By Janet Fullwood
Contra Costa Times Correspondent

“The upcoming Olympic Heritage Celebration is timed to cash in on public enthusiasm for the 2010 Winter Olympics, opening Feb. 12 in Vancouver, British Columbia. And it’s more than just a nostalgia bash. The underlying goal is to raise funds and support for a ski museum to be built at a yet-to-be-determined North Shore location.

The proposed facility, which will incorporate the Auburn Ski Club collection now on display in a deteriorating Donner Summit museum, will take a broad look at the history of skiing in the west, says Linda Williams, project manager for the Olympic Museum Foundation.”

By Meghan Packer

Posted November 2, 2009

Voters Will Decide On Natural Science Center Bond

“Greensboro, NC — When voters head to the polls Tuesday, they’ll have a chance to vote for more than a mayor and city council members. They can also choose whether to support a $20 million bond referedum for the Natural Science Center.”

A DIFFERENT VIEWPOINT Peter Dodson, left, of the University of Pennsylvania, Michael Foote of the University of Chicago and Jon Todd of the Museum of Natural History in London watching a video at the Creation Museum.

By Kenneth Chang
New York Times, Published June 30, 2009

Creation Museum
2800 Bullittsburg Church Rd.
Petersburg, KY  41080
888-582-4253
http://creationmuseum.org

Previous Exhibition Review New York Times

PETERSBURG, Ky. — Tamaki Sato was confused by the dinosaur exhibit. The placards described the various dinosaurs as originating from different geological periods — the stegosaurus from the Upper Jurassic, the heterodontosaurus from the Lower Jurassic, the velociraptor from the Upper Cretaceous — yet in each case, the date of demise was the same: around 2348 B.C.

“I was just curious why,” said Dr. Sato, a professor of geology from Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan.

For paleontologists like Dr. Sato, layers of bedrock represent an accumulation over hundreds of millions of years, and the Lower Jurassic is much older than the Upper Cretaceous.

But here in the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, Earth and the universe are just over 6,000 years old, created in six days by God. The museum preaches, “Same facts, different conclusions” and is unequivocal in viewing paleontological and geological data in light of a literal reading of the Bible.

In the creationist interpretation, the layers were laid down in one event — the worldwide flood when God wiped the land clean except for the creatures on Noah’s ark — and these dinosaurs died in 2348 B.C., the year of the flood.

“That’s one thing I learned,” Dr. Sato said.

The worlds of academic paleontology and creationism rarely collide, but the former paid a visit to the latter last Wednesday. The University of Cincinnati was hosting the North American Paleontological Convention, where scientists presented their latest research at the frontiers of the ancient past. In a break from the lectures, about 70 of the attendees boarded school buses for a field trip to the Creation Museum, on the other side of the Ohio River.

“I’m very curious and fascinated,” Stefan Bengtson, a professor of paleozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said before the visit, “because we have little of that kind of thing in Sweden.”

Arnold I. Miller, a professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati and head of the meeting’s organizing committee, suggested the trip. “Too often, academics tend to ignore what’s going on around them,” Dr. Miller said. “I feel at least it would be valuable for my colleagues to become aware not only of how creationists are portraying their own message, but how they’re portraying the paleontological message and the evolutionary message.”

Since the museum opened two years ago, 750,000 people have passed through its doors, but this was the first large group of paleontologists to drop by. The museum welcomed the atypical guests with the typical hospitality. “Praise God, we’re excited to have you here,” said Bonnie Mills, a guest service employee.

The scientists received the group admission rate, which included lunch.

Terry Mortenson, a lecturer and researcher for Answers in Genesis, the ministry that built and runs the Creation Museum, said he did not expect the visit to change many minds. “I’m sure for the most part they’ll be of a different view from what’s presented here,” Dr. Mortenson said. “We’ll just give the freedom to see what they want to see.”

Near the entrance to the exhibits is an animatronic display that includes a girl feeding a carrot to a squirrel as two dinosaurs stand nearby, a stark departure from natural history museums that say the first humans lived 65 million years after the last dinosaurs.

“I’m speechless,” said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, who walked around with crossed arms and a grimace. “It’s rather scary.”

Dr. Mortenson and others at the museum say they look at the same rocks and fossils as the visiting scientists, but because of different starting assumptions they arrive at different answers. For example, they say the biblical flood set off huge turmoil inside the Earth that broke apart the continents and pushed them to their current locations, not that the continents have moved over a few billion years.

“Everyone has presuppositions what they will consider, what questions they will ask,” said Dr. Mortenson, who holds a doctorate in the history of geology from Coventry University in England. “The very first two rooms of our museum talk about this issue of starting points and assumptions. We will very strongly contest an evolutionist position that they are letting facts speak for themselves.”

The museum’s presentation appeals to visitors like Steven Leinberger and his wife, Deborah, who came with a group from the Church of the Lutheran Confession in Eau Claire, Wis. “This is what should be taught even in science,” Mr. Leinberger said.

The museum founders placed it in the Cincinnati area because it is within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the United States population. The area has also long attracted paleontologists with some of the most fossil-laden rocks in North America, where it is easy along some roadsides to pick up fossils dated to be hundreds of millions of years old. The rocks are so well known that they are called the Cincinnatian Series, representing the stretch of time from 451 million to 443 million years ago.

Many of the paleontologists thought the museum misrepresented and ridiculed them and their work and unfairly blamed them for the ills of society.

“I think they should rename the museum — not the Creation Museum, but the Confusion Museum,” said Lisa E. Park, a professor of paleontology at the University of Akron.

“Unfortunately, they do it knowingly,” Dr. Park said. “I was dismayed. As a Christian, I was dismayed.”

Dr. Bengtson noted that to explain how the few species aboard the ark could have diversified to the multitude of animals alive today in only a few thousand years, the museum said simply, “God provided organisms with special tools to change rapidly.”

“Thus in one sentence they admit that evolution is real,” Dr. Bengtson said, “and that they have to invoke magic to explain how it works.”

But even some who disagree with the information and message concede that the museum has an obvious appeal. “I hate that it exists,” said Jason D. Rosenhouse, a mathematician at James Madison University in Virginia and a blogger on evolution issues, “but given that it exists, you can have a good time here. They put on a very good show if you can handle the suspension of disbelief.”

By the end of the visit, among the dinosaurs, Dr. Briggs seemed amused. “I like the fact the dinosaurs were in the ark,” he said. (About 50 kinds of dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, the museum explains, but later went extinct for unknown reasons.)

The museum, he realized, probably changes few beliefs. “But you worry about the youngsters,” he said.

Dr. Sato likened the museum to an amusement park. “I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Disneyland,” she said.

Did she enjoy Disneyland?

“Not very much,” she said.

Come Meet Your Folks: Warm Blood Is Required

By Edward Rothstein

New York Times, May 14, 2009

You don’t usually associate the American Museum of Natural History with a carnival barker sales pitch — Step right up, folks! Never before seen by human eyes! — but the playful tone of its fine new exhibition, “Extreme Mammals,” comes close. It boasts “the biggest, smallest and most amazing animals of all time.”

This exhibition, which opens on Saturday, has as many exclamation marks as a Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” show. And where they are missing, you feel like inserting them, even when some of its creatures are represented only by fossils and skulls, drawings and skeletal reproductions:

A bee-sized bat!

A beaver with horns!

Whales with teeth “as big as a slice of pizza!”

An Indonesian pig with teeth that grow through the top of its skull bones!

Ten-thousand-year-old coarse black hair — fresh-frozen from the pelt of an extinct mammoth!

And — live! — nocturnal “sugar gliders,” the show’s only living creatures! In the dim display they look like flying squirrels whose bulbous eyes put the doe-eyed caricatures of Japanese anime to shame.

This pace is kept up throughout. At the entrance you are dwarfed by a life-size model of the “largest land mammal ever,” an 18-foot-tall, 20-ton, extinct vegetarian Indricotherium, which looks like a cross between an elephant and a rhinoceros, if both had been designed by Dr. Seuss. Turn again, and you see the “smallest mammal ever,” a 50-million-year-old 1.5-inch Batodonoides, reconstructed from a recently discovered “tiny fossil jaw”: it looks like a jumbo mosquito with teeth, meriting an urgent, quick swat.

Extreme mammals indeed. Anything extreme, of course, has always been sought by collectors: it is guaranteed to inspire amazement. Though the word now often means little more than hype, John J. Flynn, the museum’s paleontologist and the show’s curator, makes it appropriate. He has done so not by highlighting nature’s freaks and exceptions — the mutations and bizarre accidents that amaze and horrify — but by exploring the edges of our awareness about the animal kingdom’s most familiar group.

To a certain extent all animal categories are arbitrary; we choose which kinds of associations are important, creating order out of miscellany, taming the chaos of variation. Paleontologists don’t use categories like “animals that swim,” “animals with cute faces” or “animals that taste good,” because these categories — which might turn out to be very useful in certain circumstances — don’t tell us much about their kinship and history. Or about our own.

At first glance at these astonishingly diverse creatures, which include koala bears, armadillos, platypuses, beavers, whales and humans, it might seem that mammalia as a category is also arbitrary: is there any significant connection between the lumbering Indricotherium and the gnatty Batodonoides?

Look around here and you are struck not by uniformity and shared traits but by intricate variation. There is a display of mammalian “headgear”: antlers, tusks, horns and protrusions. There are teeth that grind, others that chop and the comb-like baleen of whales — fine, toothlike filaments that filter smaller animals for eating. There are descriptions of mammalian “marriages” with one female and many males (naked mole rats), one male and many females (lions), multiple partners (bonobos) and monogamous alliances (Blandford’s foxes).

Part of the show’s excitement is the dizzying variation of life forms contained in this single category. Why, then, even come up with a concept of “mammal”?

It may well have been because humans were finding similarities with our own species. Mammals, we learned in school, are a class of vertebrates. Like us they have bones in their backs. Like us their infants feed on milk produced by the female’s mammary glands. Mammals have hair or fur. They are warm-blooded, and they are not hatched from eggs.

By definition, it seems, a typical mammal — one that is not extreme — is us. Or as the exhibition advertising puts it, “Come and meet your relatives!”

But as the show soon teaches us, even these resemblances don’t always hold. While the “vast majority” of mammals give birth to live young, marsupials will host them in a pouch (the kangaroo, we learn, can simultaneously provide different kinds of milk for its differently aged offspring) and mammalian monotremes like the “short-beaked echidna,” which resembles a spiny platypus, even lay eggs. Humans are also less typical than it might seem: we are the only mammalian bipeds that don’t hop (at least as the dominant means of locomotion). A more reliable defining characteristic, it seems, is something found only in the study of physical remains: all mammals and only mammals have three bones inside the middle ear.

This earbone criterion may seem esoteric — until we learn that the evolution of that bone structure is related to the development of a single lower jaw, which in turn, is associated with the fact that mammals, unlike, say, lizards, have differentiated teeth that allow for different kinds of chewing. Many seemingly arbitrary physical characteristics are actually associated with a particular kind of survival. Mammals developed nocturnally effective eyesight, as well as larger brains for strategizing, which is where humans may be the most extreme of all.

In this exercise of classification that brain is being put to strenuous use, because the particular characteristics are so variable that scientists today define mammals not using physical criteria but evolutionary origins: “All mammals alive today descended from a single, shared ancestor.”

The ascendance of those descendants had much to do with a loose assemblage of features: warm blood, nocturnal eyesight, large brains. Were mammals the dinosaurs’ nemesis? Some credit here is given to the recently discovered Repenomamus, a cat-size creature, perhaps the largest mammal in the age of the dinosaurs: 130-million-year-old Repenomamus fossils have been found with dinosaur bones inside their bellies.

So these extreme mammals really are, in a strange way, our relatives, a multibranched, variegated web of life forms, many extinct (as are 99 percent of all species that ever lived) but some of which are still being discovered: the last display shows a reconstruction of a striped rabbit, a new species discovered in 1999 in Laos.

The lesson may be that nothing about mammals is that extreme, because nothing about them is really commonplace. This show might even be considered a self-centered declaration of evolutionary triumph. It is something that only a mammal could have conceived.

“Extreme Mammals” opens Saturday and runs through Jan. 3 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street; amnh.org; (212) 769-5100 or (212) 769-5200. Timed entry tickets required for nonmembers.