Denver Museum of Nature and Science

K~ and I visited the Denver Museum today and were given a private tour of the collections. J. D~ was kind enough to spend his entire Friday afternoon showing us around and letting us see all the cool stuff. Fortunately, we got the grand tour despite the fact that museum is currently moving it's entire collection to a brand new housing area with fancy state-of-the-art rolling cabinets.

We spent most of the time with the bird collection and we got to see about 40 passenger pigeons (extinct), an ossified goose trachea (shout out to M. J~), and articulated skeletons of a bunch of birds including a kestrel and three different owls (which K~ identified on sight as a saw-whet, burrowing, and pygmy).

They also had two complete elephant bird eggs (these are watermelon size, the hand for scale doesn't actually do it justice). Elephant birds are from Madagascar and went extinct a couple hundred years ago. The fact that any eggs stil exist is amazing - not to mention two complete, unbroken ones.

 The Denver Museum had a collection trip to the Galapagos in 1960, one year before they stopped allowing collections, and returned with a number of Geospiza finches.

Most excitingly, they had a male and two female speciments of the infamous Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (unfortunately, the photo is a bit blurry*):

















We also got to see a bunch of the beetles, scorpions, spiders, camel scorpions (which I've never even heard of before but looked bad-ass - apparently the mouthparts for predator in the movie Predator were based on these guys) and whip scorpions (which gained fame in the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as the spider that Moody used to demonstrate the unforgivable curses to the defense agains the dark arts class). Also we were able to see some more beetles, butterflies and moths as they were being moved to the new shelves (the staff were fantastic and took a break from moving specimens to let us look at the cool beetles).

After the birds and bugs we headed over to the fossils - there were two dire wolves (smaller than I expected), an irish elk skull (with antlers spanning further than I could reach from toe to fingertip), a bunch of mammoth and mastodon skulls, leg bones, and vertebrae, a petrified tree stump we helped move, and a Stockoceros (which is like a pronghorn with two horns).

One really cool specimen we saw was a giant ground sloth.

Then we got to the mammal cabinets and looked mainly at the chipmunks, but we got to see some lions, tigers, a gorilla, and bats too. Didn't see any Phodopus but I guess I've seen plenty of them.

All in all it was a great afternoon. Major thanks to J. D~ for showing us around and answering all our questions. Also to the staff of the Denver Museum for taking time to show us some cool biology!

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*I'm told all ivory-billed photos are blurry - it's a tradition. 

Parent-of-Origin Effects Paper is out!

http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/onlineLibraryTPS.asp?DOI=10.1111/evo.12500&ArticleID=1354661