AMNH-IP-Columbia University Collection

It has been quite the exciting week! On Wednesday alone I attended two presentations and got a tour of the Earth and Planetary Sciences department. The talks were both really interesting! Dr. Kate Kiseeva presented on "Probing the Deep Earth: Insights from Mantle Xenoliths and Inclusions in Diamonds". I learned a lot during that talk, I previously had very little knowledge of inclusions in diamonds, let alone how one would study them! Another talk was given by Stephanie Pierce from Harvard and was titled "Functional Adaptive Landscapes (Help) Illuminate Major Transitions in Vertebrate Evolution". This talk was also very enlightening regarding the specifics of what changes animals underwent during these transitions. The tour around the Earth and Planetary Sciences department was excellent. Nicole Childs, the Collections Manager in the department, had a wide range of knowledge about all of the collections we visited. We started in the rock collections, and all of the ...

The highlight of this week was definitely the tour Bushra and I went on around Invertebrate Zoology! Corey Smith, a Senior Museum Specialist in the department, showed us all around the Insect collection of pinned specimens. We started with the beetles, which is what Corey now works on, and I was amazed by the diversity of specimens we saw! We saw some of the largest beetles on the planet, about the width of my fist, as well as some of the smallest, about the size of an ant. I remarked that if I had seen a lot of these outside, I would not have guessed they were beetles, but rather a weird insect I was not familiar with. Corey said he thinks that is not an uncommon way people think. But going forward, I will now be able to hazard a guess that weird insect is actually a beetle!       Drawer of goliath beetles (Scarabaeidae)                           Drawer of longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae)     ...