This post first appeared on the Bureau of International Information Programs in the United States Department of State's blog Our Planet on March 8, 2013 as part or their Smithsonian Month series. Thank you to the Bureau of International Information Programs in the United States Department of State for permisison to repost.
Here is the first guest blog for Smithsonian Month. It was written by Nick Pyenson, Ph.D., Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals for the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. For more information on his research interests, check out this page.
Fossils are the direct records of ancient life, and as a paleontologist, it’s always a thrill everyday to hold and study these messengers from the geologic past. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, we house 42 million specimens in the Department of Paleobiology from every continent in the world, spanning every geologic time period from the last Ice Age (~18,000 years ago) to first squiggles of microbial life (~3.5 billion years ago). Our mission is to study, preserve and continue building these unique collections.
But it’s important to recognize that these collections didn’t just appear magically at the museum. They are the culmination of millions of hours of labor spent collecting and retrieving these traces of the distant past. Each specimen undertook a special journey from its discovery in a rock outcrop to a museum drawer. And, often, these journeys take decades, might involve preparation in a laboratory, or re-analysis with new eyes. You never know what secret may be revealed by a careful look in a museum cabinet.
Like modern biodiversity, fossils are non-renewable resources. Sometimes, they are plentifully preserved, while other times they are exceedingly rare. Consequently their scientific value is disproportionately large. The commercial interest in selling fossils has been a perennial issue in the history of paleontology, and today’s professional societies take explicit positions on the sale of fossils and their protection on public lands. Technological advancements are also providing new ways to salvage crucial information, especially in time-sensitive circumstances. For example, my Chilean collaborators and I have been able to use 3D digitization tools to save valuable information about entire fossil sites, when details about the position of fossils in rock layers, and their orientation, might have otherwise been lost. These tools give us the potential to share and preserve information in a variety of new ways. Although that is no substitute for the real thing, it’s one of the many reasons why museums continue to be an irreplaceable place to store, share and study the natural world.
This entry reflects the author’s personal judgments and does not represent the views of the United States Government or the Department of State.