2017 Mapes Collection Interns Blog

Welcome back to week seven of the Mapes Intern Blog. When we last left off, we had just finished seeing the amazing collections in Anthropology and were continuing with the progress working with the specimens!  This week we had the privilege to explore Mammalogy Collections which was brief overview of large and diverse collections can be! One of our larger Feline friends!Note some teeth are labeled as they are loose and could fall out of the skull. Our tour of Mammalogy was quite diverse. We saw things from primates, to bats, to marsupials, to wolverines (or as Keara calls them "over-sized ferrets"), to even hippos.We even got to see some specimens that Teddy Roosevelt collected in his youth! A carnivore that Roosevelt collected and prepared himself. Our tour guide, Neil Duncan, was more than excited to discuss the differences between the types of drawers and boxes used within the collections, and about how the collection's storage style has changed ove...

Hola, Um waynuma?, Rimaykullayki, Gude, konnichiwa, Hello! We have successfully completed our 6th week! That's 3/4ths of the way through before we are all home-bound which will be a breath of fresh air (no pun intended...) for all of us. This week started out as a typical Monday with a little rocky morning due to subway complications but we didn't let it kill our work vibe! To date, we completed three more cabinets this week with a running total of 22 cabinets! Spirits were high this week with many jokes in between the adversities of curation with missing specimen labels, poorly archived boxes, and uneven ethafoam liners. Getting out of the windowless basement is also always an adventure. This week some of the interns ate lunch at a make-your-own-salad restaurant. Yum!  A specimen with an exemplary example of scientific terminology in the world of paleontologists. This week's scientific tour was of the Anthropology collection. Anthropology by definition is "...

Hello again! Week number five has come and gone and we’re well on our way to complete our goal of thirty cabinets of rehoused, cataloged and databased specimens. We’ve worked our way through all the recent nautilus collections and are back to working with (mostly) Carboniferous fossil cephalopod specimens. Cabinets housing fossil specimens, we’ve noted, are far more time consuming to curate than cabinets of nautilus shells so we still have much work ahead of us! ©AMNH/N. Berlet Working in the Mapes collection from 9 to 5 every weekday puts us interns in a bit of a bubble so the weekly collection tours we take are refreshing and crucial in getting a better perspective of the large-scale work done behind the scenes at the AMNH. This week we had the privilege to tour the museum’s ornithology collections with collections manager Paul Sweet. We met Paul at his office (which had a fantastic view of Central Park) where he proceeded to explain that the m...