Of Stones and Skins

The trip back saw a break in the rain and clear skies almost the whole way back, a victory dinner at Perkins, and gliding back into Chicago a few hours before the snow. All in all it was a roaring success, and I got to help two great museums out of a pinch.

I also have had some pretty fun conversations with visitors. I’m usually behind the scenes, but I feed some critters who are out on the floor. Stinky the musk turtle is really old and needs help eating, so I get a lot of onlookers when I’m feeding him tweezers full of food. I get surprised looks when I truthfully answer the question of “What are you feeding him?”. Chopped baby mouse. Some people just look uncomfortable and walk off, but I often get great follow up conversations, like debunking the idea that turtles are all vegetarian, or comparing him to other predators who also eat mice. Also just the idea of mouse farms to feed the pet trade is a new concept to a lot of folks. Bags o’ frozen mice of all sizes people, mouse farms.

The skull still needs a ton of work to just get free from the easy matrix, and then we have to decide how to get rid of that bumpy red layer.  From here on out I’ll probably slow down quite a bit, but we are almost to the polishing and beautifying stage.  I’m way excited.

Not only has a super funky new species of extinct turtle been described, but it was named after the fossil-prep volunteer who prepared it! A girl can dream...

Okay, gave the old boy an eyeball, hope that helps people see his face better. If nothing else, it amused everyone in the lab for a week before I turned him. This past week I finished the face and top of his head, and started on the back of the skull. The really identifying parts are the back of the skull and the pallet. My big find this week was the occipital condyle, which is the place your spine attaches to your head. In the last photo, it's two little round bits sticking out of the middle of the skull. They are intact, which is great. You can also see a bunch of bandaging I had to do, one side of the back of the head is broken up. The priority is to get everything cleaned up right now for identification, so we'll glue those broken bits back together later when we have time to make it pretty. In the mean time it's being held together with B72, carbo wax and gauze.

So these photos are a progression of the work I've done on this skull, starting at least prepped and moving to most recent. The biggest difference is how little of the skull is even visible in the first photo,and the fact the dude has an eye in the last photo. This is four days worth of work, the matrix is just flying off, it's delightful. So for visual reference, his nose is facing the bottom of the images the top of his head parallels the left edge, and no, I don't know what that protrusion on the side of his nose is, we've dubbed it "the booger". I'll probably keep moving down the front of his face to expose his big tusk next, I hope it's all there, that would be super cool.

More volunteering at more museums! I'm back to volunteering at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum as well now. Fridays are for animal care. The animal care team know me well, and gave me a whole new set of critters to care for, so I can learn more about everyone. Before, my caretaking focused on birds, invertebrates, and a smattering of amphibians and aquatic turtles. Now my focus is terrestrial turtles, snakes and a different smattering of invertebrates, amphibians and aquatic turtles, plus two spoiled rats. I'm also privileged to feed Bob the endangered Blandings Turtle 2 pinkie mice every Friday. I'm still settling into the routine, so I pretty much spent the whole day there today, forgetting stuff and making lots of extra trips. At the end of the day though, everyone was clean and fed, and I picked up more snakes in one day then ever before in my whole life. (Cadbury, Toby, Coco, Bianca, and Cayenne). I also took hour out to have lunch with a bunch of staff and volunteers and just chat. It's such a welcoming place, I'm glad to be back!

I'm back! I missed volunteering, silly needing a paying job to live. My summer camp counselor job has come to a close, and I'm still working on job hunting, so I can fill my time with delightful stuff like this. This is my newest dicynodont skull at the Field Museum. This one was found in Tanzania this summer by Ken Angielczyk, and he specifically asked me to prepare it!!! I've been waiting weeks to see it, and today did not disappoint. Look at the size of it! You can see my knees in the second photo, for scale. We are cutting the jacket off bit by bit, and prepping as we go. I say "we" because I'm actually tag-teaming with the head preparator, so we can get it done faster. So far it's a breeze though, and look at those crazy bone knobs in the close-up. Those are covering a big area on his nose. This thing is going to be breathtaking.

Today was a holiday, so for my day off I went right back to the Nature Museum to volunteer at the taxidermy desk. I prepped a Northern Flicker to be used as a demonstration of preservation for the Summer Camp. I skinned it, but then put the body back in the skin and loosely sewed it back up, and popped the other bits in a baggie. That went back in the freezer, then I made a common yellowthroat study skin, just for fun. It was nice to be back at the desk, it's great to talk to museum visitors and show people something from behind the scenes.

I've now officially switched gears from being a volunteer to staff, whoo! I'm a head summer camp counselor at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum! Camp doesn't start for a couple of weeks, right now we are in orientation and curriculum design. It's been great to go even farther behind the scenes to see all the research and planning that goes into everything the Education Department does. From in depth studies of how different ages learn, to partnering with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to get coyotes pelts, they are a very cool department. Today a horticulturist walked us around the grounds to get us familiar with all the resources out there. He showed us an ash tree being killed by the invasive Emerald Ash Borer, and there was actually an adult beetle right there, along with the tell-tale V shaped holes they leave in the bark. Boom, firsthand experience with a new invasive species and its effect. Right there. Also we picked and ate an assortment of things, and like all plants in the onion (alium) family have super pretty flowers. Good stuff.

This is a little tangential to volunteering and taxidermy and what not, but I think it's a story worth sharing. My bike was stolen last week. I live in Chicago, and this is my primary form of transport. I have a car for grocery shopping and getting the pets to the vet, and I take the CTA a lot, but the bike is always my first choice. It saves me a lot of money by not using gas or paid parking, and I can eat a lot more cupcakes. Last week it was taken out of my building's locked basement. I was crushed. That second photo is my bike after I reclaimed it, getting a checkup by the shop that had it. Yes, I actually got my stolen bike back. Among all the things I did after I realized my bike was gone, one thing was to walk to the bike shop at the end of my block, Ciclo Urbano (http://westtownbikes.org/retail) and ask if anyone had tried to sell them my bike. I described my bike and was overheard by a shop full of customers and mechanics. Two days later they had my bike, because someone saw it on the street in a suspicious circumstance, and grabbed it. I don't know who grabbed it, and I didn't pry, but holy crap. So if you want to be prepared in case you bike is ever stolen, here is what I did: 1) write down your bike's serial number (tips here: https://bikeindex.org/serials). 2) don't remove the stickers from the bike shop where the bike was originally purchased. Ciclo Urbano actually called my original bike shop to get my info. 3) Register your bike everywhere. I'm on http://www.bikeshepherd.org/ and registered with the Chicago Police Department. 4) File a police report 5) if you are in the Chicago area, post your lost bike to http://chicago.stolenbike.org/ 6) MOST IMPORTANT: tell everyone. I posted a public post on Facebook, and walked into that bike shop and told them about my bike. If I hadn't made my post public on FB, my original bike shop might not have found me, they had an old phone number. A lot of people shared my FB post, and I had folks I didn't even know checking eBay and Craig's List. In this case, I got my bike back because I asked my community for help, and they did. If my bike was sold to a pawn shop, the police would have been the ones to find it. If it had been posted to Craig's List, it might have been a friend of a friend in Wisconsin who spotted it. In this case, someone from Chicago's very tight bike community saw something fishy. My bike sleeps in my apartment now, and I still kinda can't believe I got it back.

Bittersweet last day as a volunteer at the Chicago Academy of Sciences and its Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum before I become staff next week as a head camp counselor. I didn't get any photos of the critters at the museum because I was to busy telling them I love them in a goofy voice. You know. For my afternoon in the collection, I got to pull butterflies out of the archives. There is a new exhibit in the works for this summer, and I got to select nice specimens from a list of local butterflies to be part of that display. Also it turns out the collection has 3 drawers packed full of Red-Spotted Purples, which is about the most goth drawer of butterflies ever. I found a great one to add to the exhibit, no worries.