#amnh

“Border fragment of wool with a continuous band of #hummingbirds and fringelike appendages representing beans. Early Nasca [Nazca, Peru, c.1-450 CE]. Pollination of bean plants by birds may be suggested here. Border was formed using a needle-knit stemstitch.”

Feast your eyes on the Museum’s giant amethyst geode. Standing 9 ft (2.7 m) tall and weighing around 11,000 lbs (4,990 kg), it’s one of the largest specimens in our halls. How did this dazzling geode come to be? About 135 million years ago, the continental plates carrying South America and Africa began to separate. Magma poured out from fractures in Earth’s crust and large gas bubbles escaped from within the magma—becoming trapped in the rock as it solidified, forming cavities. Groundwater flowing into these spaces brought dissolved silica, which crystallized into quartz. Over millennia, most of these quartz crystals turned into rich purple amethyst. 

Spot this and other amazing specimens in the Museum’s Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals! 

For all my New Yorkers (and adjacent), come visit the American Museum of Natural History and meet other trans people!

In conjunction with the Trans Visibility Social Club of NYC!

If you RSVP before January 22nd* you will be able to see Encounters in the Milky Way with Pedro Pascal at the Hayden Planetarium & IMPACT: the end of the age of dinosaurs for free. This would normally cost $35 (or $28 for students). Depending on the number of people who RSVP, I may break everyone up into two groups so the exhibits don't get crowded.

*latecomers can still see the shows but may not be able to see it at the same time as everyone else, depending on capacity

💎 There will also be an optional scavenger hunt with a prize for the first three winners (everyone else gets some candy)!

If you have any museum-specific questions (directions, what to see, etc.) feel free to @/DM me :-)

In 1924, a mother Sumatran rhinoceros is shot and killed in the Pegu Range of present-day Myanmar, while her young calf is captured alive and sent to the Yangon Zoo (then known as the Rangoon Zoo). Following his death shortly thereafter, his body is reunited with that of his mother at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Today, the over 100-year-old pair remain on display, tucked away in a corner of the museum's Hall of Asian Mammals. The aged placard that accompanies their taxidermied remains not only minces words on the tragedy of their collection, but leaves out that the pair represent the critically endangered, if not already extinct, northern subspecies of Sumatran rhinoceros, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis lasiotis.

But for some reason the color bug bit me and so I decided to crack open my colored pencils at the museum. But I didn’t like the colored lighting of the skeleton so I decided to switch it out for a totally different color.

I then spent the next 90 minutes going “fuck I have no idea what I’m doing this is miserable I have no business having my students work in colored pencil I am a failure” (it was, admittedly, probably a foolish idea to reintroduce myself to color AND force myself to switch the reference’s colors at the same time)

and then it came together in the last 5 minutes when I was hopelessly burnishing. Literally this gif.

Anyway we’re so back I’m a competent artist who can trust my foundations and should probably take my own advice when I tell students “sometimes things look weird until they’re 90% done”