Welcome To the Museum

Welcome to Noah's Ravens, the blog where I'll explore the collections of the Beneski Museum of Natural History, the natural history collection at Massachusetts's Amherst College. It is also my current place of employment; I'm a first-year student at Amherst and work shifts as a museum docent and tour guide. As a hopeful future palaeontologist, it's basically a dream job made real.

Here on Noah's Ravens, I intend to take a closer look at some of the specimens in the Beneski's rather extensive collections, which include giant mammals of the Pleistocene, one of the world's largest assemblages of dinosaur tracks, and a lot of oreodonts. Seriously, there are loads of oreodonts.

The author, with the skull of one of the aforementioned oreodonts. 

I'm going to look for stories behind the fossils, to catch a glimpse of their often-interesting human histories as well as their natural histories. There will likely be diversions from the Beneski Museum as well, and maybe even slight dips into my personal life (natural history-related dips, of course). I do hope you'll find this blog interesting, and — if you don't already — come to share my fascination with the specimens that call this museum home.

— M

(PS — Wondering about the blog title? That'll need a post of its own...)