DILJIT DOSANJH I FULL VIDEO I BIG SCENE CON.FI.DEN.TIAL I NEW SONGS 2018
- Many visitors to the Peabody Museum don't realize
that what we have on display
in our public galleries is less
than one percent of the museum's collections.
I'm Tim White.
I'm one of the collection professionals here at the museum.
Today, my colleagues and I are gonna take you
on a behind the scenes tour of the Peabody
to see many of the specimens and artifacts
that people rarely get to see.
Some people think that the Peabody
is all fossils and bones
and we certainly have our share of those,
but we have also collected everything from arrowheads
and pottery to plants and birds,
fish and butterflies, and even DNA.
And a lot of it is housed right here in a complex
that includes the museum,
the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center,
and the Kline Geology Laboratory.
While we already moved most of our anthropology collections
to West Campus in 2008,
we still have some important artifacts waiting
to be moved from the Peabody basement.
Let's meet Maureen DaRos, one of our anthropologists,
to learn about some of these artifacts.
Maureen, could you tell us a little bit
about the contents of this room?
- This is our Archeology of the Americas room,
and it's North America all the way through South America.
And we have collections such as ceramics,
and lithics and here's some of our earliest collection
and this is a tripod vessel from Panama.
This was used as an offeratory vessel,
probably found in a funerary context.
This was actually part of one
of our earliest digitization projects as well,
where 30,000 whole vessel
or figurine items were digitized,
photographed by graduate students
whose specialty was South America.
- [Tim] How many objects are in this room?
- This room has probably over 40,000 objects,
it's closer to 70,000 objects.
I mean, some of them are the larger whole vessels
or stone-carved objects,
but a lot of them were excavated material
that are a lot smaller but all needs
to be inventoried, digitized, and photographed
before we can move them.
- What's along the wall, Maureen, behind all of the glass?
- Along the wall is mostly our whole vessels from Peru.
One of our largest South American collections is from Peru,
we've had several archeologists over the years,
including Wendell Bennett, who was interested
in the Huari culture.
But we also right here we have some Moche vessels,
and it's simply,
we didn't want them in moveable storage,
coming out of a drawer, so they're on shelving.
It's a worldwide collection, we have a large collection
of North American basketry,
and we have the largest Caribbean archeology collection
in the world,
and we have large collections from the Pacific,
so these are large wooden poles,
and basketry fronts that decorated the South Pacific houses.
- [Tim] And where are we moving them to?
- We're gonna be moving them to our facility at West Campus,
where we already have 75 percent of our collections
and we're hoping to be able to have more browsable,
accessible storage.
- I've been managing collections
for over 30 years, and one thing I've learned
about improving the conditions is that
it's all about opportunity.
We certainly weren't looking to move,
but West Campus was a great opportunity
to upgrade our space.
Of course, a move like that doesn't happen everyday,
and many opportunities have come in the form of grants,
which brings us to our next stop.
This room was renovated with funds from the
Save America's Treasures program.
This is Vertebrate Paleontology's newest collection room,
and it happens to be Marilyn Fox's favorite room.
Marilyn is our Chief Preparator of vertebrate fossils.
Marilyn, what does a preparator actually do?
- Well Tim, we do a lot of things.
So we take care of the collections,
we go out and collect new fossils,
and when you collect a fossil it's encased in rock,
so our main job is to uncover the bone
and the information contained in the bone,
so they can be used for research.
- So what are you working on now, Marilyn?
- So for example right now, I'm working mostly
on a teeny tiny fragment of a lower jaw,
that we collected in the Petrified Forest.
It's a new kind of animal that we don't know about.
This is an interesting piece
because it's got serrated teeth,
that means it's a meat-eater,
but it's only,
its jaw is only this big.
We always have a variety of things that we're working on.
And my colleague Brian who's in the lab today,
is working on a block that was collected
in the 1940s of an animal called Coelophysis,
which is one of the earliest Triassic dinosaurs.
So most of the animals
in the Triassic were actually crocodile relatives.
But what's really cool is in this giant block,
there's more than one kind of animal,
so there's the Coelophysis, and unknown crocodile relatives.
Tim, let me show you why this is my favorite room.
So before we moved the specimens into this room,
they were stored in what I think of
as the archetypal dino-store room,
which was dark, dank, dusty,
1926 state of the art shelving.
And we've moved them into 21st Century,
state of the art shelving, so these shelves can open up
with the touch of a finger,
this is over 500 pounds on this shelf,
and researchers can come in, it's well-lit,
it's light and bright, and they can measure,
they can study these specimens without the danger
of moving them around.
- [Tim] So what are we looking at here, Marilyn?
- Well this is the top of the femur,
which is this thigh bone, of Apatosaurus,
and if you go up in the Great Hall,
there's this giant bone lying on the Jurassic Island,
and this is the other side of the leg.
So we've had about four or five different researchers
just in the last year,
here working on the relationships of these animals.
So even though these were collected 150 years ago,
they're used all the time by current researchers.
Now I'll show you something else.
So Tim this is an example
of 19th Century shipping practices.
This is something that was collected by J.B. Hatcher
in the 1890s, and what they did
in the field was they put it in this box
with prairie grasses as a support.
Then they put that in a horse and buggy,
drove it across the Badlands, put it on a train,
and that's how it got back to New Haven.
But the grasses during all that time dried out,
so they were offering no support to this poor bone,
which pretty much got destroyed.
So now what's actually more scientifically interesting
about this specimen is the grasses.
- Yeah, that's my understanding, Marilyn,
that the grass can actually be used
as a proxy now to predict
what the environment was like during the 1890s.
- It just means you can never know
what's gonna be useful
for scientific research in the future.
- If the story of the prairie grass tells us anything,
it's that we can't always know
what future generations will find important.
So the Peabody isn't just
about preserving the past for today,
we're also about preserving the present for posterity.
The Peabody's Cryo Collection is our newest collection.
In the vats behind me are tissue samples of birds,
fish and mammals that were collected in the field
by our researchers.
These vats preserve the samples
at temperatures below minus 310 degrees Fahrenheit.
And because we're using liquid nitrogen,
they can maintain those temperatures for up to a month
if we lose power.
The samples in this collection are available
to scientists around the world,
and their immediate use is to add genetic information
to everything else we might know
about an organism's evolutionary history.
But because we intend
to preserve these samples indefinitely,
we can really only guess
at what uses future researchers may find
for these collections.
But collections aren't just about having things,
it's what you do with them.
- We're now in the Class of 1954,
Environmental Science Center,
2/3s of which is occupied by Peabody collections and labs.
We deliberately designed this building
to bring the collections and the people who study them
into close proximity.
The result is cutting edge scientific research
that attracts people from across campus
and from around the world.
Though in many cases, you don't actually have
to come here to reap the benefits.
So we're in the Entymology Collection with Nicole,
and we were hoping you could tell us a little bit
about the collection.
What are you working on now, Nicole?
- Well we have a grant called the LepNet grant,
and this is a multi-institution opportunity for us
to digitize all of our moth and butterfly holdings.
That means we're gonna be digitizing
about 150,000 specimens over the course of the grant,
possibly more.
We have students coming in everyday,
maybe up to 10 students working at a time,
and they read the data that's on the labels associated
with our moth and butterfly specimens,
and they enter that into our database.
- [Tim] So what's the goal of this, Nicole?
- Well, we're trying to make everything
that we have here at the Peabody,
accessible to anyone, anywhere.
So it used to be that researchers
or visitors may have to cross the entire world
to get specimens that they're using for their research.
Putting the data online means that any researcher
who's interested in a certain group of insects can look
at the data online and see whether
or not the specimens they're interested in,
are here at the Peabody.
Then they can contact us to get more information
about those specimens.
This research can be anything
from research on conservation of environments
to research on pollinators like bees,
everybody's interested these days in finding out
why the bees are dying,
so one of the areas of our collection
that we digitized first was our bees.
- So what are students and researchers using
the collection for?
- Well so it may be that once they find
that there are specimens here
that they're interested in for their research,
they need DNA sampling,
or they need some kind of tissue sample.
Sometimes you refer to this as, grinding up their legs,
because usually with insects, they'll remove a leg,
and here we have a specimen, this is a swallowtail butterfly
and as you can maybe see, Tim, it's missing some of its legs
so instead of the ordinary six we have only three legs.
Because insects have six legs,
this gives us six opportunities for people
to take tissue samples from a specimen.
So that's often very useful for researchers,
although it damages the specimen,
it's relatively minimal overall.
- [Tim] So why should we care about insects?
- Insects compose some 80 percent of species diversity
on Earth, maybe as high as 90 percent.
They're most of what we have on Earth,
and they impact our lives in every way,
in addition to interesting
and useful food sources,
they provide research possibilities for medicine,
they pollinate our food,
so without them, we wouldn't survive for very long.
- When museums started digitizing their collections,
there was a concern that if people could view collections
on their computers, museums would die off.
In fact, it's been the opposite.
More and more people are using the museum
because of its online presence.
So we're in Invertebrate Zoology with Dan Drew.
Dan, what have you been working on, lately?
- So we're in the third year
of a National Science Foundation-sponsored project,
to catalog and digitize
our 50,000 plus microslide collection,
that has been acquired over the last 150 years
by various Yale researchers,
starting with our first curator,
and then all the way down to current research,
doing work on small crustaceans,
so still we're still making slides.
The project was to catalog initially,
gather all the metadata for the slides
and enter it into our database,
and part of the project is we bought a slide scanner
to scan 2,000 of those slides at high resolution,
and also low-res scans of as many of the slides as possible.
We're probably gonna approach somewhere in the neighborhood
of 40,000 scans altogether.
All of those scans will be freely available
through the Yale Peabody website,
and then the high-resolution scans are going to be available
through our virtual microscopy website,
which is geared towards education,
particularly four through eight,
high school, and even undergraduates and graduate students
in colleges, will be able to use the material.
- So how is this better than traditional microscopy, Dan?
- It's better than a traditional microscope,
in that the scanner allows you to look
at the whole specimen at one time,
a student looking under a microscope
in a classroom would only see a small portion
of that specimen.
The scanner stitches it together
and allows us to display the entire image.
Also, microscopes are prohibitively expensive
for many school systems, so we can produce the images
that they would be seeing, and provide them via the website.
- So are there other advantages
that have come out of this project, Dan?
- For one, the best advantage
for scientific researchers is the material
that has been essentially lost to the scientific community
for as long as 150 years, is now available.
Researchers can find the material, number one,
know where to go and look for it,
and be able to use the images instead of possibly having
to come here, or we could take new images
at higher resolution for them and send it to them.
- So this is the division of Invertebrate Paleontology,
and we're here with Susan Butts, the collection manager
for invertebrate fossils.
So what have you been working on recently, Susan?
- Well Tim, we've got a grant
from the National Science Foundation,
to look at the Western Interior Seaway,
and the name of the grant is The Cretaceous World.
So the Western Interior Seaway is a seaway
that covered the interior of the United States,
it ran from Canada down to Mexico.
And what we're doing is digitizing all the material.
So the animals that lived in the Western Interior Seaway,
range from microfossils like foraminifera zooplankton,
to ammonoids, to very big clams
in the Western Interior Seaway,
and then we have the vertebrates
like Hesperornis, which is in the Great Hall,
Archelon, the giant sea turtle, which is in the Great Hall,
and Xiphactonis, the giant fish in the Great Hall.
Now we're working on this with collaborators
from several different institutions,
and by digitizing from all these different museums,
we can get a better picture of what the ecosystem is,
and then we can look at how that ecosystem responds
over time to sea level changes,
so we know that this time period,
which is the time of T-Rex,
is a time when there's big sea level changes
and that drives whole new changes
in terms of biodiversity.
So assembling this huge dataset
from all these different institutions,
gives a really solid base for studying what happens
in response to climate change,
in response to sea level changes related to climate,
and then just how fossil communities interacted.
- So what are the challenges, Susan,
when you're dealing with this kind of material?
- Well this is the type of object
that is a digitization challenge.
So this is a cluster of fossils
that are cemented together with minerals,
and in the past we would have cataloged this as one object,
but now we have the ability to catalog each and every one
of the clams in this fossil.
And we have to develop pretty sophisticated workflows
to do that, and what it involves,
is taking very high resolution images,
and then we have a series of scripts
that process those images,
rename them as the specimen number for the Peabody Museum,
and then introduce them to our database,
and attach them to this data for these specimens.
- [Tim] So who's doing this work, Susan?
- So we do have a museum assistant who assembles material,
but the people who do the bulk
of digitization are Yale students.
So we have two or three students each term
that are digitizing all these materials,
and over the course of the grant, so far,
which has been a year and a half,
we've done about 70,000 objects.
- From the Western Interior Seaway
to microcrustaceans, swallowtail butterflies to DNA samples,
Apatosaurus femurs to Panamanian pottery,
and much, much more,
the Peabody collections are at the heart
of the museum's mission
to tell the story of our planet and its people.
We've been very fortunate over the years
through grants, building renovation, and collection moves
to not only improve the conditions of our collections,
but to build on the museum's long legacy
of giving the public, the Yale community,
and researchers around the world as much access
to our collections as we possibly can.
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