2018 Mapes Collection Intern Blog

Our third week at the museum has been an adventure! We are gradually picking up speed and becoming more familiar with the motions involved in rehousing, cataloguing, and databasing these incredible specimens. Every fossil is unique, and we have enjoyed this opportunity to inspect (in detail, over and over again) and admire them. Additionally, we have finally mastered the art of multitasking: we now handle the Mapes collection to the sweet sounds of the "My Favorite Murder" podcast, as well as NPR when that gets a little hard to handle (and music when the news is too hard to handle). On Wednesday, we got an AWESOME tour of Exhibits by Dina Langis (thanks again Dina, it was amazing!!) and learned about the backstage work needed to create our favorite exhibits. We had the honor of being clued in to some top-secret future exhibit plans (if I told you, I'd have to kill you, and I didn't make that rule, I'm just an intern).   The only snuffleupagus in the museum...

Throughout our second week, we continued on in our pursuit to rehouse, catalog, and database our specimens from the Roy Mapes Collection! Though we're becoming more comfortable with our work, that doesn't mean any less questions for Bushra! However, new drawers means new fossils -and many of us are finding some beautiful specimens! A sand dollar (Echinodermata) from the Cenozoic Some funky corals (Anthozoa) This week we had the pleasure of visiting the Herpetology Collection, complete with a tour courtesy of David Kirizian. We were amazed by the sheer number of specimens they house (almost 380,000!) and by the size of some of some of these specimens (like the Galapagos Tortoises featured below). Many of the specimens are used for ongoing research, meaning that scientists from many different institutions and countries come to study this collection.  Galapagos tortoises gifted to the collection Specimens preserved in Ethanol Some Crocodilian sk...

Welcome to the 2018 Mapes intern blog! We all successfully made it through one week in NYC and are excited to share our experiences with you as we work to rehouse, catalogue and database this extensive collection of Paleozoic marine invertebrate. This is the third year of the Mapes internship at the American Museum of Natural History and it is our job to work through the final 20 cabinets of specimens. We hope you enjoy learning about the collection! Before we begin,  we would like to introduce the 2018 intern crew. Lindsey : Lindsey Powell is a Hoosier pursuing a Geology degree from Indiana University-Purdue University  of Indianapolis. She has spent time at the Black Hills Institute, as an intern, employee, and volunteer, where she was active in the preparation, assembly, and shipping of the Tyrannosaurs rex known as Trix. In her free time she volunteers at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis in the PaleoLab, and her only hobby is learning more about tyrannosaurs....