10am.-7pm. in New York City on Saturday, November 11, 2023

On November 11, 2023, I, along with my peers in the Science and Global Change Scholars program, filed onto the bus at 6am. to head to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Arriving at 10am., we clattered off the bus, shuffling through the group ticket line to begin our day of tours. In front of the Titanosaur cast located in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Center Dr., Dr. Holtz explained how the halls were designed using cladistics to display information. Cladistics refers to a method of organizing and hypothesizing the evolutionary relationship of organisms in a tree of life. However, as new information is revealed, changing the previously hypothesized organization of evolutionary relationships, the museum quickly becomes outdated. Throughout our two guided tours conducted by Dr. Merck and Dr. Holtz we learn more about the errors of museum layout as well as the outdated information presented.

Dr. Merck: Hall of Vertebrate Origins on Vertebrate Evolution

Dr. Merck's tour, held in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins, was on the evolution of vertebrates from marine organisms to terrestrial ones through their distinct characteristics. The floor of the exhibit was designed with strategically placed black tiles to represent the branches of the evolution of vertebrates that connected the organisms on display. Each column in the hall had the name or group of organisms featured, a picture of the tree of life that indicated where in evolution they laid, and a model with a description of a key evolutionary feature that appeared. This method of cementing the evolutionary relationships of organisms through cladistics was useful in visualizing vertebrate evolution but erroneous. New discoveries that altered the hypothesis of the cladistic would force the museum to uproot an entire exhibit to fix, which is an expensive and time consuming task. Dr. Merck stated that if the hall were created perfectly then the museum would have to build a separate building to organize all organisms in the family tree. But clearly they weren't able to do that so what we are left with in the Hall of Vertebrate Origins is the vertebrate evolution of non-mammal and dinosaur organisms.

The first vertebrates, ostracoderms, were armored jawless fishes from the Paleozoic Era with living descendants like the hagfish and lamprey. Bones and vertebrate bones started as armored plating, evolving to what we know today. Genetic accidents, a mutation or duplication of a DNA sequence, cause drastic changes such as the structure of organisms. The development of jaws is theorized to be one of these accidents, mutating the composition of the throat that led to vertebrates with jaws that could bite like the Dunkleosteus, bony fish, chondrichthyans (sharks), and coelacanths/lungfishes. Bony fishes, with its two major clades: ray-finned fish and lobe-finned fish, introduced internal skeletal structures of bones instead of mainly cartilage like for sharks.

Then came the development of limbs and lungs that are tetrapods (amphibians and reptiles), terrestrial creatures that either gave birth to watertight eggs or developed wingspans for flight (pterosaurs). Here, Dr. Merck addressed another error in the exhibit. When the exhibit was being built, the hypothesis was that turtles were closely related to Pareiasaurs as they were descendants of the extinct clade of herbivorous reptiles. The exhibit designers wanted to demonstrate this connection between the two organisms by locating them next to each other as a display of their evolutionary proximity. Since the establishment of the exhibit new information has changed the cladistics, revealing that turtles and Pareiasaurs are on different branches of the evolutionary tree. To avoid having to close the exhibit off while renovations can be done to right the wrongs in the exhibit, the museum could add additional signages that warn the museum-goers of the inaccurate relationship between turtles and Pareiasaurs portrayed. In the long run there will likely be more errors that appear, needing a full renovation of the exhibit.

The Hall of Vertebrate Origins is catered to an audience of all ages, just like the rest of the museum. The information presented is complex but simply explained for anyone from middle school to adulthood to understand while the display of fossils suspended in the air is entertaining for young children. The concepts presented in the exhibit may be too complex for a child to understand but the design of the exhibit with its images and family tree gives the sense of the relationships between vertebrate organisms. There weren't a lot of interactive elements to the exhibit, only one or two screens that you could click through to have a narrator explain the fossils it was in front of to you. The museum could add some more options to tablets like a little matching game for where the major developments in vertebrates lay on the family tree.

Dr. Holtz: Hall of Saurischian and Ornithischian Dinosaurs

The Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs and the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs are similarly catered to the larger audience. These two halls felt more interactive and playful for kids to explore as there are casts of fossils (e.g an egg fossil) that you were encouraged to touch and could visualize better. The information on display is around the same complexity as the Hall of Vertebrate Origins but more specific to the distinctions between dinosaurs so that it could offer most people some form of new knowledge.

After grabbing some food, gyros, from the food truck outside the museum we regrouped again at the Titanosaur awaiting for Dr. Merck’s tour to begin. Led through both the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs and Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, Dr. Merck explained in depth the distinctions between dinosaurs that is dinosaur phylogeny as new fossils and reexamination of fossils reveal more accurate relationships. The most memorable error in the museum was one Dr. Holtz had discovered it while the exhibit was being built, causing the exhibit to be quickly outdated. It was believed that Tyrannosaurus were closely related to Allosaurus, causing their displays to be connected in proximity to each other. But like the turtle and Pareiasaurs, the location of the displays became misinformative with new information, with Tyrannosaurus being more closely related to birds. To fix this outdated information, the museum would have to scrap the whole of the exhibit, renovating it to portray the accurate information. There is another incident where in 2015 the species that was once named Sauropods became Galeamopus, making the name card of the display inaccurate. Thankfully the change of a name card is easy to replace. Not to mention the inaccuracy in the model of the Tyrannosaurus on display. When the cast was being put up in the exhibit, paleontologists had not found the legs of the fossil. To complete the fossil model, they use an Allosaurus leg that’s too long for the Tyrannosaurus.

Dr. Holtz explained that dinosaurs were originally relatively small creatures that could keep the balance of their body weight on their hind legs. An exact cause of the increase in size of dinosaurs hasn’t been determined but we do know that the upright stance, legs position under their body, that dinosaurs had allowed them to support a larger body mass compared to the sprawling stance of reptiles. The dinosaurs’ ability to more evenly distribute their weight for mobility likely contributed to the allowance in size changes. The long necks of the dinosaurs also could have contributed to the size change as they were able to consume more food, leading to more energy storage suitable for a larger stature. We also learned about the difference between Saurischian, “lizard-hipped”, dinosaurs and Ornithischian, “bird-hipped”, dinosaurs. Saurischians have a pubis that points downward while Ornithischians have a pubis that points back. Dr. Holtz emphasizes that he doesn’t know why Ornithischians are called “bird-hipped” when their pubis isn’t like that of a bird.

Self Guided Tour: Hall of Primates

For the final tour, a few of my friends and I did a self-guided tour through the Hall of Primates that explored the mammalian order of hominids and other closely related species. The hall was set up with cases of replicas of primates lining the parameters and descriptions of the distinct features the different primate genera exhibit. Key features such as head shape, posture, hand shape (with a specific focus on the thumb), and the amount and distribution of hair on the species of primate are important to understand the relationship between hominids. For example the subfamily Atelinae has a rounded head, small or absent thumbs that can’t be used separately from the other fingers with variations in hair texture and length that determine whether its Genus Ateles (spider monkey - long, coarse hair), Genus Brachyteles (wooly spider monkey - short, pelage thick and somewhat wooly hair), or Genus Lagothrix (wooly monkeys - dense, pelage soft, and wooly hair).

When exploring the exhibit it was noticeably more inaccessible to kids to learn form. There was a lot of visual stimulation with the interesting poses replicas and skeleton of primates were in but all of the information was through text. There were no interactable activities and often the information had technical names next to it made it difficult to want to start reading. I would add in a tablet like those from the Hall of Vertebrate Origins, Saurischian Dinosaurs, and Ornithischian Dinosaurs that can read out some of the information, or an audio guide of the hall that visitors could listen to. The text explanations of the differences between species were extremely helpful in understanding the reasoning or method of categorization.

Last modified: 9 May 2024