The 9th grade biology students recently traveled to London for a week-long field trip to many historical sites. The students spent three hours exploring the Natural History Museum. The following is the first in a series of posts written by the students to discuss what they learned.
By Joe, Josh V, and Sam
After spending a very exciting and tiring week in London, we are finally back in the place we call home. Even though we were thrilled to see our friends and family, I think deep down in our hearts, we all wish we were back in London, running all over the place. This was a wonderful experience that we will value and treasure for the rest of out lives, and I think most of us did not want this experience to end so soon.
We went to many interesting sites in London, but one of the most intriguing was the Museum of Natural History. Have you ever been to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan? Well, picture that, but much bigger. It was so immense that in the three hours we spent there, most of the 9th graders only made their way through 4 exhibits. We had the opportunity to visit Darwin’s Cocoon, and then our class split up into groups of three to explore other exhibits. Our group was assigned to the Tree Gallery and Central Hall. At the Tree Gallery, we saw a 47 million year old fossil of a mammal called Ida, and if you looked up at the ceiling, there was a 17 meter long masterpiece of a 200 year old oak tree. When we walked around Central Hall, we saw many fossils of animals such as the Glyptodon, the Diplodocus, and the Paracyclotosaurus davidi. Bet you never heard of those animals before. There was so much information, that no matter how hard we tried to memorize and take note of all of it, it was impossible. Yet, we collected enough to write a very fascinating and captivating blog post for you to read.
The 17 meter long oak tree in the Tree Gallery, entitled TREE, was truly grand and is an absolute masterpiece. Tania Covats was the artist who was selected to display a piece about Darwin. The piece celebrates Darwin’s 200th birthday. The tree is made out of a 200-year-old oak tree (200 a connection), which is sliced extremely thin. The tree is an artistic interpretation, of the iconic drawing done by Darwin, entitled the tree of life. The sketch is so iconic because it is the first time Darwin tried to demonstrate his theory. As the great scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.” So the exhibit has a profound statement, because according to Theodosius nothing displayed in the Natural History Museum would make sense without his drawing and his theory. Darwin’s idea with the tree is that everything has a common ancestor. A tree has such a simple start, a seed, that sprouts to a complex tree with hundreds of branches, thousands of leaves, and hundreds of thousands of seeds. The idea states that animals all started from small basic single celled organisms, like Radiolaria, and evolved into complex multi cellular organisms. The tree branches show closeness like two leaves on the same branch, but also the distance of some leaves on different branches, but they are all connected to the same branch and the same tree ,so they’re related, just what Darwin wanted to show.
Primate Evolutionary Tree
At the Tree Gallery, we were also privileged to see a replica of a 47 million year old female primate fossil called Darwinius masillae, or simply Ida. This was a very big discovery. Ida was found in Darmstadt, Germany in 1983, and scientists discovered its fossil in 2 halves. Determining by Ida’s youthful and adult teeth, she was only about 9 months old when she died, and Ida’s last meal,-fruit, seeds, and nuts- was still in her gut when the paleontologists found her. She was preserved very well and was in good condition. She has many similarities with humans such as her feet and hands, because we both have fingers and nails, and we both have movable thumbs.
Ida
When you first walk into the Museum of Natural History, there is a huge dinosaur called the Diplodocus standing in the middle of the Central Gallery. It is nearly 90 feet long, 16 feet tall, and the tail is 45 feet long. They would use their neck, which measures 25 feet, to retrieve food and leaves deep into the forest without actually stepping foot into it, and they couldn’t hold their neck any more than 17 feet above the ground because it was so heavy. Instead they carried it parallel to their body. This dinosaur is so big that you couldn’t take a picture of the whole thing without taking the picture in sections. Although its appearance is grand, it only weighted about 11 tons, which was light for a dinosaur that big. Even though its tail and body was very long, its head was only about 2 feet long; maybe that was why they had the lowest intellectual level compared to other dinosaurs. After some further research, we found out that this dinosaur was a sauropod, and it lived in the late Jurassic Period, 145-150 million years ago. Because they were herbivores, its main food source was leaves, and we also found out that because Diplodocuses never chewed their food; they often ate rocks to digest the leaves. The Diplodocus display at the Museum of Natural History in London was presented in 1905.
Diplodocus
We encountered a very interesting exhibit, of a giant armadillo called a Glyptodon in Central Hall. The fossil displayed was part of a show called weird animals. It had a domed carapace (shell), rather than tortoise shells, but was made of bone with a rich blood supply and hairs poking through. This shell was made up from many discrete pieces of bone, over 1,000 individual pieces, which grew in the skin of the young animals and fused together to form a solid mass about three centimeters thick in the adults. These plant-eating creatures were quite common throughout much of South America and they spread north into North America. Like so many Ice Age giants, Glyptodon became extinct at about the time of their first contact with modern humans, about 12,000 years ago.
Paracyclotosaurus davidi
We also visited exhibits like the ancient amphibian display case. The Paracyclotosaurus davidi was the only extinct amphibian that lived in Australia 235 million years ago, and it looks like a big crocodile or alligator. This exact remain that we viewed at the museum had multiple fractures in the skull,shoulder, and jaw bone, probably from an injury by a fallen tree. This specimen is 2.7 meters long and the bones were in cased in mud so over millions of years the mud hardened and the bones became as hard as a rock.
Our group also visited a very freaky fish called the Coelacanth. Apparently in 1938 when this creature was first caught people believed that it was extinct for 85 million years. In 1938 a whole colony was discovered in the waters off of the coast of Madagascar and the Comoro islands. In 1960 this specimen was caught; unfortunately, it lost its deep blue coloring. The tail and fins have 3 lobs (limb-like fins ) and scientists say that it was at the beginning of the evolutionary tree for four-limb land living animals. These fish like to swim in depths of up to 2,300 feet, and they could grow to up to 6.6 feet, and weigh up to 20 pounds. There are only about 1,000 of these fish left in the Comoros, so they are considered endangered.
Coelacanth
Where was the first Diplodocus fossil found, and how did it get its name? Where was Ida found, and how was it preserved for such a long period of time? Research a dinosaur similar to the Diplodocus and give reasoning as to why they are similar. Compare and contrast. How did the Paracyclotosaurus davidi become extinct? How did the Glyptodon get it name?
