Are You Making a Connection?

So, why are you here? What part of yourself did you bring today? What experience do you want to have? These are the questions I wish I could ask every one of you as you come through the museum’s doors. Then according to your answers I’d play matchmaker, pointing out an exhibit hall, hooking you up with just the right specimen or artifact so you could make a connection.

In today’s increasingly digitized world we are overwhelmed with visual images, most of which we ignore. You come to the museum and we’ve got…uh…more stuff for you to look at. Yet, you’re here. You could have stayed home twitching through a hundred television channels or trawling online for something, anything, about science. But you dealt with traffic and parking to experience something real, so what will you connect with and why?

Everyone coming to the museum brings their own individual history, likes and dislikes and those things obviously factor into the objects they find appealing. Suppose you love all things purple and you really like minerals, it’s no big revelation that one of your favorite specimens at HMNS might be the amethyst geode in the mineral hall. At this point, mentally Rolodex the specimens and artifacts you’ve come to love at HMNS. What do you never tire looking at, what do you always re-visit? Fossils? Shells? Taxidermied wildlife? A Native American pot? You can probably easily state the reasons why, too. Old stuff’s cool, shells are pretty, animals fascinate me, etc., etc. But let’s dig a little deeper.

photo credit: jrsnchzhrs

Think of an object at the museum that caught your attention for no particular reason, it sorta surprised you. It might have been nothing special until you read the label, learned something new, and suddenly you saw that object differently. Or across the gallery something grabbed your eye and you absolutely had to know what that thing was. Aha! A connection’s been made, you’re not completely sure why, but you enjoy it and now it’s a favorite thing to see and share with others when you visit the museum.

Let me assure you, that very real connection between you and your special item can’t be downloaded or digitized. To illustrate I’ll share one of my favorites - but I have to cheat a little. This specimen’s not on exhibit but is part of the vertebrate zoology collection. A few years back a giraffe died of old age at the Houston Zoo and the skull was sent over to Dr. Brooks, our Curator of Vertebrate Zoology. The giraffe was Hi-Lo, whom I remember fondly from my childhood zoo visits (that’s my personal history connection) so I was pleased his skull came into our collections. Then I observed that the horns, those knobby things on a giraffe’s head, are actually bone. Somehow I thought they’d be some sort of spongy cartilage. Who knew? But I gained new insight. Last, for no reason I can defend, I truly love the slender elongated sculptural beauty of the skull. It’s just cool. Yeah, I can google an image of a giraffe’s skull on any computer but it’ll never delight me the way that Hi-Lo’s does.

Ok, a connection’s been made. Where will it take you? Does it inspire enough to pursue further knowledge or is the experience of the connection enough in itself? As a child, the late great Stephen Jay Gould so loved the dinosaur skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History that he became a renowned paleontologist. Me? I enjoy looking at the giraffe’s skull over and over again but am content to remain a registrar. And here’s some more musings regarding our connections with objects. Why do we take photos of our favorite things in museums? Why do we take photos of ourselves with them? Why do we buy replicas of them in the museum gift shop?

photo credit: Zepfanman.com

Whew, lots of questions in this blog! Now it’s your turn, let’s make this a discussion. Which objects do you think best represent the museum; are there iconic objects that connect with every visitor? Communicate with us; tell us what your favorite HMNS artifacts and specimens are and why. Because, if I could, the last question I’d ask when you go out the museum’s doors would be: Did you make a connection?

Donna Meadows
Associate Registrar, Acquisitions

There have been whole books written about the history and development of the Periodic Table of the Elements, and how that shaped what we know about chemistry now, how great it is, blah, blah, blah. And the Periodic Table is a great and useful tool, but today I’m sticking to some basic fun stuff, like this crocheted periodic table that Erin introduced me to, or the periodic table TABLE.

All you really need to know (for now) is that the chemical elements are pure substances usually considered the building blocks of all the matter in the universe. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, lithium, potassium, bismuth, neon, helium, tungsten, copper, and gold are all elements, along with about a hundred or so others. Tom Lehrer wrote a fantastic and ridiculous song, The Elements, which names them all (or at least all the ones known when he wrote the song).

Most of the time we encounter the elements as compounds (like a water molecule is two hydrogen atoms attached to one oxygen atom) or mixtures (like air) or alloys (a special kind of mixture) like steel (iron and friends) or brass (copper and zinc).

If you want to get picky, then yes, an atom of an element can be broken down into even smaller and simpler building blocks, but I’m not worrying about that now.

So, returning to just the elements, each element has unique characteristics, just like peanut butter is different from jelly. Each element has a certain number of protons (the atomic number), and an atomic mass (essentially how much stuff there is in an average atom of that element), and a number of valence electrons (which determines a lot about how the element reacts).

Don’t get bogged down in what each of those things means, just remember that different elements have different characteristics, just like some shapes have curves and others have angles, or like some animals have two legs, some four, some more, and some none.

Anyway, the point is that if you have different characteristics, you can do some sorting, and sorted options are easier to deal with than a pile of randomness (I bet you select a sorted pair of matching socks most of the time, and prefer that your oatmeal isn’t stored in the same container with chocolate chips, soy sauce, and croutons in your pantry).

Science LOVES classification and sorting, and there are all sorts of systems and methods to do it. One word for these systems is taxonomy (to be distinguished from taxidermy, though you may certainly classify and sort your stuffed road-kill should you so choose.) Taxonomy often refers to sorting and classifying living or once living things, but it can also mean classifying rocks, stars, etc., based on their characteristics.

Things to Try:

Periodic Table of Office Supplies?

Instead of sorting elements or classifying animals into classes or species, I sorted some office supplies of the order Paperclippius, more commonly known as paper clips. Go ahead and try this with your own office supplies, pocket change, or whatever small items are handy.

Here is an assortment of specialty paperclips — how could you sort these?

You might sort by color:

Or by shape:

And both ways have value. If we sort by color and shape at the same time, a ‘table’ starts to form:

And the next step……

And then we might complete the table this way:

But we could have set up our sorting table like this:

Or like this:

And those ways are just as good — they all sort by both attributes (shape and color), and we know where each type of clip ‘belongs’ in the table. If we had everything laid out except the blue triangle clip, you would notice the ‘hole’ and know approximately what that clip should look like.

The existence of many elements in the periodic table was correctly predicted before those elements were discovered, because of the ‘holes’ left in the early versions of the table. Pretty cool, right?

BEYONDbones

Houston Museum of Natural Science

Tag Archives: taxidermy

Are You Making a Connection?

Science and Sorting

Latest Posts

Latest Comments

Editor Picks

Most Comments