From the last passenger pigeon to a 240-million-year-old graveyard of giant amphibians, a new exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., allows visitors to explore America’s natural diversity and cultural heritage. I had a first glimpse of “Of these lands“, which is part of a Smithsonian Institution initiative marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. Here is the video.
Aaron Tremper — Associate Editor at Science News Explores
Imagine we look at the United States not through its borders, but through its lands, its creatures, and the stories they carry. This is the objective proposed by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History with its new exhibition: From These Lands. We attended the press preview for a first look.
The exhibit explores America’s national history through more than 600 specimens and cultural objects from across the country. And by United States, I mean all of it: all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and even the five U.S. territories.
Kirk Johnson — Sant Director, National Museum of Natural History
“Our real goal is for everyone who comes to this museum to see themselves and their place in this exhibition. Every object has a multitude of stories, and this exhibition is about bringing all of those stories together around individual objects.”
Aaron Dip
But rather than being organized by state, the exhibition is built around themes: stories that cross borders and connect us to the land we share. America contains multitudes of them, and this exhibition examines them.
Aaron Dip
What makes the United States diverse isn’t just the people who live there. He also saw the wide range of living things, large and small, that call America home. A colorful example of this diversity is an exhibit featuring insects from different states and Washington, DC. The preserved specimens offer a glimpse into the estimated 91,000 species found so far in the United States.
Aaron Dip
In addition to celebrating diversity, From These Lands also examines what happens when that diversity is threatened. For one of these stories, the exhibition takes viewers beneath the waves.
Torben Rick — Curator of North American Archeology
“Kelp forests are these incredible, biodiverse forests in the ocean that line the entire Pacific coast of the United States. Sea urchins, for example, eat kelp, sea otters eat urchins. In a healthy system, they all keep themselves in balance. But what happened during the global fur and oil trade, sea otters and other seals and sea lions were pushed to the brink of extinction and we have seen in many areas that they were totally extirpated. There has been a real concerted effort by conservation biologists and conservationists in the United States to bring back sea otters.”
Aaron Dip
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, one of the museum’s most emblematic objects, also makes an appearance. But the conservationists made a deliberate choice here: they placed this extinct species next to a species that has been removed from the edge: the Guam rail.
Torben Rick
“What happened on Guam was towards the end of World War II, brown snakes were accidentally introduced. So you have an invasive species coming in – several species of birds that had never encountered such a predator became extinct. The Guam rail was pushed to the brink, but what happened in the 1980s was that Smithsonian scientists at the Conservation Biology Institute, at the zoo, started a breeding program, stepped in and started this restoration, and what we see now is that it’s over 200 Guam rails that have been released into the wild on Guam.
Aaron Dip
An exhibit that stops you in your tracks: an array of New Mexico fossils—a graveyard of gigantic salamander-like amphibians, some up to nine feet long, dating to about 240 million years ago.
Stewart Edie — Research geologist, curator of fossil molluscs
“That’s a lot of amphibians at once, and you wonder how did that happen? The initial interpretation was that it must have been a pond where they had gathered together and dried up and they all disappeared. But when you look closer, what you see is that these aren’t just articulated skeletons. They’re not just there. They’re mixed together. They’re all mixed together. So there was a some movement involved. As the science continued, they looked closer at the bones and they realized that there actually wasn’t much of what we would call “weathering”, so the exposure to the sun and the elements was quite cool. There was probably some event like a flood that moved the bodies, and they piled up and the bones all mixed together and they were quickly buried.
Aaron Dip
As someone who has followed the museum’s bird collection for years, this section struck me differently. The Smithsonian’s bird collection has been growing for more than a century. It is a record of animals frozen in time, telling us not only how populations have changed and where species have traveled, but increasingly, thanks to new technologies, what is written in their very DNA.
But what makes these collections truly remarkable is not just scientific. That’s who’s behind them.
Stewart Edie
“Teddy Roosevelt was an avid bird watcher, and in his late teens he collected these two specimens and donated them to the museum. It’s not just about the scientists at the museum – these specimens come from all parts of our country and help grow the national collections and help us create this cumulative knowledge of biodiversity over time.”
Aaron Dip
Although it’s easy to get lost looking at the stunning specimens, From These Lands isn’t just about observing. It also encourages viewers to think outside the box and discover places beyond their backyard.
Kirk Johnson
“I wanted to inspire people to visit the rest of the country. Go see a place that you don’t know. Think of a place that you’ve only heard the name of before and go to that place and find out what it is. Because every part of this nation is wonderful and really interesting, and there are so many ways to see any given place, and what we’re trying to do here is catalyze your curiosity about how you might approach a place.”
Aaron Dip
The exhibit is part of the Smithsonian’s Our Shared Future: 250, a museum-wide initiative marking the country’s 250th anniversary.