Romsey Abbey: The mystery of the hair in the coffin

Art Under the Microscope: Lacquer

This sample of wood is actually from the panel of Japanese lacquer that decorates this cabinet, which explains why a Japanese wood was found on a French furniture piece.

Bonus fact: Did you know there is an International Association of Wood Anatomists? 

Art Under the Microscope is a series that features, well, art under the microscope, as photographed by our conservators to better study and preserve our collections.

Research Suggests Dodos Might Have Been Quite Intelligent

New research suggests that the dodo, an extinct bird whose name has entered popular culture as a symbol of stupidity, was actually fairly smart. The work, published today in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, finds that the overall size of the dodo’s brain in relation to its body size was on par with its closest living relatives: pigeons—birds whose ability to be trained implies they’re no dummies. 

The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) was a large, flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, where they were last seen alive in 1662. When sailors discovered the island  in the late 1500s, the dodo didn’t fear these new arrivals. That led to the birds being herded onto passing boats as an easy meal for passing sailors.

“Because of that behavior and invasive species that were introduced to the island, they disappeared in less than 100 years after humans arrived. Today, they are almost exclusively known for becoming extinct, and I think that’s why we’ve given them this reputation of being dumb,”said Eugenia Gold, the lead author of the paper, a research associate and recent graduate of the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School, and an instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University.

Read how Gold managed to examine the brain of a long-extinct bird. 

The Raising of Chicago

During the early history of Chicago, the city was often plagued by epidemic diseases such as typhoid fever, yellow fever, cholera, and dysentery.  The main cause of this was due to the fact that the elevation of the city was not that much higher than the shoreline of Lake Michigan. As a result, the city suffered from poor drainage and sewage systems as water could not flow downhill, causing Chicago streets to be filled with large pools of standing water which harbored pathogens and parasites.  Flooding was also very common.  By the late 1850’s, it was clear that something had to be done as the city continued to grow, worsening the problem.

In 1856 an engineer named Ellis S. Chesbrough submitted a plan to solve the problem by building a new sewage and drainage system.  An ambitious project, the key to the new plan was to literally raise the entire city around 4-7 feet, working systematically, building by building, block by block.  Work began in early 1858 with the lifting of a four story, 750 ton brick building to a new elevation of 6 feet, 2 inches with the aid of 200 jackscrews. Over the next year, 50 other buildings were likewise lifted, with hundreds of thousands of tons of soil and concrete laid to form a new foundation for the city. In 1861 the 1 acre large Tremont House Hotel was raised six feet using 5,000 jackscrews (top picture).  The Hotel continued to operate throughout the work, housing many guests including several VIP’s and a US Senator.  The following year the 27,000 ton Robbins Building was lifted more than two feet, all the while businesses and shops continued to operate out of the building.  The most impressive feat was the lifting of half of a city block located between Clark Street and LaSalle Street.  This included several 4 and 5 story brick buildings as well as the streets and sidewalk. Conducted by a team of six engineers (including Brown Hollingsworth and George Pullman) directing a crew of six hundred men, the entire half block was lifted 4 feet 8 inches using 6,000 jackscrews (bottom picture).

Work continued throughout the 1860’s, by the end of the decade it was mostly completed, with hundreds of buildings raised or moved completely.  The new sewage and drainage system mostly solved Chicago’s health and sanitation problems.  However pollution and sewage from the rapidly growing industrial city devastated Lake Michigan.

Natural History Museums Are Teeming With Undiscovered Species

Via @theatlantic​:

“Evon Hekkala, a geneticist at Fordham University, is an evangelist for natural history museums and the many secrets that are still locked within their drawers and dioramas…It’s easy to view such collections as soulless stashes, examples of humanity’s hoarding instinct unleashed upon the natural world, turning vibrant menageries into dead zoos, and living, breathing, mating, hunting, fighting creatures into mere specimens, dissembled and dissected, posed in dioramas, pinned in drawers, crammed into cabinets, and stuffed into jars. But to Hekkala and many other scientists, these hoards are full of riches still. They are time capsules that contain records of past ecosystems that are rapidly changing or disappearing. They are archives that provide clues about raging epidemics, environmental pollution, and hidden extinctions. And they are full of unknown species—like the sacred crocodile.”

Read the full story from The Atlantic, and see the Musuem’s own tale of discovering a new species in a collection drawer:

Learn more about this topic. 

Clay sculpture, 15,000 years old…

Back in 1912, the three sons of a local count were exploring a cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees (one of the core areas for Palaeolithic parietal art), and discovered the marks of prehistoric people within, including this bull and cow bison pair moulded out of the cave wall clay and propped against a boulder on the ground, then left for many millennia. The preservation is remarkable considering the time span and the unfired nature of the clay. The only damage are a few cracks due to desiccation.

Keep reading

This could be the earliest picture of a volcano ever painted. It was found in Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave in southern France, which was used as an art gallery about 35,000 years ago, and rediscovered by modern humans in 1994. 

Although it looks like later artists sketched a Megaloceros over the top of the volcanic art, archaeologists have been able to determine (and date) the general shape of the previous drawing, which looks surprising like a volcano. 

The painting site is relatively close to now-extinct volcanoes visible from the area of the cave. Dating performed on volcanic mountain range shows that at least some of the volcanoes were likely active during the time the cave was used for painting, and could have served as a source of inspiration for the artist.

(The original paper, available here, has maps of the area and photos of some of the volcanic remnants. In the image above, frame B is a photo of the painting, frame C is a sketch of the details made by archaeologists, while frame D and E show other prehistoric (but much newer) volcano art, dating from 7-10,000 years ago.) 

Image credit and original paper:

A 36,000-Year-Old Volcanic Eruption Depicted in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave (Ardèche, France)?, Sébastien Nomade et al, PLOS|ONE, 1/8/2016

A simple graphic shows Jared Diamond’s hypothesis about the five main factors influencing whether a society will be able to continue for millennia or will die out much quicker.

Ancient DNA Tells Us Much About Modern Basque's Once-Unknown Origins

The Basques have unique customs and a language - Euskera - that is unrelated to any other spoken in Europe, or indeed the world. Nestled in a mountainous corner of Atlantic Europe, they also show distinct genetic patterns to their neighbours in France and Spain. But their origins have remained an elusive mystery for as long as anthropologists and linguists have been studying the Basque and their Euskera.  Mattias Jakobsson from Uppsala University in Sweden analysed the genomes of eight Stone Age human skeletons from El Portalón in Atapuerca, northern Spain. These individuals lived between 3,500 and 5,500 years ago, after the transition to farming in southwest Europe. The results show that these early Iberian farmers are the closest ancestors to present-day Basques. Jokobsson’s results suggest that the modern Basque are likely descendants of early farmers, possibly mixed with local hunter-gatherers and using their language, who then became isolated for millennia. Read the full BBC article here

Early human migration patterns, based on genetic evidence from male y chromosomes and female mitochondrial DNA.

Experts once considered cave dwellers to be evolutionary dead ends. Charles Darwin himself wrote of these “wrecks of ancient life,” and “living fossils.” But now we know better. As scientists find new cave species and probe their DNA, we’re learning that this hidden world is as dynamic as the one above ground. Far from being dead zones, caves are evolutionary laboratories.

The cave spider (Trogloraptor marchingtoni), first discovered in the dark zone of a cave in the coastal forests of Oregon, differs from other spiders so much that scientists created a new family to classify it. One feature that sets it apart: unmatched toothed claws at the end of each leg that are likely used for capturing prey.

Meet more amazing creatures in Life at the Limits, open for one more month!

At the time of his death in 1601, the Danish astronomer, mathematician, and alchemist Tycho Brahe was the most respected scientist in the world. He was also a huge partier, had upended astronomical beliefs that had been around for over 1,500 years, and had been given no less than two castles and a personal island. Keep reading

Take a look at Toxoplasma gondii, you may be infected with it.  Roughly a third of all humans are infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can alter the behavior of mice—and it appears to influence our behavior as well. Studies suggest that infected men become more reckless, break more rules, and dress more sloppily. Infected women become more sociable and wear more expensive clothing. Both have slower reaction times and get in more car accidents. A digital rendering of this parasite, which appears in the exhibition’s interactive table, is pictured here.

Learn more about your microbiome in the new exhibition, The Secret World Inside You, now open at the Museum.

Image: © AMNH