November 20

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On the 20th I had a doctor's appt.  I'm not as good as I suppose I should be about annual checkups, but, luckily, all is well.  (The older I get, the more likely I know it is that they will say something bad to me, and the harder it is to go in, I find.........)

After Health Service (after getting stabbed for blood work and after setting up appts for xrays -- mammogram and bone scan), I rewarded myself with a trip to the natural science museum.

Unfortunately it was full of hordes of children.  Sigh.  I am not that fond of children.  I'm not actually that fond of anyone whose public behavior includes a lot of running and yelling.  Especially when I'm in a place where those activities are inappropriate.  (People, please.  Take your kid to the playground.  Take them to the gym.  Take them to Chuckie Cheese.  There are plenty of places where running and yelling are appropriate.  Museums are NOT on that list.  Nor are libraries............................................................)

I bounced around from place to place within the museum, trying to find places that were relatively calm.  There where a lot of parents with the kids, but only a couple of them were exercising any control over the children (who were upper-elementary age, not 5....).

The museum has lots of dioramas of pre-human life on earth.  I love them....  Love to imagine the research that went into the work, love the careful sculpting, love the observation of life on earth now which informs the gestures of the creatures in diorama -- look at the gray one, at right, scratching its face with a hind hoof......  Love the way the painted backdrop and the sculptures in front make a cohesive whole.  So much to like about these.

Sadly, I did not even glance at the explanatory info, let alone capture it.  Given the camelid look of the animal nearest to us, I wonder if this is in the the Americas, somewhere.



Bouncing around.........  Wow.  20,000 years.................  Wondering what new techniques will allow -- 10, 20, 50 years from now............

They told us about this sort of thing in Emergence of Life class (which was way too heavy on vocabulary/taxonomy for my taste).  I thought this was a particularly clear explanation, with the part below showing shapes of creatures in the two groups.

I was very puzzled by the dentition here -- straight forward?  Then I remembered that elderly fossils like this one may well have been squashed, over the millennia.  I wonder if that isn't what happened to this one.  Not sure what it is about this face -- it looks like it should be in an animated movie.  As a wise old friend.  Not as a fish...........  Not that I know that these were actually *fish*, but look at the drawing of its skeleton (I'll show you a bigger image of that in a minute).

No info on this next one captured, alas, but I'm pretty sure this is an allosaur.   No sense of scale captured, either.

This was over two feet from back of head to front of nose.  Yikes.  I am not sorry we do not share the planet with living examples of these............

So interesting to contemplate these older displays, in light of newer ways to educate about these creatures.  There's plenty to observe here..............

I like this nice clear chart of some of the changes that critters went through as they became mammals...........

You'll recall that several weeks ago we talked about differentiated teeth (mammals) in contrast to reptile teeth (where all the teeth in the mouth are very similar in shape, with basically one function), in the context of plastic cat skeletons at the Rat House.

You can read what the museum says about this link in the reptile-to-mammal chain for yourself.

The museum's dino area was, as you'd predict, PACKED with children.

I went upstairs.  Which, alas, was also packed, but was perhaps a bit quieter.  Perhaps.

There is an area which has taxidermy and models about animals and plants found in Michigan.

You may recall from a few days ago my post about voles, I mean SHREWS, spotted scurrying in my neighborhood?  Well, I wrote that post on the morning of the 20th, so thoughts of mice/voles/shrews were near the surface of my consciousness.

Look!!  This is what I saw in the neighborhood, I am 98% sure.  That same long sausage-shaped body.  The same lack of visible ears.  The same short tail.  The ones I saw were much darker in color (making it harder to distinguish the eye from the coat -- I didn't notice eyes at all, one way or the other).  I don't recall the pointy snout.  But given everything......  I really bet this is what I saw.

I read on Wikipedia that short-tailed shrews prey on mice, which are about the same size.  I wondered about that.  Now I read "the only poisonous mammal in the USA"....  Yikes.  Poor little meecers -- everyone is after them!



Here's a display of shrews found in Michigan.  Some of them are much more mouse-shaped than the short-tailed ones.........  The bigger ones of these are mouse-sized, and the little ones are ... smaller.

Speaking of mice......................  You may recall I was thinking I needed to figure out what was the difference between mice and voles (and shrews).  I had read on Wikipedia that some critters with "mouse" in their names are voles.  Meadow mice, for example.  Voles are more ... rounded.  Less-pointy snouts, smaller ears, a more chubby shape than other, more mousy, mice....

Here you have it, straight from the museum -- "Voles are a subgroup of mice."



Now here is a surprise!

Muskrats are giant aquatic voles!?!?  Who knew?  Not I, that's for sure!

Notice that its feet are not webbed.  Kinda weird, for an aquatic critter, I think.

Before we wander on from the muskrat, I have another thought to discuss.  This muskrat doesn't really look all that much like the ones we've seen in the park.  This brings up the important notion that one example of something in a museum (or in real life...) is not necessarily representative of the group.  Taxidermy (for example) is inexact................

Look at a live muskrat, seen in the pond at West Park.

Its head is broader.  Its eyes are bigger, and in the sides of its head, not near the top.  Its ears are much bigger, and furry.

A good thing to keep in mind, in museums.  In all of life, I guess.  Things aren't necessarily as they seem.  One example of something may, or may not, be a good and true and accurate representative of what it purports to represent.  Current "best thinking" about something may be miles from the truth..............................

Of course I have no idea if the individual above is a "more representative" representative of Muskrat than is the specimen in the museum.  I merely note they are rather different.  Perhaps there are varieties of muskrat.  Or perhaps there are large individual differences.  Or perhaps one of them really is more representative of muskratkind than the other.  I don't know.



Ok.  Moving on.  Or back, I guess, to an actual mouse mouse (in contrast to a vole mouse).

My "extra thought" here is that we know an awful lot more about things that are easy for us to find and to manage than about things which are difficult to find or to manage.  The prairie deer mice above are one example.

For another, we learned in microbiome class that E. coli is actually a rather rare critter in the healthy adult human gut.  "One microbe in a million is E. coli."  The reason we know so much about E. coli is NOT because it is a major player in our guts, but because it looooves to live in petri dishes.  The bacteria that actually are major players in our guts are not so easy to grow in petri dishes, and hence are much less well known......

How many other things we know a LOT about are things that aren't really that important, in the scheme of things, but are easy to study?  (And which ones are they, and which things do we really wish we knew more about, if we want to get at what matters??????)

A chastening set of thoughts, I think........



One last image before we leave the museum.  It was approaching lunchtime, and the hordes were being gathered for departure.  I went back into the paleontology section for a few minutes, and admired this green thing.  More and more cool dioramas of ancient under-sea life.............  Helicoceras (I actually thought to capture the info about this display!).  This doesn't strike me as an evolutionarily sensible design, but here it is.......

I had lunch with my work buddies.  Always a pleasure.  We talked, amongst other topics,  about dogs past, and about cell phones present (my friend had been surprised to receive a text from me, suggesting lunch).



It wasn't really a nice day for walking, despite what you see below.  It was way too windy.  It would have been a lovely day, if calm -- so nice and blue, and not too cold -- but the excesses of wind made it rather nasty.  This is the only time I stopped for a pic.

Looking west in West Park, across the frozen pond.  I wonder if we'll see ducks here any more this year.  They want open water, not an ice rink, so we may not.

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