Sunday, June 5, 2016

Another Summer, Another Place

This year, there is no field work. There are no nights under the milky way, no scorpions, and no monsoons threatening to steal my tent.

Instead, this is my summer view. And this is Opie, Floyd, and Bea deciding on what they want to do over the weekends that we'll be here. For some reason, before I got kind of tired of cities, I really wanted to come here when I was little. There was something magic about the Statue of Liberty. I may not like crowds, but its made up for by everything I want to explore here.


But there are no dinosaurs buried in NYC. At least.... none that I've heard of. Unless you count those that are buried in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History.

Look familiar? This is the home of Rexy, from Night at the Museum.

The museum is one of those that really got paleontology going. It is the reason that no one can forget Brontosaurus, and the home of Roy Chapman Andrews, who went from custodian to leading a field expedition to the Gobi desert. Its like Chicago; its one of those museums that has risen to being one of the most renowned institutes of paleontology.

This is where I'm interning this summer.

Funny story, though. I'm not actually interning in the paleontology department. I'm in ornithology, the study of birds. Why?

Well, I've been using the summers to try to narrow down what exactly I want to study in graduate school by studying a different animal group every summer. And the project this year happens to be studying the differences between the bones of different species, and using it to work out the relationships between birds, both fossil and modern. Now, the birds I'm working on are ones that you would actually recognize as birds if you stepped out of a time machine; they are not dinosaurs with feathers or that can even fly. You'd know these were birds, no questions asked. However, we are interested in the end of the Cretaceous and the time right after the meteor. Before the dinosaurs went extinct, there wasn't a very high diversity among the birds. Afterwards we find a lot of different species. What happened?

Frankly, we don't know. Its a research internship; the point is to study things we don't know. The extinction of the dinosaurs did open more niches, or roles in the environment, leaving them to be filled by birds and mammals. But that's about all we've got figured out at this point.

So I'm not working with the public this summer. But I'll be sure to dig up stories about birds, dinosaurs, the museum, and anything else science-y I can. Meanwhile, I'll be in a city I can't dig in, having a different kind of adventure.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.