ASB Day 2: Learning about Forams

(Apologies for the delay, slow wifi at the hotel)
Today was day 2 of my internship at the National Museum of National History for Alternate Spring Break, which I introduced you to yesterday

The lab where I'm working

I'm plugging and chugging away at my project still (I'm hoping to have all the big moving pieces worked out by tomorrow, so we can start working on the bells and whistles on Thursday and Friday). But I lucked out today because I got a tour of the paleobiology work area today and learned more about how the project I'm working on relates to the work they do. I mentioned in yesterday's post that the Excel workbook I'm helping reconstruct was used to categories specimens into homogeneous groups ... well this was applied to the study of foraminifera (forams for short)

A foram, up close and personal

The many varieties (only a sampling) of forams

I felt quite lucky to get a tour of the Cushman foram collection by Dr. Martin Buzas. He showed me some samples on a stereoscopic microscope (now in 3D!).

These things are so itty bitty....

That in order to get them onto a slide, they have to use a small paint brush to order the specimens in ordered rows and columns.

Forams are really fascinating; they are some of the most common plankton species; they've been around for 30 million years (as opposed to humans who've been around for about 2 million); they can be used for dating other fossils; they make some amazingly intricate and varied shell structures ... basically they rock. Which is I guess why the scientist, Zheng Shouyi, was so easily able to convince the Chinese government to build a forma sculpture park. No joke

Forma Sculpture Park (source: Smithsonian online magazine)

I also got to see where they keep the large vertebrate fossils

They build the casts to protect the fossils for transport

Row of fossils (you can see what I'm standing next to in the following picture at the end...)

Me next to an Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) femur bone

The Dinosaur Hall in the Natural History Museum

It is crazy because the museum is planning on redoing the Dinosaur Hall soon and it is going to take SEVEN years to complete! Take a good look because it won't be the same again!

My mom always wanted me to go into science .... maybe this is my back door in?