly descendants of Melanesians, closely related to the islanders of Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu. The island was one of the first landmasses to become populated by modern humans, about 50,000 years ago.

Hundreds of cultures live on the island of New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. These groups reside in small, remote rural villages- more than a third of them in the rugged highlands- and make their living by fishing, farming, hunting, and gathering. As a result of the villages’ isolation, many different languages are spoken on the island. With nearly one thousand distinct dialects spoken there, New Guinea possesses the greatest concentration of languages in the world.

The traditional Melanesian cultures are kept alive in elaborate rituals that accompany deaths, feasts, marriages, compensation ceremonies and initiation rites. Many of the artifacts in our collections reflect the diversity of the region, highlighting such ceremonial traditions as the dramatic fire dances practiced in the Highlands of West Papua and the ritualized veneration of ancestors among the Sepik River groups of New Guinea.

Art in New Guinea is as varied as its people. Carving, twining and weaving, produces many different types of art. Carved wooden sculptures, masks, canoes, and storyboards from New Guinea are valued around the globe in private collections, museums, and art markets.

The objects in Warrior Spirits, which include daggers carved from the bones of cassowary birds – a large flightless bird native to New Guinea and prized for its aggressive territorial nature—along with carved shields, war-clubs, spears and bows and arrows, were created and used by the indigenous peoples of present-day Papua New Guinea and West Papua, Indonesia.

Warrior Spirits: Indigenous Arts from New Guinea will be on display from Feb. 4 through May 13. Augmented with maps, graphics, and audio and video elements, this exhibit allows visitors a glimpse into the fascinating world of New Guinea. For more information, visit our website: www.snomnh.ou.edu.

This morning I had the pleasure of escorting Fred Greenlee around some of our collections.  Fred is a producer for the History Channel show “Swamp People,” and has been doing some location scouting in southern Oklahoma. He called me up earlier this week, hoping that our museum had some examples of prehistoric fish hooks he could photograph, to tie into an upcoming episode of the show.

I asked Don Wyckoff, our curator of archaeology and, sure enough, we do have some examples of fish hooks, both finished hooks and several in various stages of completion.  Dr. Wyckoff brought them out of the collection for Fred to photograph, and explained to us how these fish hooks were made.

The work begins with a little piece of deer or turkey bone. The tool-maker would use a piece of sandstone to wear away the bone at an angle at one end, using the natural interior curve of the bone to form the U-shape that will become the  hook.  Once the U-shape was honed, the artisan would then begin to sand or break away bits of the bone from the edge of the curve to form the hook and the shank.  A groove around the end of the shank would keep the line in place. Bigger hooks could be made from larger pieces of bone, of course, and we saw one whose shank was about two inches long, but the hook had broken off.

I was amazed both at the delicate craftsmanship of these little fishhooks, and at the ingenuity required to come up with this technique for creating the hooked shape out of a curved bit of bone.  There’s some serious geometry in this design!

Dr. Wyckoff tells us that peoples all over the plains and into Georgia and Tennessee were making this same kind of fish hooks, and hooks had been used as far back as 6,000 years ago.  (The ones he showed us were about 2,800 years old.)  Hooks are rare because they are made of bone, and most are quite small, so they often decompose unless they are deposited in soils with just the right chemical make-up to preserve them, as these were.

Fishing, Wyckoff explained, was an activity that was often done by children in hunter-gatherer societies. It was a way they could contribute to the household before they had developed skills in more aggressive types of hunting.   Seine nets were also used to catch fish, often in oxbow lakes where river fish would congregate.  Our collection includes some very nice net-weights made for this purpose.

I looked at those little  hooks and I realized something:  people who lived 2,800 or 6,000 years ago were every bit as ingenious and skilled as people today… they were just further down the technology discovery chain.  The first human who sought out a way to catch a single fish using bait on a hand-crafted hook was every bit as forward thinking as Bill Gates, and the technology that arrived from that brainstorm was every bit as far reaching and life changing for the people at the time.  We stand, as Sir Isaac Newton said, on the shoulders of Giants.  Sometimes we stand there and fish.

Summer is upon us, boys and girls. And that means it’s time to unplug your headphones, close your laptop, put down the Wii remote and GET OUTSIDE!!!

I return to this theme at this time each year because I cannot stress enough how very important it is that our children, and ourselves, get out into nature. Our planet is approaching a major environmental crisis – what some scientists are already calling the Sixth Great Extinction. Honeybees are being decimated by Colony Collapse, Bats are falling victim to White nose syndrome, and frogs around the world are afflicted by the devastating chytrid fungus. Animals are disappearing from our planet faster than our scientists can discover and name them all. Now, more than at any time in our world’s history, we must get back in tune with nature.

I don’t mean just going out and wiggling our toes in the invasive Bermuda grass of our suburban lawns, either. We need to get out there and see what it’s really like.  That doesn’t necessarily mean a trip to the Amazon, but it does mean a trip to the forest, a neighborhood stream, or native grassland. We need to educate ourselves, and more importantly, we need to educate the next generation about the importance of maintaining the fragile and unbelievably complex web of life that sustains us. The scientists of the future – the ones who may be able to stop the downward trend in species diversity – are quite probably in grade school right now. Yeah, that kid on the sofa with the remote and the bag of Cheetos:  potentially the next Darwin.

Can a generation so removed from nature that they do not know the difference between a mammal and an amphibian be expected to chose ecology as a course of study? There is a real push in schools and families for kids to go into technology… computers are the new “plastics” so famously touted in the 1967 film “The Graduate.” And yes, computers are and will continue to be central to our civilization. But our civilization is itself built upon a planet that has complex and delicate “systems” of its own… ones upon which all our lives are dependent.

The Earth’s ecological systems are so rich and so diverse that scientists have been studying them for over 100 years and are still only dipping their toes into the amazing scientific wellspring of information they hold. But we will need scientists – biologists, ecologists, paleontologists, and all the other natural history ologists – to decode this information. The IT crew won’t be able to do it alone.

So get outside with your kids! Go see how many different living things you can discover in a square foot of your back yard. You’ll be surprised. Take a net to a local stream or pond and see what you can catch. Look at dirt under a microscope. Discover the world anew and you will come away refreshed, amazed and richer for having done so. And so will your kids.

This summer, as every summer, the Sam Noble Museum offers a series of summer programs for children ages 4 to 14. In subject matter they range from outdoor survival skills to paleontology, aquatic biology and entomology. They are geared to give kids hands-on experience at the excitement and wonder of scientific inquiry, using real objects from the museum’s educational collections. Most of the classes also take the students outdoors to explore and learn under the tutelage of museum educators.

I’ve followed along on these trips from time to time, and it is always a thrill to hear the moment a child engages and gets really curious. They go from squelching merrily through the mud to suddenly standing transfixed with a dripping net in their hands, amazed that they actually caught something! Something alive!  A tadpole! A crayfish! A water beetle! And then the questions begin.

“How does it change into a frog?”
“Is a crayfish a lobster?”
“How does it walk on water like that?”

Ahhhhh! That’s the moment. Each summer, from these sloppy, wet, grubby groups of children with squelching sneakers and red faces, it is possible, just possible, that a brilliant field biologist will be born. One of them might just save the world.

So go on… get out there!

Friday, April 29, is Save the Frogs day. It’s an international effort to raise awareness about the importance of frogs (and o

ther amphibians) to the ecosystem, and the dangers currently facing frog populations worldwide.

Frogs are what biologists refer to as an “indicator species.” What this means is scientists can look at the health of frogs and frog populations in an area to get a good sense of the general health of the ecosystem there. The quality of water in an e

nvironment is central to the health of that environment. Frogs and other amphibians are, of course, dependent upon the water sources in their environments. They cannot live far from water, and because they breathe through their porous skin, any pollutants in the water will directly affect frogs. When frog populations begin to decline, it’s an indication that something is wrong at the very heart of the environment.

Losing frogs may not seem like that big a deal to some. The croak, they hop around… so what? But consider the number of insects that frogs, toads and other amphibians devour every night. And then consider the number of other animals that prey upon frogs and toads for their own survival: birds, snakes, fish, raccoons… etc. Losing frogs cuts at the heart of the ecosystem.

To say nothing of the potential scientific benefits frogs may hold. Many frogs produce chemicals on their skin or inside their bodies that may be of interest to scientists for the source of future medicines. One such frog from Australia actually produced a chemical in its stomach that stopped its stomach from making the enzymes needed to digest food, allowing the frog to swallow its fertilized eggs and provide them a safe place to develop and hatch. When the froglets emerged, the adult frog simpl

y opened her mouth and let them climb out, completely undamaged by stomach acids. Once the froglets had gone, the adult frog was able to “turn on” her stomach chemistry again. These frogs might have provided a key to eliminating suffering for ulcer patients… except they’ve been extinct since 1979.

Frogs have been around for more than 200 million years. They’ve seen the rise and

fall of the mighty dinosaurs, survived ice ages, and thrived on almost every continent. If they are in trouble now… can we be far behind?

So Save the Frogs! Visit our museum on Friday, April 29 to learn more about frogs, view some live Oklahoma frogs, and hear presentations by our curators of reptiles and amphibians. And to learn more about the Save the Frogs Day international, visit their website: www.savethefrogs.org.

There’s a room just off the museum’s loading dock marked “Before Entering: Check CO2 Monitor.” This is where the museum’s CO2 “bubble” is located, and it’s where many objects entering museum collections spend their first month.

Because many of the museum’s 10 million objects in collections are highly susceptible to the depredations of a host of fur, feather and flesh-eating insects, we take pest control very very seriously. Pests in the museum range from dermestid beetles and silverfish to ladybugs and brown recluse spiders.  It’s impractical, and not very healthy, to constantly treat the building with pesticides.  Instead, the museum employs an Integrated Pest Management System that 1) implements certain rules and procedures to keep incoming pests to a minimum and 2) monitors the whole building to keep tabs on what pests do get in, and where.

To keep from bringing in a nest of insect eggs that could hatch in collections, we need to be sure that any object or specimen coming in has no viable eggs or bugs on board.  Since insects and their eggs are very very small, almost every object that comes into the museum has the potential to house a hidden host of them.  Some objects have greater potential for hiding pests.  Animal skins or taxidermied animals are of particular danger, as are any wooden or paper objects that may have been stored in a place where insects were present. Fresh flowers or plants are not allowed in the museum for obvious reasons.  Less obviously, corrugated cardboard is not allowed because the spaces made by the corrugation serve as excellent insect condominiums.

To kill any insects or eggs they could be hiding, all objects or specimens destined to go into museum collections are loaded into the “bubble” – really more like a fabric sided tent – which is sealed up and then pumped full of a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen for a month. When the CO2 is vented and the bubble opened up, any pests or their eggs that may have been hiding are dead, and the objects are safe to go into collections.

Interestingly enough, pure CO2 is not used.  It turns out that some insects have the ability to go dormant under anaerobic conditions.  These insects would simply shut down for their month-long stay in the bubble and then reanimate when the bubble was opened and oxygen was again present.  A mixture including just enough oxygen fools the insects into continuing to try to breathe, a process which actually results in their death by dehydration, not asphyxiation.

It sounds sort of unpleasant, but it is vital to the preservation of our collections that we keep these pests out.  An invasion of flesh-eating dermestid beetles can devastate a collection of animal skins or Native American buckskin or feathered objects in a very short time.

Of course it’s not possible to keep all insects out of the museum.  That’s where the second approach of the IPM system comes into play:  monitoring the insects that are getting into the museum. Hundreds of sticky traps are located at key points all over the building.  Every few months, Roxie Hites, our IPM technician, (fondly referred to as the Bug Lady) collects the traps and records all the pests she finds in them - their location, species and number.  By keeping track, she can spot a sudden uptick in the numbers and head off a disaster before it happens.

I’ve been absent from the blog for some time. My apologies. Things have been busy around the museum, and the last two weeks even more so than usual.

Last week, as you may have read in the papers or seen on television, we announced the naming of a new species of dinosaur, based on fossils in our collection. Brontomerus mcintoshi is a long-necked plant-eater from the Early Cretaceous Period, found in Utah in 1994. It bears the somewhat dubious distinction of having, well, really enormous thighs. We know this because it has an unusually large hip bone. Big bones mean big muscles attached to them, and this one had, proportionately, the largest of any of the big sauropods. So much so, in fact, that its name means “thunder thighs.”

Click here to read the full story about Brontomerus.

The announcement has raised several questions, some of which I will answer here, for the curious. One thing I have been asked several times is “when will it be on view in the museum?” The sad answer, most likely, is “never.” Brontomerus was described based on a handful of broken and very fragile bones (what our vertebrate paleontology curator refers to as “road kill”) that were salvaged from a site that had been looted by commercial bone-hunters. Anything that was display quality had been taken, and what was left was not pretty. There are only a few pieces of two individuals, and these are far too fragile to put on display. The fossils are of great value to the scientific community, however, because Brontomerus is one of several sauropod discoveries from the Early Cretaceous over the past ten years that shed light on a time period for which not much research had previously been done.

Another question I’ve heard is: “How do you know that it’s a new species, or even what it looked like, based on so few pieces?”

Actually, our vertebrate paleontology curator came up with a good analogy for that. You may have met a really good mechanic who can look at a random piece of an engine and tell you at a glance what kind of car it came from. Paleontologists see fossil bones the same way. They know that a bone of a certain size and shape is characteristic of a certain type of dinosaur – in this case, a sauropod. Because they are familiar with lots of sauropods, they know what is typical of this type, and when they run across something new, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

The hip bone on this sauropod is just all out of proportion, to the trained eye, to any sauropod they had seen before. It’s shorter in the back and much broader in the front than the same bone on, say, a Brachiosaurus. Based on that, the scientists knew they had something new. From there, it’s a matter of measurement and analysis of all the bones available, and comparison of those bones to known sauropods. Following that research, the paleontologists are able to write up a paper that describes how the new species is different from any other.

Another question about the new dinosaur is: “Why are Utah bones in an Oklahoma museum?” Well, it so happens that the curator of our collection who co-authored the paper, Dr. Rich Cifelli, specializes on mammals of the Early Cretaceous. To do research on that time period, he has to go to areas where rocks of that age can be found… so he has done research from this area of Utah in the past. He has all the requisite permits for collecting on federal land, and he has a relationship with the Bureau of Land Management there. When officials in Utah discovered that looters had been at work, they contacted Dr. Cifelli to let him know that he might want to come out and salvage what he could from the quarry site, before any more got taken or was damaged by exposure to the elements. Cifelli took a team out to Utah and collected what they could and brought the fossils back here to the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History to be prepared and protected in our collection.

One last question: “The bones were collected in 1994. Why did it take so long to name them as a new species?”

First of all, it takes a long time to get fossils out of the rock. Especially if – like these fossils – they are very fragile and broken. The preparation process has to move very slowly and carefully. Broken fossil fragments must be secured with glue all along the way to keep the bones from falling into a hopeless jigsaw puzzle of fossilized bits.

Once the bones were prepared and identified as sauropod, they would have been included in the collection and became available for the scientific community to study. It so happens that the curators at our museum both focus their research efforts on mammals, not dinosaurs, so these pieces were not of particular immediate interest to their line of study. They were, in short, busy with other things. It wasn’t until 2007, when Dr. Mike Taylor visited the collection from England to look at our sauropods that things really got started. Dr. Taylor is a sauropod specialist. He recognized something unusual about the bones right away, and determined to put the study of them on his To Do list. He worked with Matt Wedel, another sauropod specialist who was a graduate student here at OU when the project started. He’s now a PhD, teaching anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences at Pomona, CA.

It took a few more years to do all the requisite research and writing required to get a new species recognized. The paper itself is 24 pages long and full of words like “preacetabular lobe” and “ischiatic peduncle.” Hardly poolside reading.

So those are my answers to questions you may or may not have been wondering about regarding Brontomerus.

Incidentally, for those who don’t remember this:  Brontomerus is the second new sauropod that has been named from the collection of the OMNH in the past eleven years. The first was Sauroposeidon proteles, found in the 90s in southeastern Oklahoma. It was named in 1999, and earned the Guinness World Record for the world’s tallest dinosaur based on Dr. Cifelli’s estimate that it would have stood some 60 feet tall. Its neck alone would have been 40 feet long!

A couple of years ago, we worked with exhibit fabricators from Research Casting International, a Canadian company that specializes in dinosaur reconstruction, to recreate the neck and head of Sauroposeidon and put it on display in the museum. The long neck stretches down from the museum ceiling in our Orientation Gallery and the dinosaur’s head peers out into the Great Hall to greet visitors. You should come see it.

After my post several weeks ago on former museum director J. Willis Stovall’s dire warnings about the impacts of human activity on the environment, I decided to do a little informal polling of our current museum curators to ask about what impacts of climate change they have seen during their research.

Drs. Laurie Vitt (left) and Janalee Caldwell, curators of herpetology

I went first to Drs. Janalee Caldwell and Laurie Vitt, our curators of amphibians and reptiles, respectively. Much of their field research has been done in the Amazon River area of Brazil, which is, of course, at risk. And since amphibians in particular tend to serve as a sort of early warning system for environmental changes, I expected to get stories of population drops or changes to breeding season or something of that nature that could be attributed to climate change. I got some of that… but the answer that I ultimately received from these scientists was something else. Something much more thought provoking. Something that makes perfect sense when you think about it, but isn’t getting the sort of headline coverage that global climate change is garnering at present.

In the past few years, a downturn in frog populations has gotten considerable news coverage. A contagious fungus known as chytrid is largely to blame for this, and the fungus itself has been directly tied to climate change. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080401-frog-fungus.html).

Dr. Caldwell pointed out that although she has been working with frogs in the Amazon for more than 20 years, the consequences of climate change take place over larger time spans, so the amount of measurable change that can be seen over 20 years can seem small.

Nevertheless, changes are occurring, and many species are, without a doubt, sliding along the path to extinction. Caldwell points to a review paper published in The Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics in 2006 summarizing 866 research papers that document how climate change has caused such things as changes in breeding cycles, mis-matches between when certain caterpillars emerge and when bird parents are trying to find them to feed their young, etc.

And that was in 2006!

“If the average public understood how many species are being lost, it would scare them to death,” said Laurie Vitt.

BUT, he added – and here is where my search for information about climate change became a discussion about something else entirely – climate change is just a symptom, not the cause of these extinctions. Climate change is just one part of a much larger problem that includes habitat loss, overuse of natural resources (such as fisheries) and pollution. All of these are symptoms caused by one thing: overpopulation by humans.

Some scientists refer to human overpopulation as “the Elephant in the Room” when it comes to environmental change. We struggle with cutting fossil fuel use, making better use of our resources, curbing pollution. But behind all of these massive global problems is one humongous, and growing, cause. There are, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s World Population Clock, 6,869,198,668 people on the planet today, with the number, of course, rising steadily. Improvements in health care and technologies that allow for the automation of farming and production of other necessities caused the population growth rate to skyrocket since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Resources on the earth, however, are finite. Any biologist will tell you that when a population begins to outgrow the rate at which its resources can be renewed, nasty things begin to happen.

“We’re like bacteria in a Petri dish,” Caldwell explains. “As the bacteria multiplies, it uses up its food resources (the agar in the dish) and waste builds up, eventually leading to the death of all the bacteria.”

Many resources on our planet are renewable, of course. So the Petri dish analogy is not exactly correct. We can continue to grow food, though for how long we can produce enough to feed the ever-increasing number of hungry mouths is a question up for debate. More immediate than the question of feeding everyone is the issue of crowding – an issue which is much more immediately pressing (if you’ll pardon the pun), and not just for humans, but for all the other species with which we share the planet. As humans use up more space, other species get crowded into less, and the space available may not be adequate for their needs.

Habitat loss is actually the gravest concern facing many species today. “Species end up in fragmented habitats because we cut big chunks out for housing or highways,” Vitt explained. “Tiger salamanders, right here in Oklahoma, are a good example. Tiger salamanders breed in temporary ponds, but they don’t live there. They live elsewhere. A manmade pasture or road that goes in between where they live and breed interrupts their ability to get to and from the water for breeding.”

So What about a few tiger salamanders? There are plenty of folks who can and do make this argument. To misquote Hamlet: “Who is the tiger salamander to us or we to the tiger salamander that we should mourn for it?”

“All organisms are parts of complex ecosystems,” Vitt warned. “All the species interactions maintain the ecosystem over time. The mix, the complexity, helps to protect the whole.”

Think about the bacteria that live in our intestines. There are millions of bacteria in there, and hundreds of species that do all sorts of things – many which scientists don’t begin to understand yet. But their relative numbers remain pretty constant. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to suffer the very unpleasant consequences of the overgrowth of some of that bacteria…. well, it’s not nice. All the bacteria work together, somehow each helping to keep the others’ numbers in check. Scientists don’t really understand yet how and why these bacteria interact, but one thing is certain, you don’t just randomly do away with some of them and not expect consequences to the community at large.

Mass extinction is a cyclical truth on our planet. Five such extinctions have occurred over the history of the Earth. The greatest of these happened at the end of the Permian Period, when some 90% of all organisms were wiped out. The sad truth is that huge extinctions are likely to occur again. According to Dr. Caldwell, some scientists are saying that we have already entered the “sixth Great Extinction.” Some say the crash is inevitable – that it could take place within my lifetime… or that of my ten-year-old son.

Of course, humans are not bacteria.We have the unique ability to THINK. We are the only species that has the capacity to consider the future. We can observe, cogitate, make predictions based on our observations, and then make plans and take action accordingly. If we have the will to do so.

In a letter to BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in December, 1969, our museum’s current director, Michael A. Mares – then a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin – wrote:

The public must be made aware of the precarious ecological position in which over-population and technology have placed us. Without the intelligent support of laymen, attempts to institute reforms to meet this crisis are doomed to failure. How many colleges and universities offer even a basic course in human ecology available to all students? What is the percentage of future high school biology teachers acquainted with the rudiments of their own species’ ecology? The answers, I believe, are tragic.

In the very near future, we, as biologists, will know why the pillars of our natural environment crumbled, bringing down the temple of our synthetic surroundings. But to know then will not be enough, just as to know now is not enough. In an attempt to be constructive rather than merely critical, the following is suggested. It is known that delaying the age at which a woman first gives birth slows down population growth. It seems feasible that a series of cash rewards could be paid to a couple for delaying the birth of their first child.… Beyond this point a system of deductions for two children and penalties for more than two could be imposed….These methods and activities may cost us two precious commodities, time and money, but we must ask, how much is an environment worth?

The idea of limiting our population growth is controversial, particularly in a country in which personal freedoms are so central to our idea of who we are. But Dr. Mares’ warning and proposal, along with the earlier warning by Dr. Stovall, and added to the voices of the many scientists who are currently speaking up about “the Elephant in the Room,” does warrant some consideration and discussion. As thinking, planning organisms, dependent upon our ecosystem… how should we proceed?

The museum Exhibits team has begun installation of the exhibition “Mediterranean Treasures: Selections from the Classics Collection.” This will be a beautiful exhibit, featuring 100 objects from the the Mediterranean area dating from between the 21st century BCE and the 3rd century CE. The objects come from our ethnology collections here at the Sam Noble Museum. Many of these objects have never been displayed, or have not been displayed in more than 5 years.

I went down to watch the work, and was struck first by the beautiful casework. The coins in particular present a challenge for exhibit designers. How do you display a small coin in such a way that the visitor can view both sides? Our team came up with a very striking solution in these tall cases with a long center light.

Most of the hard work of preparing this exhibition was done long before the installation began. Mount-making is as much an art as it is a science. The mounts that hold the objects secure have to be sturdy but not overwhelming. Each mount is hand-crafted to exactly fit the piece it will hold. It is then painted to match, so it is camouflaged against the object and won’t distract from the viewing. The mountmaking has been going on for months behind the scenes.

Exhibit preparator Scott Jones and ethnology collection manager Kate Barr are now working to carefully install those objects into their mounts in the exhibit cases. It’s a painstaking and precise task, which will soon pay off in a lovely and polished-looking exhibition.

Everyone has a favorite object or display. My favorites are these beautiful glass bottles and jars. The colors are wonderful, and it’s amazing to think that something so fragile has lasted so long. Kate tells me that glass blowing techniques have not changed that much since the Classical period. I like to imagine the breath of some long-gone artisan going into the creation of these elegant objects. Would those artists ever have imagined that their work would so long outlive them?