Fossils In A Museum Floor

Just recently, I have returned for a small vacation to Chicago, Illinois, USA. In these troubled times of a world-wide epidemic, I did not think a trip would happen in 2020. As it turns out, some museums in Chicago opened for limited visitation and Kentucky was not put on a quarantine list by Illinois. So I was able to visit.

So we visited the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) this week. The building was built for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. It was known as the Palace of Fine Arts. After the Exposition it housed the Field Museum of Natural History until that museum moved in 1920.

After watching a Brain Scoop YouTube video on the fossils in the floor tile at the Field Museum I wondered if they were at MSI. As it turned out, they were and they appear very similar to the ones found that Field Museum. According the video the tile were quarried at Carthage, Missouri, USA (Carthage Marble Corporation?).

The fossils in the pictures above are Mississippian Period Archimedes sp. bryozoan. The first image is a quite nice cross section showing the screw section plus the net like structure that helped capture food for the colony. The tile can be found in front of the Red Stairs entrance way.

Prehistoric Road Trip Videos

I watched a great show recently on Kentucky Educational Television (KET) Passport Internet streaming site about paleontology in the western United States. The show was called Prehistoric Road Trip hosted by Emily Graslie and available by WTTW Chicago. Three episodes make up this show. Below are embedded Public Broadcasting System (PBS) viewers for each one. They were recorded on 3 separate visits to five western states over a 9 week period in the summer of 2019.

Emily Graslie is the Chief Curiosity Correspondent of The Field Museum in Chicago and has been with them since 2013. She hosts the YouTube channel The Brain Scoop which as of this writing has had 31,258,841 total views. The museum is fortunate to have such an energetic and happy presenter for their videos.

What I liked most about the Prehistoric Road Trip episodes was the field collecting where they are splitting shale to find fish or plants. The hands on aspect of fossil collecting and then the interpretation of what one finds. Clues to what it might be, how it lived and died. When Emily visited the reservation with the dinosaur fossils just eroding out of the ground reminds me around Louisville at some sites where coral fossils just litter the area. Hopefully a good way can be found to preserve and display them.

Visit the website to learn more about the show and how to visit the fossil sites shown in it.
https://interactive.wttw.com/prehistoric-road-trip

The Trouble With Trilobites Video

PBS Digital Studios has helped produce a new web series about Earth science called Eons. Their first episode is about trilobites (not tribbles and science fiction). The video on YouTube last about 7 minutes.
If the embedded link does work below, here is a direct YouTube link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aji2VnQFUCs

The Story of the World's Favorite Fossil

Here is a YouTube video from the SciShow channel. It claims that the Orthoceras cephalopod is the world's favorite fossil. They are showing a polished one from Morocco. Oddly enough, with all the fossils I have photographed on this blog, I have not photographed a Moroccan one. I guess they are the favorite because Moroccan fossil dealers extract and polish so many to sell worldwide. One can see them for sale at fossil shows and museum gift shops.

They publish videos on science news, history, and concepts. With over a million subscribers and almost 100 million total views, they have quite a viewing audience! As of this writing they have published 365 videos.

The video highlighted in this blog post has been downloaded almost 360,000 times as of this writing. That is really good for something about a fossil that does not relate to a dinosaur or the evolution debate. In a creative way to raise money for the SciShow video operation they sold 20 signed Orthoceras fossils for $50 each. They sold out according to this web site: https://subbable.com/scishow.  Here is their pledge video, wow just like PBS and NPR do. :) I wish them the best.