04Aug / 2017

Anachrokapi

My family recently visited the Natural History Museum in London, UK. As we slowly made our way through the labyrinth of reconstructed fossils, skeletons, and taxidermied specimens, I was reminded of a anachronistic okapi that appeared, briefly but memorably to me, in the third season of Penny Dreadful.

In Penny Dreadful, the character of Dr. Alexander Sweet is the director of zoological studies at the very same Natural History Museum. In the second episode of season 3, Dr. Sweet and lead character, Vanessa Ives, tour the museum, which includes a taxidermied okapi specimen positioned correctly, from an evolutionary perspective, near the giraffe skeleton (seen below in the far left of the screenshot).

Screenshot 2017-08-03 21.45.58.png

The enigmatic okapi, the “ghost of the forest”, often considered mythological by European explorers, was formally described to Western science in 1901 CE. Which makes one wonder where Dr. Sweet’s museum found their specimen*?

It could just be a mistake or it could be a hint. I’d elaborate, but spoilers…

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12Jul / 2016

A visit to the Herschel Museum

(cross-posted from easternblot.net)

The day after the Brexit referendum I went to visit a museum dedicated to two German immigrants, and some of England’s most prolific astronomers.

2016-06-24 13.50.02 Siblings William and Caroline Herschel lived in Bath during the 18th century, in New King Street. Two and a half centuries later, the street was quiet, with recycling bags outside every door, and a few straggling hopeful “Vote Remain” posters in some of the windows. The Herschels used to live at number 19, where the front door was now partly open.

I stepped inside, into a very normal corridor of a very normal terraced house. Normal, aside from a man standing behind a desk in the room at the far end of the corridor, welcoming me to the museum, and explaining that I could walk around the house, which was entirely converted to a museum devoted to the Herschels’ life and work.

I started at the basement level, which had access to the garden. This was the very garden in which William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781.

Until his discovery, there were only six known planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. All of these could be seen with the naked eye, and had been recognized as planets from the way they travelled across the night sky and changed position in relation to the stars.

2016-06-24 13.47.23 The remaining planets were too far away to see. There were telescopes at the time, but none were good enough to see that far into space with enough detail. William Herschel developed a telescope that made it possible to see further into space in more detail. He had a workshop attached to his home, where he worked on his telescopes, and he soon became the world’s foremost telescope maker.

But despite discovering a whole new planet, astronomy was just Herschel’s hobby at the time. His day job was as organist for the Octagon Chapel in Bath. The organ is no more, but a set of pipes from the old organ are on display in the music room, upstairs in the museum.

2016-06-24 13.57.50 The music room also has several objects related to the life Caroline Herschel. She initially came to England to help her brother around the house and to pursue a professional singing career. When William’s astronomy hobby slowed turned into a full career, she became more involved with that, and made a few astronomical discoveries of her own.

When William discovered the planet Uranus, he proposed to name it Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) to honour England’s King George III, who was also Duke of Herschel’s hometown Hanover. The name didn’t stick, because other astronomers preferred a more international name, but in 1782, William Herschel was employed as King’s Astronomer. A few years later, the king also paid Caroline a salary for her assistance to William, making her the very first woman in the world to receive a salary for scientific work.

In the gift shop on the ground floor of the house I picked up two booklets about the Herschels’ musical careers, before heading back to the train station.

In the following days, it quickly became clear that in the wake of Brexit it has become quite difficult for European scientists in the UK, when nobody knows whether they will need visas, or whether new researchers will even want to come. Even British scientists are already having trouble applying for collaborative grants with their EU colleagues, as they might not qualify for the funding in a few years, and hinder the joint application.

So how did the Herschels get to work in England so easily, centuries before the EU? There may not have been a Europe-wide open borders scheme at the time, but there was an arrangement between Hanover and England, since they shared a ruler (King George III), so it was an obvious and easy choice to move between the two places.

I wanted to visit the museum because I was interested in the Herschels’ dual interests in music and science, but the date of my visit couldn’t have been more poignant, as the Herschel story is a textbook example of the work that foreign scientists have contributed to the UK.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel Tagged: Bath, Brexit, Caroline Herschel, William Herschel

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12Jan / 2016

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

“Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is closed until further notice”, says the website for the Oregon bird sanctuary.

This is the refuge that is currently being held by an armed group. There is much circulating online about the fact that they have guns and want snacks, but very little is mentioned about the location.

Some unarmed occupants of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

The Malheur Refuge was originally founded in 1908, and has expanded since then by government purchase of surrounding lands. This is ultimately what the group holding fort in the wildlife center is acting against: they are acting on behalf of ranchers who want their land back – not just this land, but land in other locations as well.

So why has the wildlife refuge been buying these lands? Conservation.

In the late 19th century, many birds in the area fell prey to hunters who gathered their feathers to sell to the hat industry. The white heron population almost entirely disappeared during this time. Rather than sitting idly by as their local fauna was turned into hats and fascinators, locals took action. Wildlife photographers and the Oregon Audubon Society lobbied for the creation of a preservation area, and in 1908 President Roosevelt established what was then known as the Lake Malheur Reservation.

These days, the area supports “between 5 and 66 percent of the Pacific Flyway’s migrating populations for priority waterfowl” and “over 20 percent of the Oregon population of breeding greater sandhill cranes”. It’s a major bird habitat, but it’s also home to many species of mammals, fish, and insects.

Researchers make use of the refuge for moth, bee and bat inventory studies. According to a recent study, Malheur is one of the few places in the Pacific North-West where the canyon bat is found.

If you want to see the bats or birds on the refuge, you’re going to have to wait for the occupation to end. Don’t send snacks.

Image by Barbara Wheeler, CC-BY via Wikimedia.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel

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11Nov / 2015

Greetings from the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station

The Main Building of the Kilpisjarvi Biological Station

Regular readers of the Finch & Pea are aware that for the past few weeks, I’ve been doing an art residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, way above the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. It’s quite an unusual place. Let me show you around.

The station, which belongs to the University of Helsinki, was founded in 1964 to promote biological and geographical research in the north. Conditions were quite primitive at first, with researchers renting rooms from some of the very few year-round inhabitants of the area. (There are still only about 100 full-time residents of Kilpisjarvi) Twenty years later, the current building was built, and additional facilities have been added over the years.

No shoes!

The Station sits between Saana Fell and Kilpisjarvi Lake. An extremely clean, modern facility, it still has a few quirks. For starters, the station has a strict “no shoes” policy. You leave your boots at the entrance hall and pad around in your socks. If your city boots are not equal to the winter snow and ice or the spring and summer mud, there are dozens of pairs available to borrow, along with backpacks, bikes and cross-country skis. Alas, during my visit there was too much snow for bikes, but too little for skis. There are not one but two saunas. Hey, this is Finland.

The Library

The very nice little library is well-stocked with books and journals, mostly about science and nature, in Finnish, English and a few other languages. The nicely-equipped labs are filled with all the usual equipment and supplies, and lined with posters showing the projects that teams have undertaken here. They run the gamut of Arctic themes, from lake sediments and the size of fishes to birch tree growth patterns, bird populations and, of course, lots of work on lemmings. The station’s logo is this wonderful image of two lemmings in either a fight for dominance or a passionate embrace.

What are those lemmings doing?

Although the station has hosted dozens of artists through the Ars Bioarctica residency program, there’s really no place to make art. I did some painting either in the lab or, on the weekends, in the residents’ kitchen. Most days, I would go for walks, take photos and pick up a few interesting samples of lichens or plants in the morning. Then, after lunch, I would go to the lab and look at my finds under the microscope. The first week, I drew pictures in pencil like a 19^th century naturalist. After that, they set me up with a microscope and software so I could save images to use in my work after I get home.

Some finds from my walks

At the end of my second week here, another short-term resident of the station made a stunning discovery: an entire room full of mounted rodent skins, including mice, rats, voles, moles, weasels, hedgehogs, squirrels and even bats. In addition, there were drawers and cases full of skins and bones, all carefully catalogued and dating back as far as the 1960s. Apparently this “Mouse Museum”, as it is known, was the work of a longtime lab assistant at the station.

The “Mouse Museum”

Altogether, it’s been a privilege to visit this utterly unique place. Kilpisjärvi is the quietest and most remote place I’ve ever been in my life, and it allowed me to observe in depth the sub-Arctic landscape as it moved from fall to winter. I look forward to reflecting more on this experience and incorporating it into my artwork in the months and years to come.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel, The Art of Science Tagged: Arctic Circle, Ars Bioarctica, Kilpisjarvi, Kilpisjarvi Biological Station, science art

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05Nov / 2015

Fossil Butte

This is not one of Michele’s snaps from Finland, but rather a picture of Fossil Butte National Park in Wyoming. Fifty million years ago, this area looked VERY different. It was a lot warmer, and there was a lake. We know this because this particular lake has left behind some extremely well conserved fossils.

Prehistoric horse found at Fossil Lake.

When railroad workers in the 19th century visited the area, they noticed so many fossils that they named the nearby settlement “Fossil”.

Fish from Fossil Lake

The fossils from this region are so well conserved because the ancient lake was rich in calcium carbonate. Layers of calcium carbonate would settle on newly dead animals that had sunk to the bottom of the lake, and over the years this created well-preserved fossils set in limestone.

The species found in the limestone are familiar – similar to many creatures alive today – but unexpected for Wyoming. There are crocodiles and palm trees, for example. It suggests that back then, the climate in Wyoming would have been more like that of Florida today.

To see the fossils from Fossil Lake, you can visit Fossil Butte National Park in Wyoming, or see a large collection of the fossils at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Crocodile and palm tree photos are both CC-BY-SA (according to Field Museum usage terms) taken by Eva Amsen. Other photos are public domain, via National Park Service.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel Tagged: Fossil Butte, Paleontology

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04Nov / 2015

Climbed a Mountain and I Turned Around: My Saana Saga

View of Malla and Kilpisjarvi Lake from Saana

Last Friday I decided to walk up Saana Fell, the mountain that overlooks the Kilpisjarvi Biological Station, where I am staying as an artist in residence. Local artist Leena* had told me the view was amazing from the top, and that there were stairs up the side. It’s only 4 kilometers, she said. How hard could that be? I walk all the time!

So I set out, in my favorite yoga pants and my snow boots from Marshalls. I didn’t take any food or water because I had just had breakfast and I thought it would only take about an hour and half to get to the top. Yes, I am kind of stupid.

1. The walk

I started out from the Kilpsjarvi camping center, walking along a gently upward-sloping path with wooden walkways over the slippery bits. I can do this, I thought. 4 km, piece of cake. After all, I had walked to the border of Norway two days before, a much longer trek. After walking uphill for what felt like three million years, I came to a sign that said Saana, 3.5 km. Shit.

2. The Stairs

That’s a lot of stairs

At first I was happy to see the stairs up the side of the mountain. Then, about 10 minutes later, I was really glad I was doing this alone, so nobody had to see me stop every 20 stairs to catch my breath. Then every fifteen. Then whenever I damn well felt like it. I stopped to examine every interesting lichen I saw. I ate some snow. About halfway up the stairs my phone dinged with a message from T-Mobile welcoming me to Finland. At the top of the stairs there was a nice wooden platform with a bench, where I gratefully sat and waited for my heart rate to return to normal.

3. The Here We Go!

Arctic Hare was here

At this point I realized that the stairs did not, in fact, go all the way to the summit. But I had come a long way, and I was determined. This was the “here we go” portion of the climb, when I was full of confidence. The sun was up, the view was stunning, and I was strong and capable. There were painted sticks to mark the path, so I followed them. I saw one other set of human footprints, but no other people. In fact, I never saw another living creature the whole time, only the prints of a few arctic hares and birds. I am a real Viking now, I thought.

4. The AYFKM

Oh dear

The “here we go” leg of the journey turned out to be significantly shorter than the “are you fucking kidding me” leg. The bright sunshine had melted some of the snow, turning many of the rocks icy. I slid around a lot. There were no more footprints. For some reason I was particularly terrified by the idea of falling and breaking my teeth on a rock, hundreds of miles from a dentist. I focused on keeping my mouth tightly shut, walking in the areas where I could see shrubs sticking up through the snow, and saying “fuck” a lot.

5. The Hey, This Isn’t So Bad

Piece of Cake

Then I got to a kind of plateau where there was lots of soft snow that was easy to walk through. Hey, this isn’t so bad! That lasted for about 7 minutes.

6. The AYFKM, Part II

Then the AYFKM part started again, with slippery rocks and a very steep uphill grade. I could see the white stick marking the summit, but it was still a long way off. I checked the time and discovered that I had been out for over two and a half hours. I began thinking, for the first time, about how hard it might be to get back down the mountain. (See above, “I am kind of stupid”)

I tried some more affirmations of the “you can do it” type, followed by some of the “you can’t quit now, you wuss” variety. But after looking back down and discovering that I could not even see where the stairs started, I reluctantly decided to stop short of the summit.

7. The Turning Point

Me, ass over teakettle

I beat myself up a little over turning back. (Old! Fat! Weak!) Then Saana took over and started beating me up much more efficiently. The melted and re-frozen surface was treacherous. I lost track of how many times I fell down. Once, after I went down especially hard with my arms bent awkwardly behind me, I took a break to lie there for a while and have a little cry. Then I got back up again, because a) I was a Viking now and b) I had no alternative. I slid on my ass down a few steep parts, which, although uncomfortable, seemed preferable to taking them face-first.

8. The Stairs Again

I am the Stair Master!

I have never been so happy to see a ridiculously long, steep set of snow–covered stairs than on the trip back down Saana. I didn’t exactly skip down, but I took them at a good clip. There were many more sets of human footprints on them than when I came up. My sense of triumph came surging back, as I realized that others had climbed up Saana today, but none had made it as far as me.

9. The Walk (with humans)

By the time I reached the wooden walkways, I was starving and my legs were shaking. I had been walking (and climbing, sliding, and falling) for four hours. I saw people on the walkway, young Nordic types with impressive hiking gear. I inwardly scoffed at them, setting out in mid-afternoon for an easy stroll. They undoubtedly saw a tired, chubby, middle aged American in snow boots and a puffy coat, and not the mountain warrior I had become. As I slowly wobbled my way along the main road back to the biological station, I hummed The Ride of the Valkyries under my breath.

Hojotoho!

*Leena has been living in Lapland for 15 years, 3 km from the road, with her husband, who is a Sami reindeer herder. I should never listen to Leena.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel Tagged: Finland, Kilpisjarvi, lapland, Saana Fell

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28Oct / 2015

Art of Science, Arctic Edition: Getting Here

Kilpisjärvi

It’s a long way to Kilpisjärvi. This is essentially true wherever you start. In my case, I left Washington, DC about 5pm on Friday and arrived in Kilpisjärvi about the same time on Sunday, having traveled by plane, train, bus and car. At each stage of the journey, I left my usual mode of life farther behind.

The airplane part of the trip was only noteworthy for the huge contrast in the style of airport security between the Nordic countries and the United States. Last week, when I traveled to Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience meeting, I was patted down, swabbed for bomb residue and questioned by TSA agents at both BWI and O’Hare. In transit at Reykjavik, by contrast, the immigration guy took a quick glance at my passport photo, decided it was probably me, and nodded me on. After I retrieved my bag in Helsinki, I simply walked through the door marked “nothing to declare”. I will think wistfully of this experience every time I hear someone say that Obama wants to turn the US into Europe.

From Helsinki airport, you can take a subway train right into the center of town. But first you have to descend deep into the bowels of the earth, on no fewer than four escalators. (This is probably to avoid disturbing the trolls. Finland is apparently full of trolls, and not the internet kind.) Once in town, I met some twitter friends, Janina and Tommi, who took me for lunch and showed me the beautiful library at The University of Helsinki.

Helsinki University Library

Then it was time to get on the overnight train to Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland. The train is very comfortable, with two decks of berths with cute little bunk beds. In the summer, the view from the top is probably beautiful, but because it gets dark early in the autumn, I couldn’t see much.

My bed on the overnight train to Rovaniemi

On the train, my first Stupid Foreigner Problem (SFP) struck. The train made many stops, but there were no station announcements, so as not to wake sleeping passengers. Since the route continued beyond Rovaniemi, how would I know where to get off? I had also cleverly planned my trip to coincide with the very day that clocks go back in Finland for daylight saving, complicating the issue of arrival time. Fortunately, the train had great WiFi (since 2010, Finland has classified internet access as a legal right), so I was able to tell from Google Maps when we were arriving in Rovaniemi and get myself safely off the train.

Rovaniemi is supposed to be the true home of Santa Claus, and has a theme park devoted to all things Santa. On this particular Sunday morning, however, it was gray and rainy and everything was closed, so I hopped on the bus to Kilpisjärvi without regret. There were four passengers. After two hours or so, the other three got off, and I continued to Kilpisjärvi alone with the friendly bus driver.

We stopped for a lunch break in Muonio, where I had been advised to eat in the local Thai restaurant. As Muonio is basically a one-intersection town, it was easy to find. Alas, on a rainy Sunday in the off-season, the cook had not prepared any Thai food, so the other customers (both of them) and I made do with tea and pastries, which we ate to the discordant accompaniment of loud Asian pop music. The adjoining visitor center and gift shop offered reindeer hides for 149 Euros.

The visitor center at the Thai restaurant in Muoni shows the distance to Bangkok and Kilpisjarvi

The visitor center at the Thai restaurant in Muonio shows the distance to Bangkok and Kilpisjarvi

I saw my first small herd of reindeer almost immediately outside Rovaniemi! Then some more. Then a couple more reindeer. Then a few more reindeer crossing the road. The driver, who called reindeer “the local mosquitoes,” told me there are 8,000 reindeer vs. vehicle accidents a year in Lapland. Apparently reindeer are not very smart.

The driver told me that the local Sami people use every part of the reindeer – not just the meat and hides, but also the bones and antlers, from which they make tools. He said that they even grind up the hooves for medicine.

“What kind of medicine?”

“Medicine for men. You understand?”

I understood, but even so, he clarified further. “It makes the stick stand up!”

I hadn’t even arrived in Kilpisjärvi yet, and I had already learned so much.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel, The Art of Science Tagged: Art, Kilpisjarvi, lapland

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13Oct / 2015

Action Potential Lab

Imagine a cross between 826 stores, the Wellcome Collection, makerspaces and the best birthday parties you remember from your childhood. That’s Action Potential Lab. Located in a century-old pharmacy building in Toronto, Action Potential Lab welcomes kids and adults to explore the intersection of art and science.

Lisa Carrie Goldberg started Action Potential Lab when she returned to Toronto after eight years studying in Boston and Perth. When I visited Toronto recently, I dropped by the lab to meet her. Even though I was there after hours, Lisa’s day was far from over, and she had to briefly interrupt our conversation to receive some samples for an upcoming thermochromatic dye screenprinting workshop. She had a few minutes for an interview, though:

I was curious how you ended up here. What got you to start this place?

I’m from Toronto originally but went to art school in Boston, where I did interrelated media: everything from film and photography to textiles and glassblowing. That program was really great, because it wasn’t about perfecting one skill set, but rather about concept-based work and learning how to practice as a working artist.

The theme I kept going back to was science in general: Trying to understand the world, or using scientific tools and technologies, but from an artistic perspective. I was doing a lot of work with a microbiology lab across the street from my art school. I made a connection with a professor there at the pharmacy college, who taught me basic microbiology and from that relationship I was left to just do my own work in his lab. That was really one of the most fruitful times, and this became my studio for the last two years of my undergrad. I would present my work to my peers, and they’d be like “Where are you even creating this stuff?”. I’d have mixed different agars and was ordering sheep’s blood though the professor. It was amazing that this could happen! I would have to sneak in at night, because I had to be there when classes weren’t there, but I was given free reign to this lab. It was just incredible.

When I was finishing up my undergrad, and showed my professors the whole catalog of what I’d been working on, they mentioned that there was a program in Perth, Australia, that was bringing scientists and artists together. It just so happened that the professors who started that program were in New York, showing at the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MOMA, so I took the bus from Boston to New York to meet them and was hooked from there.

As soon as I finished my undergrad I went straight to Perth to start my masters in biological art. The program was a bunch of artists working in wet labs. We were housed in the Anatomy and Human Biology department. It wasn’t a medical illustration or anatomical drawing kind of program; it was hands-on work in collaboration with or inspired by science. You would take science courses if you had an art background or art courses if you had a science background, and then you’d find a field that you’re interested in. I thought I would continue doing microbiology, but I ended up getting very excited by the new sleep lab that was being built. It was a research facility that hadn’t even been used for any work yet, and they were willing to let me use it for my own studies. I did my thesis on body positions in sleep, and reflecting that with dancers’ movements. That was really wonderful.

When I came back to Toronto after being away for eight years I started looking for a group of peers that were working in a similar way. There were a lot of amazing initiatives here. There’s Subtle Technologies, which has been around for a long time, and little things were popping up, like DIYbio. A lot of cool and interesting things were happening around science, technology, art and community. But while I was making these connections I realised that, yes, there were these groups of people, but there was no hub. So I thought “what would it be like to create my own hub and bring them all together?”

That became a new journey. In the first few months I was envisioning it like a kind of open source wet lab space. I’d met with DIYbio, and just tried different ideas, and looked for spaces that could house it. Ultimately the realisation was that there should be a space for workshops and classes, and, with finding this location, that’s how Action Potential was formed.

Do you think something like this would have worked in another city, or did it work here because Toronto already had these groups of people that would be interested?

Well, when we started off, me and the others, we were still very new. We were meeting in Hacklab, in a small space off Kensington Market, so it wasn’t like we were part of the mainstream. We were still trying to define what we do. Even MakerKids – another space like mine, but more of a hacking space for kids – were only about one year old at the time, so it was still a very fresh idea. So we still had to convince people that this is worthwhile and different and cool.

At the same time, though, the public school system was starting to integrate this idea of STEAM learning, so that kind of language or concept was already integrated into the education system. Educators were aware of it, so we didn’t have to try as hard to convince the schools that this was important. So it was easy and hard at the same time.

Toronto is also in an interesting time and space where people have a little bit more money to spend on creative endeavors. Anything you can imagine, you can do in Toronto. You’re into gaming? There’s three hackerspaces for gaming, You’re into metalwork and fire? There’s another place for you. So, in answering, I don’t know how successful this would be in a smaller town that isn’t used to such a unique idea. People are more open here, or more aware of new initiatives happening all the time.

That’s not to say that other towns wouldn’t benefit or wouldn’t be excited by something like this. For instance, SymbioticA is in Perth, the most isolated major city in the world! But the professors would often say that they wouldn’t have been able to run a program like SymbioticA in a less isolated mainstream city. We were doing tissue engineering as artists! We had access to a full lab! I’m not quite sure larger institutions in larger cities would be so open to that kind of playfulness.

Other than for kids, you have things for adults here as well?

Yeah, we do kids programming and youth workshops on the weekend and adult workshops on Thursdays or on the weekends. All of those have been such a blast! The ethos is art and science in every program that we do, but we try to offer unique things that they can’t get anywhere else. I think that’s what’s bringing people back again and again.

So what are your future plans for this space?

In the last year and a half we have been trying to see how strange and playful we can get with the adult workshops, and people have been eating it up, so I thought “oh my gosh, I can really let my freak flag fly and test out all the crazy ideas”. For instance, we’ve done a few dissections here, which are really fun. They’re for adults that didn’t necessarily take science in high school or maybe didn’t have a chance to re-engage with hands-on science since high school. We’ve been doing cow eye-ball dissections to learn about sight and how the eye works. We’ve done squid and octopus dissections, followed by printmaking and calligraphy with squid ink. In that workshop we also taught everyone how to make their own DIY specimen preservation, and everyone got to take home a small octopus that they preserved. Taxidermy has been really popular too. We’ve done rabbits and rats, and hopefully birds soon. I think taxidermy is a really good merger of science and art. There’s a craft to it, there’s a science behind it, and it involves techniques for both art and science.

If you’re in Toronto, you can sign up for classes at Action Potential Lab, or drop in during opening hours and see what’s on the shelves!

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel, The Art of Science

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15Sep / 2015

Music of the Burgess Shale

This is the second of two posts about the Burgess Shale. The first went up last week.

Last week I took you on a virtual trip to the Burgess Shale. This area of Cambrian-era fossils didn’t just inspire paleontologists, geologists and climate scientists, but musicians as well.

In 1994, composer Rand Steiger wrote an orchestral piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic called “Burgess Shale”, inspired by Stephen Jay Gould’s book about the fossils. Each movement is named after a different organism.

Of the movement “Anomalocaris”, Steiger writes:

“This was by far the largest and fiercest creature found in the shale, and it was also the most disfigured by the calamity (probably a mud slide) that instantly snatched the life of these creatures and preserved them. The most interesting thing is that parts of anomalocaris were thought to be four individual creatures; it wasn’t until recently that it was discovered that they were component parts of the same animal. SO the music for this section became a monstrous concoction featuring tuba, along with contrabass clarinet, horn, and lower strings.”

I can’t manage to find any working clips of the Burgess Shale piece online [UPDATE: See comments section – the audio links on Steiger’s site have been fixed], but in this video Steiger talks about his inspiration for the work.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel, Song of the Week Tagged: Anomalocaris, Burgess Shale, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Rand Steiger, Stephen Jay Gould

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08Sep / 2015

The Burgess Shale

This is the first of two posts about the Burgess Shale. The second one will go up next week.

In 1909, paleontologist Charles Walcott discovered fossils of the strangest organisms anyone had ever seen in the Canadian Rockies. Some had five eyes, some had strange shapes or protrusions. Over the next years he went back many times with his family, in an attempt to collect and describe the organisms.

Charles Walcott and members of his family at the Burgess Shale

The organisms were all from the Cambrian era, and this fossil field, the Burgess Shale, is a treasure trove of fossils. Wolcott found over 65 thousand, and the area is still being studied. Many of the fossils are on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and at Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum, and affiliated researchers of these and other institutes are working on the fossils and discovering new species all the time.

Why is there such a wealth of Cambrian fossils in the Burgess Shale? These were creatures living in the oceans after the “Cambrian Explosion” – a period of time over 500 million years ago when lots of new creatures evolved. These diverse organisms swam around the prehistoric oceans, but were concentrated here in a mudslide. When the continents moved, this area ended up high in the Rockies.

You can visit the fossil fields only on a guided hiking tour. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover a new fossil while you’re there!

Image in the public domain, via the Smithsonian Institution archives.

Filed under: Have Science Will Travel