AMNH-IP-Columbia University Collection

   Curation and Conservation of Columbia University Fossil Invertebrate Collection at the AMNH, Summer 2024 (A Pilot Project) Colu mbia Unive rsity Collection - Curation and Conservation - 2024 Week 6 - Final Week We said goodbye to Mac last Friday and adjusted our workflow to accommodate our remaining three interns this week. While this is sadly our last blog post, we will be working through next Wednesday before heading to Colorado for the beginning of the semester. This week we began working with fossil marine invertebrates from the Silurian Period, which is super exciting to us because there are no fossil specimens from this period in Colorado. It was great to work with specimens from a period we have little exposure to at Colorado College! We also took a tour of AMNH's exhibition department and were lucky enough to get a super special glimpse into exhibits coming to the museum in the next few years! We cannot share details, but we got to explore retired exhibit ...

  Curation and Conservation of Columbia University Fossil Invertebrate Collection at the AMNH, Summer 2024 (A Pilot Project) Colu mbia Unive rsity Collection - Curation and Conservation - 2024 Week 5 This week... We started our second to last full week off strong with all four of us working on cataloging, photographing, cleaning, and labeling. By the second day this week we lost a strong soldier. Covid unfortunately took Makena out of the workforce so there were only three of us working for the rest of the week.  We also started the week off strong with a broken stool (whoops).  By Wednesday we had recovered from our mishaps and went on a tour in the Anthropology department where John Hansen showed us around talking about collections and a bit about collections management. Due to the repatriation act which only allows people who have obtained permission to see the tribal artifacts, we were limited in the objects he could show us; so instead of Native American ar...

  Curation and Conservation of Columbia University Fossil Invertebrate Collection at the AMNH, Summer 2024 (A Pilot Project) Colu mbia Unive rsity Collection - Curation and Conservation - 2024 Week 4 This week... Below is a picture of our very-official looking portraits on the Invertebrate Paleontology bulletin board. After another weekend full of adventures, we began our fourth week of our AMNH internship! Our tour this week was of the petrology collection in the Earth and Planetary Sciences where we got a talk from Nicole Childs about the different specimens in the department. She showed us cores of rock which were drilled out of a mining site and described to us how it had to be analyzed by a geologist in order to determine the ore content in the earth below and the structure. By analyzing the structure and content they decide whether it is worth it to continue to mine for the minerals they're looking for. She also offered other ways geologists may be useful in constru...