A Night in A Museum Is Not Nearly As Exciting As Ben Stiller Makes It Out To Be, But It is Fun
I have been passionate about really old things ironically for as long as I can remember and as such natural history museums are a must see visit for me where ever they crop up. A passion of mine that boarders on being level with my love of the ancient is the science behind the environment, go figure I am a student of ecology. Fortunately for me I found a way to harness these two passions by doing research at the Burke Museum in the Paleontology department working within the Strömberg with a graduate student studying leaf fossils in order to better understand a warming period about 15 million years ago.
I am of the opinion that some of the best things that happen in life that set us on different paths than we anticipated are due to serendipitous circumstances, the way I ended up working at the Burke was one of these. As the story goes I was taking an Interdisciplinary special topics honors class hosted in the Burke about Museology and the inner machinations of what happens inside a museum. I was chomping at the bit to take this class and was not disappointed in the slightest, but was ever more pleasantly surprised when we got to tour each collection and go behind the scenes. During our trip into the Paleontology collection we got to meet with who would become my supervisor in the lab and observe the project that he was working on. I found it quite fascinating and was then in the market for a research role and the stars aligned in such a ways that he was also looking for an undergrad to help out.
The work that I helped on was really quite fascinating. The goal was to study a period of time called the Mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum during which the earth saw warming levels and increases in carbon dioxide concentration strikingly similar to what we are observing in anthropogenic climate change today. The goal of researching this event is to observe how the ecology of the region shifted to adapt to this change to have a sense of our future by looking at the past. This component of the research is something I find so fitting as an Honors student, taking an interdisciplinary approach to study something and apply it to other topics that are seemingly unrelated.
One way by which you can study the ecological makeup of a past environment is by collecting fossils of the region in question and comparing them to their modern floral counterparts. Similarly, this can also be a method used as a proxy for other environmental factors such as temperature as certain species are adapted to a specific condition. The way we used this method was by collecting fossils before, during, and after the warming event to survey the changes that occurred. One of my roles was to catalog and photograph hundreds of fossils similar to the one in the photo above in order to create a data base of different species, physiology, and location of origin. I feel like this experience was once which not only taught me a great deal but played well into my interests and potentially changed my path for the better.
"Find me in my fields of grass, Mother Natures son. Swaying daises sing a lazy song beneath the sun"