Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: The First half of The Paleozoic Era: Life In The Oceans

 It starts with life and life started in the vast shallow oceans that eventually dominated our cooling planet.  This period of natural history is told through a series of imagined giant aquariums where we can watch life in the seas evolve from the earliest multicellular "animals" (which look a lot like plants, a curious beginning for complex life) to forms much more recognizable like corals, and nautilus and ancient fish.  Each aquarium is also accompanied by a dimly lit display case full of fossils representing the creatures in the huge dioramas.

635,000,000 to 541,000,000 years ago || EDIACARAN

The Rise of Animals

Chamia, a common frond-like member of the Ediacaran biota.

541,000,000 to 485,000,000 years ago || CAMBRIAN

Diversity Burst Forth

The arrival of the Trilobite.  Trilobites lived and evolved--and sometimes mostly stayed the same through unknown though sands of species over a time period covering 180,000,000 years!  They are the first known creatures to have developed Ocular-sensory organs.  But unlike our circular water filled eyes, there first attempt at this modification of animal life was composted of quartz-like minerals and far from being able to focus and "see" things in the conventional understand of sight, there eyes only noticed brightness or the lack thereof.  Now you or I might think of what possible benefit could such near blindness afford these little creatures that spent their days foraging on the shallow ocean's floor?  The answer is surprising a lot.  You can imagine sensing a brightness above you all the day long, and suddenly and briefly it vanishes.  You freeze.  You wait.  Again there is a moment of darkness.  Now you know you are in mortal danger and quickly you burrow yourself beneath the sand, because that thing that cut off the light was very likely one of a species of apex carnivores filling the oceans at that time called Alominocaris.

485,000,000 to 419,000,000 years ago || ORDOVIAN to SILURIAN

Marine Variety Triples

I have fieldstones from Kentucky that I collected when I was there which have fossils very similar to these embedded in them.

Always a new version of Tilobite was evolving, adapting to the many micro-biomes as earth's size lent it to develop distinct climates across its surface.  Note how this species "eyes" are far more refined than those of its distant cousins.

419,000,000 to 359,000,000 years ago || DEVONIAN

Life Above, Below, And All Around

Lobe-finned bony fish (skull cast)

Gogonasus andrewae

from the Gogo Formation, Australia

Trilobite

Koneprusia sp.

Hamar Laghdad Formation, Morocco

Giant Nautilus

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: The Later half of the Paleozoic Era: Life On Land

 This post begins with the Permian-Triassic Extinction circa 252,000,000 years ago.  And it ends around the start of the Devonian Period backward to about 445,000,000 years ago.  It was a time after millions of years of large shallow oceans incubating new life forms and the first terrestrial life.  Most of the images I have are from the dioramas, so that's where we begin.

LIFE BEFORE BIG HERBIVORES

A lone Demetrodon seeks prey on the muddy edge of a shallow sea.

There's life in the sea.  

And keeping it's own company up among the ferns is a large, lumbering Dicynodont, perhaps a Lystrosaurus.  The coming Permian-Triassic Extinction will take all the Demetrodons and their vegetarian cousins the Edaphosauri, but the humble Dicynodonts will survive and thrive for the first couple of millions years of the Era.

CONIFER FORRESTS AND FERN PRAIRIES

A pair of industrious large lizards have begun to display bipodal abilities, if just for a moment, and when excited by potential prey.  

We only have to look up to the top of this dead conifer tree trunk to see the creature who is decidedly opposed to their invitation to dine!

Crocodilians have joined the evolutionary tree of life.

As have smaller lizards who are turning their ability to glide into rudimentary flight.

And while many of the life forms remind us of species we know today, these amphibians are members of a long extinct clan known as Cacops.

TROPICS DRY AS ICE SHEETS RETREAT & SWAMPS SPREAD AS ICE SHEETS INCREASE

Several million years of rapid climate changes illustrate the nature of life to adapt.  A series of mini-Ice Ages help define the process.

As the ice sheet melts, it becomes covered by a thick layer of ground rock, sand and dust.

Soon new resilient confer forests establish themselves in the open plains.

These swamps will one day become the ribbons of coal that jut across the earth and continue to fuel economic expansion even as they also bear ominous pressures to our modern climate.

There the "turtle" becomes a dragon fly--in some ways this was the Age of the Insect.

One of the Hallmark displays features a trip into a mock mine which surrounds the visited in the heart of a vein of coal full of fossil remnants from these primordeal swamps.

Nearby are actual fossilized plants from a coal mine.

The last pic from this section is that of the skellaton of one of those early Cacopian quadropedal animals, the first non-insect able to raise it's belly up off of the ground.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: The Mesazoic Era in 3 Acts, 2 "Set In Stone" & 3: "Diorama Dino-mite"

 I've combined these two as the themes for these posts came to me after my visit and the images I've taken are thin on the concept after the Cenozoic Era.  However, for Act 2 "Set In Stone" I have a most extraordinary artifact.

Fossils, true fossils almost always depend upon the presence of bones.  Something essentially composed of minerals that can be replaced in the right conditions with other more resilient minerals and thus endure over millions of years.  The drawback to this is that MOST of life on this planet does not have a skeletal structure that is sufficiently hard enough to become a fossil.  In his book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything" Bill Bryson makes several excellent assertions about the nature and reality of knowing our planet's prehistoric realities.  Here are some of my favorites:

1) Our very best estimates suggest that only one out of every 1,000,000,000 bones ever even becomes a fossil.

2) If the population of the United States is 330,000,000 people, and we each have 206 bones in our bodies, chances are that only 61 of all of our bones will ever even become a fossil.

3) 99.9+ percent of all living organisms simply decay upon dying, and even those who may take longer due to extenuating circumstances (think ritual burial) will be gone after 10 to 20 thousand years.

4) The chances that a bone fossilizes is even obscured by the chance that a human being will discover it.

So the fact that this roughly speaking 152,000,000 year old impression of a species of cephalopodia named Belemite Cephalopod, Aconthoteuthis speciosa, was discovered in the Solnhofen Formation located in present day Bavaria, in southern Germany is basically a fucking miracle!  If you're only going to have one (and the museum has many) artifact for your "Set In Stone" act, it ought to be this spectacular!

On the Dioramas of which there were only two...

We start with "Floodplains Full of Life"

Clearly the T-Rex has caught the scent and blurred motion of the Theropod offspring scurrying up the creek's muddy bank.  Is she lying in wait for a meal, or just rudely awoken from a nap in her muddy "nest"?  You get to decide.

The mother Hadrosaur is obviously aware of her presence.

Near her nest rests the skull of a triseratops.

Zero in on...wait for it...a turtle!

And if you linger and look close enough there's also a prehistoric woodpecker for your delight!

"Giant Shadows on the Landscape"

Safely kept behind glass in a museum space so full of neon and directional lighting, the glare on the glass can be really distracting...

The Allosaurus knows there's enough flesh on the old Stegosaurus to share with the smaller theropod.  The pair of ancient crocodilians hope they will also find a seat at this dinner "table."

A fitting way to say good-bye to this portion of the exhibition.

Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: The Mesazoic Era in 3 Acts, ACT 1: 'Dem Bones

 Let us return to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural Histoary and continue our adventure into the planet's distant past.   To set the stage: The meteor has landed killing off nearly all life on Earth and ending the reign of the Dinosaurs...or, at least that is how this play ends.  It begins just before that fateful event 66 million years ago and walks us once again back in time to 252,000,000 years prior and the previous great extinction event that led to the rise of the Dinosaurs.  Ergo, this is the story of the Dinosaurs.  The largest creatures ever to walk the terrestrial biomes across 190,000,000 years of evolution and techtonic change.  

A Cerapod skull being explored by a duckbill dinosaur in a manner suggesting a conversation!  

A Stegosaurus looking back at a smaller theropod that's just experienced the full wrath of the Stego's spike tail!

Two of the multitude of mid-sized to smaller therapodal herbavores.

This Allosaurus makes a meal of the old Triceratops.

My, what a long neck you have Ms. Diplodocus Longus!

A striking pose from a ginormous Crocodillian reptile that reminds us how the reptiles were also around during this time and some were just as amazing!