Blue Collar Scientist

I am sitting in the airport in Portland, Oregon, fresh from an outing to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I was fortunate to fly first class from Anchorage to Orlando and back for the princely sum of twelve dollars (thanks to frequent-flier miles), but the cost of getting such a good ticket for such a good price is a lengthy ten-hour layover in Portland. Careful advance research revealed that the exhibit of China’s dinosaur and bird fossils, called China’s Ancient Giants, had opened at OMSI just a week ago.

Naturally, I left the airport and hopped a cab for this. I even packed my carry-on very carefully - with a maximum of, uh, minimalism, so that I could comfortably spend the day at OMSI.

First, let me report that OMSI gets crowded on a Saturday. Incredibly crowded. I stood in line for about twenty minutes to pay my admission. About 3/4 of the human beings in the place were under 12 years of age, and to them all the other people in the joint were completely invisible. Most of the kiddies were accompanied by what I presume were their genetic forebears - I deliberately don’t say parents, because from what I could see the reason many of them had brought their children to the museum was to preserve their living rooms from destruction by transferring the damage to a public place that had a high probability of overstimulating their unruly progeny.

Well, it’s my bad for going on a Saturday.

The quality of the exhibit was decidedly mixed. Many of the specimens were casts, and I have no problem with that - in fact, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think exhibiting casts of megafaunal fossils is a good thing. The thing is, they have to be good casts. Some of these weren’t. There was at least one fossil with most of the knee joint surface wiped out by what I presume was an internal support, which was colored as though it were bone, and which made the whole knee anatomy suspect to me. Also, casts should be declared as such, and these weren’t. Only the actual fossils were disclosed, and I’m pretty sure there were a few actual fossils I saw that weren’t labeled as such (because you wouldn’t mount casts with such heavy ironwork, I wouldn’t think). Finally, the specimens were poorly interpreted by the signs. The curator should go check out the Orlando Science Center and see how it should be done. I was grateful that I had carried a lot of my own dinosaur knowledge into the place and didn’t have to rely on the signs.

On the other hand, they did have actual fossils of actual Liaoning birds and feathered dinosaurs, which were most impressive. These were, by and large, in large display cases off to the side of the large mounts, and relatively neglected by the children. That’s a mixed blessing, if you ask me. It was great that I was able to take long looks at these fossils without getting jostled out of the way by an insistent seven year old boy whose mother is training her son for a career in the demolition derby. But it is a tremendous lost opportunity to not have children seeing, and understanding, these fossils that were only discovered in the last 15 years or so.

In some of these fossils, the wishbone was conspicuously visible. In others, it was conspicuously absent. Right there you’ve got an accessible educational opportunity, but most of the adults I chatted with about the specimens didn’t know what the difference was and couldn’t have cared less.

Still - I’ve now seen fossils of feathered dinosaurs. With obvious feathers, right there in the rock, where anyone can see them and say “hey, that’s a feather.”

That’s way cool.

I’ll also give them full credit for hanging some cladograms of dinosaurs, and for having some excellent interpretive material on dinosaur hips and pelvises. This is fundamental evolutionary information, right out of a 101 class (and fully understandable by sixth graders), and it is always nice to see an exhibit like this take the opportunity to do some teaching about details such as these.

The rest of the museum was well designed and I think better maintained than most examples in the genre. All of the little electrical gadgets that I played with were in good working order, which is not the norm at most science and technology museums. They also had a substantial amount of floor space devoted to ecology, and human anatomy and development. They also have a planetarium and something called an Omnimax movie theater, neither of which I sampled.

It was a great way to spend an afternoon - especially considering the alternative of sitting around in an airport all day, but it was good in its own right. I’d recommend the museum to anyone in Portland, or anyone who visits the city. I’d also recommend not going on the weekend - museum staff assures me that today was typically busy for a Saturday.

The Blue Collar Scientist and the Blue Collar Mom were at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural history today. This is my first trip to Washington, DC for pleasure - I was here about fifteen years ago on government work and got to see absolutely nothing in the way of attractions during the brief time I was here. This time, it’s all for fun.

The Museum is an old-style natural history museum - there were a few outdated dioramas (e.g., showing Tyrannosaurus standing upright and balancing on its tail, though the actual mount was done right), lots of stuffed specimens in the Hall of Mammals, most of the megafaunal mounts on display were of actual fossilized bone rather than casts (with accompanying heavy steel supports), some of the descriptions on the interpretive signs are out of date (and are corrected by supplementary signs), and the whole place has the musty, dusty vibe of a natural history museum of the late ’50’s.

It was so cool.

I went immediately to the hall of fossils and dinosaurs, because that’s my thing - I’m as enthusiastic about paleontology as I am for astronomy. Almost immediately, I noticed that there was something that looked roughly like this Devonian starfish labeled as an “asteroid” (Devonaster sp). Made me feel right at home.

I was pleased to see the Museum is unabashed about displaying their specimens with evolution in mind. They exhibit a cladogram for marginocephalian (fringe-headed) dinosaurs, for example, and also have on display an impressive cladogram for proboscidians (elephants, basically) built around miniature sculptures of each species. Cladograms are really cool - they are diagrams showing the ancestry of species, based on evidence from anatomy, biochemistry, genetics, and so forth. A cladogram shows which species gave rise to which others, and what species are in a modern species’ ancestry. The tool is so powerful that there is a movement within biology to classify living things cladistically, rather than with the modernized Linnean taxonomy that is currently widely used.

I had something on my mind during my visit, inspired by comments that people left (but were never published) on my post about the Atlas of Creation - you know, that book that advocates creationism that (presumably mistakenly) used photographs of fishing lures to represent actual insects. A number of creationists, apparently in an attempt to gloss over that widely respected creationist authorities don’t know the difference between insects and fishing lures, tried to post strident, tiresome rants about how there has never been a single transitional fossil found - not one, not even one! Of course this is wrong - tons of transitional fossils have been found, otherwise we wouldn’t have cladograms. But I was wondering about this claim during my visit, and I resolved to keep my eyes open for examples of transitional fossils on exhibit for everyone to see - not buried in some obscure museum archives, but out in the areas of a museum open to the public.

And I was not disappointed:

• Ten transitional horse fossils.
• Six transitional fossils of genus Homo.
• Thirty-four transitional fossils of fishes from primitive ray-finned fishes, to teleosts.
• Over a dozen transitional fossils from fishes to amphibians.

etc. All right out there for everyone to see. And I remember that a bit over a week ago at the Orlando Science Center I noticed two transitional fossils of birds on exhibit.

How could anyone miss all these?

The answer of course is that the creationists lie. It is as simple as that - the people who say this are either lying, or have been lied to by people that they trust and are willing to repeat. Under the traditional definition, transitional fossils are fossils that have some characteristics of older organisms, but have some new features as well. There is no mistaking a transitional fossil. You can’t look at a fossilized toothed bird skull and fail to notice that some characteristics look like dinosaurs (the teeth, for example), and other characteristics look like modern birds (the beak, for example). This kind of thing is incredibly obvious and a mistake in this arena simply cannot be made in good faith.¹

Of course, we recognize today that every single fossil (and every living organism) is by definition transitional - but even under the traditional definition, finding transitional fossils is apparently pretty easy - the hard work is done, and I found over fifty of them in my first hour in a natural history museum that was new to me.

So, people - don’t let them get away with this kind of thing. When you hear a creationist point out that there are no transitional fossils anywhere, please let them know that the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History has over 50 on exhibit that they can find in less than half an hour. If necessary, let them know that they can get to the Smithsonian on the Blue or Orange lines of the DC Metro and see for themselves.

Remember, be nice. You won’t convince them. But you might convince the people around you who are listening in on the conversation.

1. I grant that some of the more obscure characteristics of fossils may be legitimately missed by people who aren’t specialists and argued over by those who are. What I’m saying here is that any ordinary person in possession of a basic sense of honesty will not fail to notice such obvious characteristics as the presence or absence of teeth. [↩]