Event name: Excursion To The American Natural History Museum (AMNH)
Event time and place: November 11, 2023 in New York
First Tour (Dr. Merck)
This tour focused on several aspects of the natural world. A significant focus was on the field of cladistics, which deals with the evolutionary history and classification of life on Earth, whether extinct or still alive today. We also focused on fossils, what and when they were, and what we clues we can glean from them. This tour had a specific focus on fish and marine life, and most of the examples given to illustrate the concepts mentioned before were of fish, or at least of some sort of marine life.
This tour portrayed many specific concepts. Here are some examples:
- The first invertebrates were jawless. The first invertebrates with jaws evolved later, due to what you could consider a genetic accident. What happened was that one of the fish's genes duplicated, and a mutation occurred at some point in one of the copies, creating a hinge structure in the head. This would turn out to be useful, as it turned into the jaw. There are no half-jawed invertebrates. Either you got the mutation that gave you a full jaw, or you didn't.
- All land vertebrates evolved from some form of bony fish. We can see how we are related to them by looking at tetrapods, whose limb structure is surprisingly similar to our current-day limb structures. Amphibians evolved sort of along this transition, bridging the gap between fully marine and fully terrestrial animals. One of the major developments that came along about this time were the egg, and the watertight shell that followed.
- We can determine information about extinct animals based on details of its fossils. For example, if we look at a fossil, and we observe that it had large guts and teeth ill-suited to grinding up meat, then we can conclude that the fossil we have is of an herbivore. In some cases, we can also determine how the animal died. For example, we observed a marine fossil with objects sticking out its rear and throughout the center of its body. This is consistent with the story that the fossil died giving birth.
Here are some examples of how the hall conveys this information:
- They hang a literal shark fossil on the ceiling so you can see the components.
- The hall structure conveys information about the tree of life. As you move along in a single hall, you generally move along in chronological order. Additionally, the halls are organized into logical cladistic groupings.
- A bony fish fossil is shown in 3D, allowing you to gain more information about that fossil. In this example, it allows us to conclude that the fish shown ate another fish and choked, causing death to both fish. Because the fossil is shown in this way, we can more easily conclude this.
- Some of the hall organization is inevitably slightly inaccurate, as it reflects our understanding of the tree of life when it was built, which has inevitably changed.
This hall is most likely aimed at the general adult with a reasonable amount of intelligence but not necessarily any background knowledge in the field. Scientific names are given but explanations are accessible to the layperson. That being said, I would say this hall is the least accessible to younger guests out of the three halls that I visited, due to the lack of interactive components and the fact that fewer of the animals in the hall are animals that younger guests might not know how to relate to.
This hall didn't contain any interactive components. Since other halls have an interactive component that answers common questions with videos, this hall could use one as well. The best use for such an interactive component might be to tell the stories that Dr. Merck told. There could be a video stand next to one of the fossils, that could answer questions such as "How do we know what the fossil ate?" or "What most likely ended this fossil's life?". A way to access a text explanation would be useful in conjunction to a video explanation, for people who want to access the information more quickly.
Dr. Merck pointed out how Pareiasaurs and turtles are together spatially but not cladistically, which is not reflected in the hall's layout. Unfortunately, this would be extremely difficult to fix, because you'd basically have to tear down the entire building, change the floor plan, and rebuild it from scratch.
Second Tour (Dr. Holtz)
This tour mainly focused on dinosaurs. There was still a significant focus on fossils, what they were, and what we can glean from them, and also a focus on cladistics and the tree of life, but this time, it was applied to dinosaurs instead of fish.
This tour portrayed many specific concepts. Here are some examples:
- We classify dinosaurs based on their common ancestor. Classic meat eaters form one group, long-necked herbivoes form another group, and beaked dinosaurs form a group on a completely different branch of the tree of life.
- At some point, rainfall increased, which caused more trees to form. This increased the size and diversity of long-necked plant eaters, leading to an increase in body size. This made it impossible to be bipedal, which meant that the long-necked plant eaters had to be quadrupeds.
- Dinosaurs had a very high metabolic rate like mammals and birds. Some evidence for this is their efficient respiration and extreme growth rate, that is, they got big despite dying young. Even a 15-year-old dinosaur could grow to several times our size.
- Ornithomimids show us that species descended of a group might not share that group's attributes. They share a group with mostly carnivores, but they are herbivores.
- Birds are dinosaurs, and every bird living today is descended from a dinosaur.
- The Stegosaurus armor is mostly just for show (i.e. attracting mates). Only the spikes on the end actually serve as a weapon.
- There is lots of data on duckbill dinosaurs. We even have some mummified duckbill specimens. Duckbills were one of the two main food sources of the T. rex, given how common they were. We know that the skin of some of these duckbills could sometimes be preserved as follows: The duckbill dies, scavengers open it up, the skin flattens and hardens, and it makes an impression in something that can be preserved.
Here are some examples of how the hall conveys this information:
- For the dinosaurs, they use life-size fossils (such as the life-size T. Rex fossil) to indicate the animal's size. It's one thing to know about the animal's form and another thing to actually see it.
- On the flip side, the life size fossils showcase the disappointing small size of the velociraptor.
This hall is most likely aimed at the general adult with a reasonable amount of intelligence but not necessarily any background knowledge in the field. That being said, out of the three halls I examined closely, this hall is probably the most accessible to younger children, just because of the subject matter (i.e. young children are fascinated by dinosaurs). The life-size fossils definitely make it more accessible to young children as well.
This contained an interactive exhibit of plate tectonics and gave information about dinosaurs. For example, I decided to obtain more information about Protoceratops. The information it gave included its size (2m), diet (plant-eater), and miscellaneous information (common in the Gobi Desert). The interactive video describing plate tectonics and how they work in termed of the Earth's crust, which showed how the Earth's continents have shifted as geologic time passes.
I didn't find the exhibits all that effective, because it took a long time (approximately 30 seconds) to get to the relevant information. You could tap on an animal to get the information about that animal, but it took a long time to get there because the interface was laggy and there was too much unskippable animation. Also, the interactive video about plate tectonics did not allow you to pause or skip forward, so I found the video too slow, and younger viewers might find it too fast.
One instance of something in this hall being out of date was that the feet bones on one of the dinosaur bone displays are inaccurately shaped. Dr. Holtz actually discovered this while the museum was being constructed, but the museum still contains the less accurate shape. This would be moderately difficult to fix. You wouldn't have to tear down the building, but you would have to obtain a correctly-shaped dinosaur bone, and physically go into the exhibit to make the fix.
Third Tour (Self-Guided: Mammals Exhibit)
This tour focused on mammals. As always, the structure of the museum made it easy to focus on fossils and cladistics. However, since mammals are more recent, we know more about the gradual evolution and transformation of each group of animal, so this was a common theme in this hall that was less prevalent in the other halls.
This tour portrayed many specific concepts. I chose to focus specifically on the evolutionary history of horses. Here is what I found:
Many distinct horse fossils have been found in various sizes and ages, with a clear trend that earlier horses were smaller than modern horses. A simple explanation is that horses evolved on a single lineage and gradually got larger. However, further investigation shows that this is not the whole story. A few species of horses were small and modern. This would contradict the simplest straight line theory. Also, most early horses had three toes and most late horses had one. However, a few late horses still had three. This suggests that there was a mutation that caused some horses to have fewer toes, but it didn't cause the horses with more toes to go extinct.
Here is an instance of how the hall conveys this information:
The exhibit lays out horse fossils chronologically to show the general trend that old horses are small, and new horses are large. Then, to showcase the exceptions, they indicate on the information slides that some examples that break the trend are in the back of the exhibit. This way, both the general rule and the fact that it's not the whole story are both conveyed well to anyone going through the whole exhibit.
This hall is most likely aimed at the general adult with a reasonable amount of intelligence but not necessarily any background knowledge in the field. This hall had lots of textual explanation, which is scientifically accurate but still accessible to the layperson. Out of the three halls I examined closely, this hall is probably in the middle, in terms of its accessibility to younger guests. It's not as immediately appealing as dinosaurs, but there are still many animals that younger children can relate to such as horses and dolphins, and there are interactive exhibits that don't require as much of an attention span as reading.
This hall contained the same interactive components as the Dinosaurs hall (information about plate tectonics and various mammals), which had the same problems as discussed before. It also contained an exhibit that would answer questions about mammals and fossils. If you clicked on a question it would give a video showing an explanation. For example, one of the questions that was displayed was, "what do extinct mammals eat?". It turns out, we don't know for sure what extinct mammoths ate, but we do know that mammoths are related to elephants, and elephants eat plants, so we can make an educated guess that mammoths eat plants. We can gather further evidence by looking at their teeth. Since mammoths have flat teeth, that gives further evidence that they eat plants. Again, in this case, static text and images would have conveyed the same amount of information while allowing the reader to go at their own pace. Since we don't have videos of extinct animals, the medium of video doesn't add that much to the explanation. That's not to say that the video explanations shouldn't be there, it's just not as efficient a way of conveying information. I personally didn't find them useful, but many others (i.e. those that prefer not to learn by reading) will.
I didn't see any instances of the exhibit being outdated. There might have been such instances, but since this portion was self-guided, I wouldn't have Dr. Holtz or Dr. Merck to point out inaccuracies. However, as our understanding of mammals evolves, the layout of the exhibit will inevitably drift further and further from what we know is true. For instance, as sea levels have risen, the interactive exhibit might be very slightly inaccurate in showing our continents today, and this trend will continue in the future. This probably wouldn't be a significant enough inaccuracy to really matter, at least from the museum's perspective, but it is at least worth noting.