Smithsonian.com

At a sneak-peek press preview of the Live Butterfly Pavilion at the Natural
History Museum earlier this week, a distinctly handsome specimen sporting
bold, gold spots on its black wings alighted on my chin.

Of the dozen or more reporters crowding into the new 1,200 square-foot steel
and glass pod that houses hundreds of tropical butterflies, the Grecian
Shoemaker butterfly chose me, and I was honored. I put my head back to make
my face a more level surface for my new companion and rather directly,
the exhibition manager Nate Erwin explained, “It’s because you’re sweating.”
And then he added, “It’s attracted to the salt in your, ah, lady’s glow.
That’s why many of the butterflies like the Gatorade. It’s the electrolytes.”

Indeed, I was way overdressed for the 95 degrees F and the 80 percent
humidity maintained inside the new Live Butterfly Pavilion, which opens to
the public today. Winter attire is way out of place here.

The beautifully lit feeding stations and plants and warm summer-like
atmosphere create a kind of surreal experience. It’s as if you’ve entered
another realm. And in fact, you have. This is where Clippers, Morphos, owls,
grey pansies, common sailors, blue glassy tigers, monarchs and sunset moths,
to name a few, will live out their adult life spans gorging themselves on the nectar from plants (grown without pesticides) like jasmine, lantana, verbena and clerodendron, to name a few.

The butterflies can eat all they want, but reproduction, according to USDA regulations, is strictly prohibited. (And any butterfly eggs found will be collected by museum staff.)

The reason: There are more than 30 species in the pod hailing from Central
and South America, North America, and Africa and Asia. If any foreigner were
to escape and reproduce in the wild, this could threaten North American
ecosystems. So all host plants (where butterflies lay eggs) like the pink
ginger that attracts the Owl butterfly and the passionflower and the pipe
vine and the milkweed, are not present in the pavilion.

“Butterflies + Plants: Partners in Evolution” is on the second floor of the museum. The exhibition hall is free, but admission to the Live Butterfly Pavilion is $6 ($5 for children, 2-12). Entrance to the Pavilion will be free on Tuesday on first come, first serve basis.

(Photograph by Chip Clark, courtesy of the National Museum of Natural History)

The IMAX movie “U2 3D,” currently on view at the Natural History Museum, adds new dimension to the age-old concert movie. This is not Scorsese’s “Last Waltz”. This is a rock and roller coaster ride where a pair of red plastic glasses is the keypass to a whole new musical realm. This is U2, the band, with vocalist Bono, bass player Adam Clayton, guitarist The Edge and drummer Larry Mullen Jr, bigger than ever, playing in a manner that’s as up close and personal as it comes, musicians three stories tall.

The 3D experience is not yet perfected, there’s still something about it that makes it more novel than normal. Even so, the camera takes the viewer on a soaring sweep 15 feet above the crowd, or to a kneeling perch just under the drummer’s drums, or right up on stage with the musicians. It’s an hour and a half of exhilarating camera angles of a 14-song performance filmed during the band’s 2005-06 Vertigo tour.

The view from the stage is breathtaking. Tens of thousands of concert goers, a teeming crowd, moving as one giant organism in a massive surge of love and admiration for the band. It’s enough to make you wish you were a performer.

The frustration is still there though when the camera gets down into the crowd at that place that’s satisfyingly close to the stage, but furiously blocked by thin, pretty girls who get to sit on their boyfriends’ shoulders. Honey, please get down, I can’t see Bono! But then fortunately, we’re buoyant again and swiftly cruising over crowd and stage, leaving the girls behind.

So what’s this film got to do with Natural History?

Well, nothing really, it’s a crowd pleaser. Says Jerry Sachs, the museum’s manager of guest services, “It provides us the opportunity to bring in a demographic that otherwise might not come to the museum.” But then with a smile adds, “Musicians. . . call it an anthropological study.”

(Photograph Courtesy of 3ALITY Digital)

Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit. Translation: God created, Linnaeus organized.

This was Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s mantra. Considered the father of modern taxonomy, Linnaeus created a system that classified about 4,400 animals and 7,700 plants into an increasingly specific framework of kingdom, class, order, genus and species, tagging each with a two-part Latin name. His naming system, known as binomial nomenclature, became the standard scientific lingo and is still used today.

In honor of Linnaeus’s birth, 300 years ago this past May (check out our homage, “Organization Man,” by Kennedy Warne, in our May issue), Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History is displaying the botanist’s personal copy of his seminal book, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, the book is the first attempt to describe his classification system. This author’s edition is the first 11 pages of what became 3,000 by the time of Linnaeus’s death.

Check out the two-day exhibit, which also includes eight animal and plant specimens named by or for Linnaeus, this Tuesday and Wednesday, November 13-14. On Tuesday, scientists and historian speak on “Three Hundred Years of Linnaean Taxonomy” in an all-day symposium at the Natural History museum.

(Systema Naturae, by Carolus Linnaeus published in 1735. Courtesy of the Embassy of Sweden.)

Last week, we asked for help identifying a picture.

You were all wrong. No, it wasn’t a specimen from the moon. Or Anne Coulter’s pet, or a portrait of Nixon, or, um, a baby panda embryo.

Paleontologist Brian T. Huber from the National Museum of Natural History’s department of paleobiology reveals the creature’s true identity:

“It is a trilobite, which belong to a group of arthropods that became extinct about 251 million years ago. The species shown is Walliserops trifurcatus, and it was collected from ocean sediments in Morocco that date to the Devonian Age, some 385 to 359 million years ago.

“The compound eyes of trilobites were important in predator detection and spines probably evolved to keep the predators from attacking. The projecting rod on the right of this specimen actually connects to a long, forked ‘trident,’ which looks like three leaves on a stem (above).

“Since many arthropods are ‘dimorphic,’ that is, male specimens have a different appearance than females of the same species, it is thought that the trident was used for sexual display.

“Does anybody have a guess what other purpose this strange feature may have served?

“This specimen is one of many that will be featured in a trilobite evolution exhibit within the new Ocean Hall, which will open in the Museum of Natural History in September 2008. This and many other spectacularly preserved specimens were donated from Dr. Robert M. Hazen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.”

(Courtesy of Chip Clark)

Native American Douglas Chilton (or Yaa nak.ch, his Native name) started carving a canoe this fall, when a raven alighted near his workspace. Chilton, who belongs to the Raven clan of the Tlingit Indians, viewed the raven’s appearance as a blessing, especially because he and his colleague Rosita Worl from Sealaska Heritage Institute had already worked out a raven design for the canoe prow.

“I’ve heard about such coincidences happening to other people, but this is the first time it’s happened to me,” Chilton says. As word about the black-winged sentry spread, clan elders came to offer blessings and prayers, naming the raven “the watcher.” (There is no Tlingit word for guardian.) When Chilton and his family members work on the canoe, the raven takes up a post in a nearby tree and periodically squawks a call, as if to say, “Hurry up!”

Chilton’s canoe was commissioned for the new Ocean Hall, which will be opening next September at the National Museum of Natural History. He is at work now just outside the Sealaska in Juneau, Alaska (a contributor to the Ocean Hall). A Web cam is following Chilton’s daily progress, and from time to time, the raven can be seen there too. It has a slightly damaged wing, but it seems to be boldly patrolling the canoe and shooing away the curious.

Chilton remembers seeing a raven, which also had an injured wing, at a site 11 miles away when he was preparing the log for carving. He believes it’s the same bird and intends to honor the raven’s vigilance by incorporating its damaged wing into the canoe design. Though ravens are common in the Northwest, witnessing a myth in the making—online—that’s a rare sign of the times.

(Douglas Chilton and the raven, courtesy of Sealaska Heritage Institute)

This summer, news reports rang with concern that the mighty Humboldt squid was expanding its home turf off the coast of California. Known to congregate in Baja’s Sea of Cortez, at least for the last 30 years, jumbo squid, up to seven feet long and weighing as much as 100 pounds, have been found in waters as far north as central California and southeast Alaska since the 1997 and 2002 El Nino episodes. Scientists note that the apparent range expansion could have something to do with climate-linked temperature changes in ocean water, the decline of predatory tuna and billfish populations and, as squid expert William Gilly of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station hypothesizes, the Humboldt’s ability to inhabit a low-oxygen environment that excludes both their fish predators and feeding competitors.

Almost as equally debated is the squid’s temperament. Smithsonian cephalopod expert Clyde Roper from the National Museum of Natural History describes his aggressive run in with a Humboldt he lured into a cage some time ago while on a filming expedition in the Sea of Cortez:

“I was really interested in how her jaws worked, and I had this wonderful head-on view and her arms were splayed out so I could see the jaws at the base of her arms, the big lips. I think at some point she began to take exception to my examinations, and she just plain attacked without warning.

She was able to do this frontwards; this is the way they capture their prey, because they swim by jet propulsion. They take water into their body cavity, then seal the opening and contract the mantle, or body, and shoot the water out the funnel. But that funnel is very flexible so they can point it out beneath their head and it shoots them backwards or they tip it over, point it towards their tail and it shoots them forward. And that’s what she did at that point. It was just an instantaneous event. First of all, I didn’t have any place to go. I was in the chamber, and she just nailed me right on top of the thigh.

We were in [the water] for several more hours. Finally, at 3 o’clock in the morning, we’d had it and decided to go up on the boat. I had on a bathing suit, diving skins and a wetsuit. We all were ready to hit the sack so I stripped off my wetsuit, dive suit and bathing suit. All of sudden, the photographer looks over and says, ‘Clyde, what’s the matter with you?’ And I looked down and sure enough the blood was still running down out of the gash. The bite was around 2 inches long, right at the top of my thigh.

I could not call it an unprovoked attack. I had her in a cage she was unaccustomed to and I was hanging on to her. I never considered the fact that she was going to attack though. I was just interested in how she worked. And, well, I found out how.”

(Courtesy of Clyde Roper, measuring the length of a giant squid specimen.)

“Lucy,” the renowned fossil skeleton of one of the world’s earliest known human ancestors, which was recovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, recently began a six-year tour in the United States, organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The fossil, however, will not go on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the museum’s Human Origins Program, explains why:

“From the outset, the plan to bring ‘Lucy’ to the U.S. ignored an existing international resolution signed by scientific representatives from 20 countries, including Ethiopia and the U.S. The resolution calls for museums–in fact, all scientific institutions–to support the care of early human fossils in their country of origin, and to make displays in other countries using excellent fossil replicas.

It’s especially distressing to museum professionals I’ve talked with in Africa that ‘Lucy’ has been removed from Ethiopia for six years, and that a U. S. museum has been involved in doing so. The decision to remove ‘Lucy’ from Ethiopia also goes against the professional views of Ethiopian scientists in the National Museum of Ethiopia, the institution mandated to safeguard such irreplaceable discoveries.

As a leading research institution in the study of human origins, we at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History believe it is best to support our fellow scientists and institutions that have such mandates and to listen to what our counterparts in other countries have to say.”

Above: A cast of the “Lucy” skeleton, housed in the Human Origins Laboratory, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The cast is a replica of the original fossilized bones, and is conserved in protective foam. The head end of the skeleton (at right) includes Lucy’s nearly complete lower jaw, and the foot end (left) includes thigh, shin, and foot bones. The fossil’s field number is AL-288, and it represents the 3.2-million-year-old species Australopithecus afarensis.

(Courtesy of Rick Potts)