A Visit To the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Part II: Terror of the South & the Nature Research Center

Clash of the titans.

Having covered the Prehistoric North Carolina exhibit at the NCSM (North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences), it's time to head on into two other fossiliferous displays.

The first of these is the impressive Terror of the South dome, which is probably fair to call the museum's centrepiece exhibit. The other is the Nature Research Center, which opened a few years ago as a new wing to the museum, so it was totally new to me on this visit. All photos were taken by yours truly, click the break to continue...

Frederic Loomis Discovers Everything, Episode 1: Raiders of the Lost Continent

Around three million years ago, South America became connected to North America via the Isthmus of Panama, and an event called the Great American Biotic Interchange took place, where wildlife from South America moved north and vice versa. Prior to this, South America had been isolated from most of the rest of the world since the Cretaceous Period, and connected only to Antarctica until they separated about 30 million years ago, allowing little exchange of wildlife from other places in world. As such, South America was a 'lost continent,' a strange land cut off almost completely from the rest of the world, with its own array of unique organisms, the characters in their own isolated evolutionary story. It was into this strange world that the North American emigrants came some three million years ago, and it was into the fossil echoes of this world that a very different group of North Americans came in the early 20th century.

Some Patagonian fossils from the Cenozoic Era. They include notoungulates (top row
and left middle row) such as the sheep-sized digger Mesotherium (top centre), superficially
elephantine astrapotheres (lower jaw of Parastrapotherium, middle right), and the extant
xenarthrans (bottom row), including the flattened armour of an armadillo.
[photograph by the author]

Happy Darwin Day!

It's 12 February 2015, and that means it's Darwin Day - everyone's favourite natural history-themed date in February - and this year we're celebrating 206 years since the great naturalist and founder of modern evolutionary science was born in 1809.

Charles Darwin, c 1878. [image in the public domain]

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...)