Week 5

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.

Izzy: Izzy Novick is from Denver, Colorado and just graduated from Smith College this spring where she majored in Biology. She is a bug enthusiast and has previously worked in the entomology department at the Denver Museum of Natural History. In her free time Izzy enjoys music, hiking and playing with her cat. She has never worked with fossils before but is very excited to learn more about Paleontology.

Vanessa: Vanessa Delnavaz is a master's student at the University of Kansas in the Museum Studies Program, with an interest in natural history collections management. Her background and bachelor's degree is in marine biology, and after college she fell in love with the museum world. She has worked in collections at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and the Biodiversity Institute at KU. Vanessa has dreamed of visiting the American Museum of Natural History since she was a little girl, and is ecstatic for her first experience here to be as an intern. She is excited to spend the summer exploring the collections and exhibits here at AMNH, as well as visiting all of the wonderful museums in New York City. 

Eva: Eva Larsen is from Clifton, New Jersey and graduated from Macalester College in 2017 as a Biology Major. Highlights from her senior year include studying mating behavior of daddy long legs and curating beetles at the University of Minnesota Entomology Collection. She is looking forward to spending the summer consuming her weight in bagels, going down the shore, and catching up on her favorite true crime podcasts!

Abby: Abby Uehling is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and just graduated from Hamilton College where she was a biology major and environmental studies and public policy double minor. She has previously worked with Lepidoptera at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science and is excited to be working with marine invertebrate fossils. A few of Abby's favorite things include ice cream, running and her bunny named Sven.

This week we started off with some with some necessary training to make sure we understood rehousing, cataloging and databasing protocols for the collection. These three steps encompass most of what our work will be focused on throughout the summer. Most of the collection came to AMNH in storage that was not compatible with AMNH standards so rehousing involves moving specimens into museum grade trays and covering labels with plastic.  After all of our specimens have a new home, we catalog them by giving each of them a number. Finally, we enter all the data found on specimens into a master database file. These labels encompass a variety of important information such as locality, species, collector, series and formation. Although we have had many questions for our trusted adviser, Bushra, we think we’re starting to get the hang of this!

Most of the Ichthyology collection is stored in ethanol.

A brachiopod databased by Izzy under a microscope.

In addition to getting to play with fossils all day, we will have the opportunity to tour a new collections department every week. This week we toured the Ichthyology Department and learned the various ways that fish are preserved. Most fish are transferred to jars of ethanol where they sit in the collection ready to be used for research. However, some are specially dyed so various tissues are different colors or preserved as skeletons, making it easier for researchers to study internal structure. We enjoyed taking a look around the collection and were especially excited to see a preserved coelacanth. It was giant! AMNH found that this particular female specimen was pregnant when it was caught, and had pups inside of it. A model of one of the pups is pictured  below.

A coelocanth pup!

The above pup was found in the female pictured on the right.