There are over 35,000 museums within the United States welcoming over 850 million visitors each year.
Did you ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes in museums creating the displays and exhibits we all enjoy?
Join us as we explore museums and their exhibits from the inside out.
Welcome to a special episode of Museum Access, the best of prehistoric times.
We're going to revisit two fantastic museums today, the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and the Field Museum in Chicago.
We'll learn about some of the very important discoveries that are now part of their spectacular collections.
Then we'll take a peek behind the scenes at Blue Rhino Studio in Minnesota.
They hold a unique niche in the fabrication world. Let's just say, if you visited museums and were blown away by exhibits with life-like prehistoric creatures,
there's a good chance they were designed and fabricated at Blue Rhino Studio. So buckle up, we're about to step back in time.
Hi, I'm Leslie Mueller. Welcome to Museum Access. We're in the middle of Los Angeles at an urban ice age excavation site, the La Brea Tar Pits.
This museum houses millions in fossils that were discovered right here.
These plants, insects and animals were trapped in sticky asphalt over 50,000 years ago.
From mammoth tusks to mouse toes, fossils are excavated, cleaned and sorted for research and display every day.
It's the only active ice age excavation site in an urban location in the world.
Over 3.5 million fossils have been removed from the tar pits to date, and they're still digging.
Today we'll learn about the importance of this particular site and learn more about a Colombian mammoth named Zedd.
So Emily, tell me about this museum. It's unbelievable. I've never been to one like this. How did this all start?
Well, there aren't very many places like this, so the La Brea Tar Pits is actually one of the most important paleontological sites in the whole world.
Paleontological? Paleontological, so a site with fossils. So any fossils, lots of things can be fossils, right? Plants can be fossils, insects can be fossils, shells can be fossils.
Here we find all of those things, and we also find the fossils of most famously the really big mammals that used to live here during the ice age.
There's sabertooth cats and giant ground sloths and mammoths and mastodons and dire wolves.
All used to live right here in LA, and we know that because we find their bones right here in the asphalt seeps in our park.
So let's talk about the beginning of the land itself.
So the asphalt seeps that we find here have actually been known about for thousands of years.
We know that the indigenous tribes in California used to use the asphalt for waterproofing of vessels and boats
and pots and baskets and things like that. But fossils were first discovered here in the late 1800s.
People had found large bones here before, but they'd always thought that it was bones of cattle that were here on the ranch or something like that
until a scientist who was traveling through saw a bone that turned out to be the sabertooth of a sabertooth cat.
And that was when they really recognized that the history of the site went much, much deeper and had a lot to tell science.
So when we say tarpids, that's sort of a colloquial term, they're more properly called asphalt seeps.
So the liquid that's seeping up basically.
The liquid that's seeping up here is asphalt, which is a very low-grade crude oil.
And that comes from this big oil field that's underground that's about a thousand feet below our feet.
Because there's a lot of earthquakes here in the Los Angeles area.
Sometimes these areas of structural weakness form in the earth and these cracks open up and that oil is able to make its way up to the surface.
And when it does, it forms these really relatively shallow pools of asphalt.
And that asphalt does two things.
It's sticky and so it's trapped, you know, thousands upon thousands of organisms, plants, animals, big things, small things here over the years.
But also asphalt has the quality of being able to preserve a lot of different types of fossils.
So it's very, very unusual to find fossils of plants and bones in the same paleontological site because the types of sediments that preserve one tend to dissolve the other.
But asphalt preserves them both.
It's also sort of unusual to find big fossils and small fossils together just because the way that those deposits get made is very different.
But the asphalt seeps collect everything.
And so what that means is that what we have here is one of the best places anywhere in the world to look at an entire ecosystem in the past.
And this is a working research lab that we have and we actually work in there seven days a week.
We have staff and volunteers that are cleaning the fossils that we've just brought out of the excavations.
They're repairing them if they're broken, gluing pieces back together and doing conservation work on them.
So we know that that fossil will be in good shape for scientists to study not just tomorrow or next week but a hundred years from now.
It's just bones and teeth. It's plants, right?
Yeah, so it's, you know, you can see the big things that people are working on but there's actually a whole section of the lab where we're looking at fossils through microscopes because we are going through the dirt that's been collected around those fossils of saber tooth cats and giant slots.
And hidden in that dirt are the bones and remains of everything from tiny lizards and birds all the way to the seeds of trees and leaf fragments and even little bits of insects.
And so it's just a really incredible record of what Los Angeles has looked like over the last 50,000 years that these seeps have been coming up in our part.
And I've been hearing about Zed, tell me a little bit about what was this discovery?
So we name a lot of our important discoveries.
Zed is a mammoth. He was found during part of a project, a salvage excavation project called Project 23, which was a series of incredible fossil deposits that were found when the art museum next door to us built a parking garage about 12 years ago.
Zed is a mammoth and he is the most complete mammoth we've found and a very rare instance where we found most of the bones of a large animal that were mostly in the right position as they would have been in life.
That's gotta be rare.
It's not rare necessarily to other paleontological sites, but it's very rare here at the tarpets because in the thousands of years that specimens are sitting in the asphalt, they seem to get sort of disarticulated and even jumbled off of bed.
Yeah, and so you'll find individual bones of a lot of animals and maybe potentially multiple bones of the same animal, but they're not necessarily found close to one another.
But Zed was found sort of beautifully laid out because he's actually an example of an animal that died and was washed into a stream bed and buried before the asphalt came in.
He was in an asphalt seat and got stuck. He actually died in more of a normal fossil sort of way, got buried, and then later asphalt came in and helped to preserve his skeleton.
And so you can see two of his tusks on display that are on display here. We've been working on preparing his skull also to come out on exhibit and there are other bits of him around the museum exhibits.
The upper tooth cats were as large as African lions but more heavily built. They relied on stealth rather than speed to hunt and ambush bison, camels, and ground sloths.
Scientists are still investigating how these felines use their most memorable feature, their four inch fangs.
These sabers may have been used for stabbing and slashing or biting open the soft underbelly of their prey.
The American mastodon became extinct about 10,000 years ago. They look similar to mammoths but were separated by 25 million years of evolution and they show key differences, especially in their teeth.
While mammoths had relatively flat teeth which were great for grinding grass, their main food source, the much smaller mastodon had more pointed teeth, perfect for a diet of twigs and leaves.
Okay, so which crater are we looking at here, Emily?
This is Deposit 13 from Project 23 and this has been one of the most incredibly rich deposits. You can just see the jungle fossils that are in here.
We've got everything from really big fossils. This is the upper arm bone of a giant ground sloth. We've got the same bone of a saber tooth cat over there.
We've got a bunch of bird bones. We've got ribs. We've got sticks all tangled up. And then among it we have these sediments, these little gravel, public areas.
And among those when we wash the asphalt out of, that's where we're going to find what we call the micro fossils, so the seeds and the leaf fragments, the insect bits and the lizard jaws and mouse teeth and all of these really cool, amazing tiny fossils that tell us so much about them.
What the environment was like here in LA over the past time and how that environment changed and the species in it moved and changed in response to environmental changes over the last 50,000 years.
Well, I'm noticing strings here. I don't know what these are for, but I want to know what those are for and I also want to know how do you go about attacking this?
The strings here, these are grid lines and these are one meter by one meter squares that we set up and these allow us to take really precise three-dimensional measurements on every fossil that we excavate.
And that way when we're going and asking questions about how did this particular deposit form, where were different fossils in relation to one another, we have all that information at our fingertips and we can basically reconstruct the fossil deposit bone by bone.
And what kind of tools are you using to pull it apart?
You know, the main tool that we use in a deposit as dense as this is actually dental picks. We actually get used dental picks. We're donated from local dentist offices.
And we use not the sharp pointy edge because we don't want to scratch the bones, but the back curvy edge and we use that to very gently sort of grain by grain scrape away the sediments to reveal the bones underneath.
Paleontologists discovered and started excavating pit 91 in 1915, over 100 years ago.
It was the 91st hole dug by early paleontologists.
The deposit was so rich in fossils that they still dig here every summer.
Digging at pit 91 nearly doubled the number of species known from the tar pits.
You can watch real paleontologists excavate real fossils from the gloopy black asphalt and learn how scientists use these specimens to study what Los Angeles was like 25,000 years ago during the ice age.
This is one of our most exciting finds from Project 23. It's zed our Colombian mammoth skull. It's still in the field jacket positioned upside down.
These are where his tusks would have come out. These are his two upper teeth, his cheekbones and the base of his skull where it connected to his neck.
This 40,000 year old incisor tooth or tusk belongs to zed, the most complete Colombian mammoth ever excavated at the La Brea tar pits.
A 40,000 year old tooth is pretty fragile.
When zed was removed from the ground, his tusk and other fossilized remains were encased in protective plaster and foam jackets like this one.
These jackets were then transported to the fossil lab where they were opened so they could be cleaned and studied.
This is a skull of another animal. This is the American lion.
Along with the cave lions in Europe, these were the biggest cats that have ever lived. They were quite enormous.
The teeth.
Yes, and highly carnivorous, so these were animals that you definitely would have wanted to stay away from.
Yeah.
To think that the unearth remains of plants, insects and animals from the last 50,000 years could be so relevant today, it's mind-boggling.
The La Brea tar pits continues to provide a gateway to the ice age and help us understand the world around us.
As promised, here's a behind-the-scenes peek at Blue Rhino Studio.
The award-winning designers here produce exhibits for museums around the world.
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Looks like a great place to work, right?
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Next stop, Chicago, a city filled with great museums.
Today, we're at Chicago's Field Museum, where science and history come together to tell the story of life on Earth.
This spectacular museum was an outgrowth of the world's Colombian exposition held here in Chicago in 1893.
Today, you're greeted by Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered.
She's seen by over 3 million people each year. We'll learn about her amazing 6 million year journey from her official gatekeeper,
head of the fossil vertebrate collection, Bill Simpson, and hear how he personally gives her a thorough cleaning two times a year.
Then we'll get a behind-the-scenes peek at the museum's rarely seen fossil collection and visit the fossil prep lab where the scientists prepare ancient specimens every day.
We've got a lot of ground to cover today, so let's begin our journey.
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Bill, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to museum access. Thank you so much.
Most of our collection is research-driven. We go out in the field and we collect fossils that we want to study.
And we bring them back, and then the first thing that needs to be done to them is the rock has to be taken off of them.
That's a process we call preparation. I was in charge of the preparation of Sue. Sue took 12 person years to take all the rock off of them.
I think people have seen, a lot of people have seen the Jurassic Park movie where they're out in the field. They're just using a little brush.
Yeah, you mean it's not like that? It's not that easy?
Yeah, no, it's not like this. So that's what this room's really all about. Most of our preparation is done under vernacular microscopes so that we can really see what we're doing and get only the rock off and not damage the fossil as it's being prepared.
This is the oldest thing that you'll see today. This is from Iowa. It's from a site which documents the very earliest stages of fish getting out onto land.
So these are creatures, not this one, but the reason we were there was to collect creatures that we call tetrapods. So they're basically fish with legs.
But this guy is a shark. You can see the fins here. Oh, yeah, that's so good. And all the calcified cartilage surrounding it.
Is that what these little dots are? Yeah. So they would brush through this, or this has already been exposed.
So we exposed this until we ran out of bone, and then we made a field jacket. This is actually the downside, but we made a field jacket.
That's what this is called, a field jacket, this outer. The aluminum foil is a separator, and then the plaster is basically a custom-made carrying case so that we can get these things back in the museum without breaking them.
So here we are, the crown jewel of the Field Museum. Tell us about suit. Yeah, I think it's become an icon for Field Museum.
It is an icon, isn't it? Yeah, everybody wants their pictures taken with suit. That's right.
And you've been involved in such a way that you can catch her eye. You can imagine what it would be like to catch the eye of a T-Rex.
Now that was intentional, I'm assuming, because here you have this whole body laid out, and now the decision is how do we actually display it here at the Field Museum?
I've been a lot of time working with the Mount Maker to decide on a pose. I bet, because I love when you're standing there.
It looks like she's looking right at you. We wanted the visitor to sort of imagine what it would be like to be eye to eye with a T-Rex.
Let's talk about this skull. Let's start at the front here. So the real skull is up in its own case, and the reason for that is that it's the most studied part of this specimen.
And it would be hard to study 13 feet up in the air. It's in its own case where it's reasonably easy to get it out of the case.
And is it heavier than this? Much heavier. This is a hollow plastic cast. This probably weighs 100 pounds. The real skull weighs 600 pounds.
Oh my ***. Wow. Tell me, what are these little holes that are at the bottom of the jawline there?
Well, some of the holes, like the big half moon, should be there. The round one right at the back should be there.
The rest of them really shouldn't be there. So there's some sort of a pathology. But it's interesting. They're not that rare in other specimens of T-Rex.
So this might, this may be some sort of an infection that they were prone to getting. We don't really know what it is yet.
There have been several papers written. But to be honest, we really don't know what sort of a pathogen this was that caused us.
So even as complete as she is, she's still a mystery and you're still learning. How do you tell how they actually move?
Well, I'll give you one example of that. One of the most important parameters in motion is mass. How much does an animal weigh?
Oh yeah. In Jurassic Park, we see T-Rex running after a jeep.
Well, elephants, they can't run. They're too heavy to run. Was T-Rex too heavy to run? How heavy was it?
We just went through a big research study with several collaborators studying five different skeletons of T-Rex.
There were four adults in one juvenile. Of the adults, two is the biggest. And so we had the juvenile one end of the size spectrum and sue with the other end of the size spectrum.
Okay.
And in the past, the way we figured out mass is to hire a sculptor to try and sculpt what the...
Sure, make a model.
Yeah.
And then scale it up. Those estimates are wild, they differ wildly. So it's too dependent on art.
Yeah.
So the new method is to scan the entire skeleton. We have a very accurate three-dimensional model of the skeleton.
Then you break the skeleton up into a cross-section, sort of like beam the Michelin man.
Oh yeah.
If you see the stack of toddlers.
Yeah, right.
So you have a stack of cross-sections going the length of the body and down the limbs.
And for each cross-section, you have a very accurate outline of the bone.
And then you take an estimate for how much flesh there would have been at that station.
How much it could carry?
For most of the history of paleo, T-Rex has been thought to be six tons or so. Sue came out at about nine-and-a-half tons.
Wow.
So we already thought T-Rex is probably too heavy for it to be very likely that she would walk.
We don't know for sure, but the heavier she is, the less likely it is that she ran.
Yes, right. Yeah, she can move because she obviously has to get prey.
So we thought T-Rex was unlikely to run at six tons.
Now we've got one at nine-and-a-half tons. Makes it even less likely that she could run.
There's a whole suite of damage related to the shoulder.
So first of all, there are three ribs, and you can see all three are broken.
These two healed together. They have big ***** of extra bone.
But this one never did form one single rib.
The third one.
Two pieces, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So imagine how much that would hurt. A permanently broken rib.
And then the shoulder blade next to it in dinosaurs consists of two bones.
The core coin and the scapula. The scapula is the strap, and the core coin is the big dinner-shaped dinner plate shape.
There should be a nice scene between those two, a suture.
That suture is completely covered over with extra bone growth.
So something damaged that shoulder blade probably related to the three broken ribs.
And then finally, the humerus, which is the upper arm bone.
It's hard to see. I know what to look for.
Where the triceps muscle attaches, there's a spur of bone.
The triceps muscle is ripped right off the arm.
Oh my ***.
And the bone and the muscle grew back towards one another, trying to reattach.
So a whole suite of severe damage around that shoulder.
You're right. She's a mess.
Yeah, she is.
Or she's been very busy.
Now I know you're the person who's responsible for cleaning soup twice a year.
Tell me about that process.
It's sort of unusual. Most of the rest of our exhibits are cleaned by the exhibition staff.
Sure.
But you know, we'll pay almost $8.5 million for this.
And I think geology just didn't want to just drop it into somebody else's lamp.
Mini maids?
I was in charge of the preparation of soup, so I knew it physically as well as anyone.
So it was decided that I would be the one that we could close to a cleaner.
And you know, anytime you touch a muscle like this, there's a chance you're going to break it.
Well, if we break it, we know we'll be able to put it back together.
Oh, that's true.
Yes.
We put it together in the first place.
That's true.
So yeah, I work very closely with exhibit staff.
We have a pneumatic scissor lift which gets us high up in the air.
And we use a vacuum cleaner which a battery powered well.
A little hand.
Yeah.
We reverse it so instead of sucking, it's blowing.
Oh, okay.
So we blow most of the dust off.
So we don't actually have to touch it any more than we have.
Yeah.
And then we use what's, it's basically like a giant bottle brush.
Remember back in high stroke chemistry, a clean test is off.
Yeah.
It exerts very little force.
They bend so easily that when you clean the fossil with them, they're not really putting
much force on the bone.
Oh, that's great.
That's how it feels.
I'm so thankful that museums like these preserve and protect the rare fossils we've seen today
and share them with the world.
They really are the guardians of our planet's history.
Thanks for joining us on this special episode of Museum Access.
I'm Leslie Mueller.
See you all right.
See you next time.
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