This month's museum pick...

The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia
Look Again! Look Again! at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia

by Dea Adria Mallin

Talk about “critters”! The Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, is America’s oldest scientific museum and research institute and an astounding repository of the diversity of life on the planet. Founded in 1812 when Philadelphia was at the heart of all scientific research in the United States, the Academy maintains a world-class collection of 17 million specimens, most of them “critters.”

More than 200 distinguished scientists work in 250,000 square feet in departments of vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology, ichthyology, malacology, herpetology, ornithology, mammalogy, and more – housing cabinet after cabinet, drawer after drawer, bottle after bottle of specimens. To walk through the collections displayed in the public spaces, which every schoolchild in the tri-state area does repeatedly, is exciting enough, but to traverse the seven vast floors of research space is to become a time traveler and to circumnavigate the world.

As a child, I was introduced to dinosaurs in a great hall dedicated to the finds of paleontologists. Giant reconstructions of dinosaur bones loomed above us, and it was thrilling to learn that one of the earliest repositories of dinosaur bones was found in the 1850’s in Haddonfield, New Jersey, just across the bridge from Philadelphia. Then, in 1986, when scientists had put together much more of the millions-of-years-old puzzle, the familiar dinosaurs underwent major reconstruction. A column of neck bones of a plesiosaur, for example, had been mistaken for tail bones, and the posture of certain dinosaurs needed correction, demonstrating the importance of looking, and then looking again, in the discovery of scientific truths. 

Natural history is always overlapping with human history, and the Academy has the longest record in the Western Hemisphere of this overlap. So when I pass an extensive exhibit on catfish, even though I’m no Southerner fancying fried catfish for dinner, I do a double take in front of a giant apothecary jar with a “pickled” catfish in it. The date is 1829. The place of origin is South America. There are other jars on display with different kinds of catfish, all “wet” specimens dating from the 1800’s, and many more in the research areas, some of which are now extinct.

They will be part of a major initiative not unlike the human genome project, in which the DNA -- the fundamental molecule of life -- will be retrieved from all the species of catfish on the planet. The technology for rapid DNA sequencing has revolutionized the biological sciences, and the Academy’s new Laboratory can retrieve the DNA from many of the 17 million specimens, whether from frozen specimens, or dried insects, or the skins of birds and mammals, or preserved fish, reptiles, and invertebrates.

Also in the public spaces is a hallway filled with dioramas of North American wildlife, from the caribou to the collared pessary, from the polar bear to the Kodiak brown bear, from bison to puma to moose, and more. They bring up a chorus of “Are they real?” from children and adults alike. Of course, we all know that the mounted specimens in their lively environments are not “real.” What is real are the hide, the horns or antlers, and the hooves. The rest is an elegant sculpture of the animal’s skeletal structure, painstakingly crafted by profoundly skilled and informed taxidermists, who, using hollow fiberglass and armatures where they once used papier-mâché casts, capture the original genius of mammalian design.   

As a counterpoint to the dioramas where animal look alive but are past their prime, as it were, is the Academy’s Live Animal Center where children can observe the behavior, care, and feeding of abandoned or injured animals and birds that cannot be returned to the wild. The lessons include everything from the idea that Bennie, the Cockatoo can live for one hundred years and that the coati has a super-sensitive nose, to the fact that the conservation status of an animal may be endangered, or that it’s not wise to have an exotic animal like a red fox as a household pet, or that people need to think about hunting, since it was a hunter who accidentally injured the Great Horned Owl that will not see the forest again. And there are the larger questions that visitors to this small exhibit learn to ask: What should the relationship be between humans and wild animals? What must be done to preserve all the threatened habitats?

In its vast research areas, the Academy houses the country’s second largest collection of mollusks, under the direction of Gary Rosenberg, Ph.D., who started to think about shells when he was five, had a volunteer job at the Academy in high school, and gave up medicine to do shells. A lifetime in research is just not enough to cover the 240 cabinets, 12,000 drawers, and 8 to 10 million shells. And Rosenberg is adding to that number with his collection of snails from Jamaica, where there are 500 species of land (not including fresh and salt water) snails found nowhere else in the entire world. Rosenberg has made seven field trips, traipsing through the Jamaican forest with his eyes on the ground, seeking snail and soil samples.    

As a major player in the initiative to record the DNA of all the species on the planet -- an initiative nicknamed The Barcode of Life -- the Academy’s snails will provide choice morsels for the study. Rosenberg opens drawer after drawer and shows me bottle after bottle of snails. In one drawer is a collection of a tree snail species from the Society Islands in the Pacific. The Academy began collecting them in 1910, but by the 1970’s, scientists realized that a carnivorous snail, introduced into the islands to help keep another population down, was also feasting on this species, and by mid-1990, the species had gone extinct. Finished. But it is still here in the Academy, its DNA intact.

Another source of the shell records are the Department’s collection of books. Rosenberg pulls one thick tome from the shelves, dating from 1788, prior to the founding of the Academy. There are 300 pages of text and a wealth of hand-painted and hand-colored plates of shells. It takes your breath away, this single enterprise in the field of malacology. As we walk past everything from gigantic clam shells to tiny cowrie shells, I wonder aloud if Rosenberg can use any of the cowrie shells I found in Haiti at the bottom of the sea in 1971.

While Gary Rosenberg does the gastropod critters like conch, whelks, snails, and slugs, Ted Daeschler, Ph.D., is across the way with vertebrate critters. Historically, the Academy was fortunate to have, in the mid- to late 1800’s, the distinguished Dr. Joseph Leidy, a man who was “born to dissect critters,” according to Daeschler. Both Academy curator and its president, Leidy is still called  “the father of vertebrate paleontology,” and “the last man who knew everything.” Leidy was able to recognize immediately that the strange bones which paleontologist, herpetologist, and ichthyologist Edward Drinker Cope brought into his office were dinosaur bones. If all Leidy had, says Daeschler, was a left tibia, Leidy could fashion a right tibia.  In 1868, when the original dinosaur exhibition opened at the Academy, it was a very big deal to present the first reconstructed dinosaur in the world. And if it didn’t have a head, well, it had a tooth. And since the tooth was a cool match for an iguana tooth, Leidy made a plaster model of a dinosaur head based on an iguana head. The original plaster model is in the cabinets at the Academy. It has a computer-printed “Do Not Discard” sign in the drawer where it now rests.  

Daeschler points to the incredible Thomas Jefferson Collection, assembled by Jefferson between 1797 and 1807 and comprised primarily of Ice Age fossils. Jefferson was interested in pre-history and natural history in the New World, and he commissioned William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) to go in search of the North American story.  

I notice that in his office, Ted Daeschler keeps an Axolotl. It is a dark-hued critter, maybe 7 or 8 inches long, with hands and feet. It began life as a newt and while it could have evolved into a land salamander, went only so far as to become an aquatic salamander. It swims in Daeschler’s aquarium, looking startlingly alive after all those dry bones. I have no idea what its life span is, but when the former living thing in Daeschler’s aquarium -- a lungfish with hundreds of millions of species years behind him -- croaked, it then went down a few floors to Ichthyology, where it got a second life as a specimen.

I recall a visit to the Icthyology collection in the basement to see a stuffed sturgeon when I was researching the history of caviar. The sturgeon was mounted above wood-and-glass bookcases, and was, if memory has not enhanced the specimen, 9 feet long and dated from the 1880’s. It came out of the Delaware River, about twenty blocks from the Academy. I have often startled people who buy Iranian beluga caviar at $100 an ounce by telling them that most of the world obtained caviar from the sturgeon of the Delaware River between 1880 and 1895, until compulsive greed undid the sturgeon, and it disappeared, overfished, from the Delaware River. More than one hundred years later, a few 9 inch long sturgeon have been identified for the first time in the river, but a new aquatic critter called the snakehead that devours everything in its path and has taken up residence in the river and nearby ponds, will probably end the possibility of little black beluga pearls from home on the soirée menu.

The Academy, home to an enormous collection of birds, is also home to John James Audubon’s elephant folio, Birds of America. Every Friday afternoon, at 4 pm in the Ewell Sale Stewart Library, a librarian dutifully removes the plexiglas lid on a special case to meticulously turn over one – just one – page of the 435 hand-colored, life-sized etchings of birds. It takes the librarian over eight years to complete the turning and start again. This double elephant folio of 39½” x 29½” pages, valued at over $10 million, is one of only 120 full sets in the world. Audubon contributed over 200 bird and mammal skins to the Academy, which also has the three-volume imperial folios of hand-colored lithographs, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845-1848), prepared after Audubon made a perilous journey along the Missouri River from St. Louis to Fort Union in 1843, at age 58, to record the wolves, beavers, otters, bighorn sheep, deer, elk, red fox, and buffalo of the West.

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While critters abound in Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, at first, it might seem as if species in dioramas, in drawers, on tabletops, under glass, or preserved in ethanol in antique apothecary jars could not begin to provide the experience of the species in the wild and alive. Yet every drawer that opens is a microcosm, and every bottle holds stories, treasures, secrets.

Today, scientists from all over the world use the Academy’s collections -- from species that have become extinct to species only recently named -- to answer compelling global questions about agriculture, medicine, environmental biology, even land management. The Academy’s work in research has immediate local utility as well, so that if there should be an oil spill in the Delaware River, the Academy’s scientists are equipped to address it. Then there is far-reaching future utility in the Academy’s role in the global DNA inventory of life on earth. But one must not think we have reached the ultimate in knowledge. Humbly, Dr. Rosenberg reminds me that no species is ever fully discovered.

And finally, there is the inspiration and the wonder and the beauty of it all. With permission, I was able to observe the birds in the hummingbird drawers twice in the past few years, and there resides the Cuban Bee hummingbird, the tiniest bird on our planet, fully articulated in less than an inch altogether. It has a red-orange iridescence on its head and neck that is pure incandescence, that makes pallid the shimmering ruby shoes of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. The bird has had a long history in that drawer, has not been able to move its wings faster than the speed of light in years and years and years. And yet, what a song it has. What a song.