Creepy Animal Museum (Warning: I'm not kidding, it really is a bit creepy. There are some graphic, but scientific images of people and a horse.)

     You don't have to travel back in time very far before things turn a bit different. When your parents were born they couldn't grow up dreaming about being a web page designer, because the internet didn't even exist. When your great-grandparents were born, they couldn't imagine being paid to fly planes through the great blue sky, because no one had ever built a plane before. Now what about your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents? Imagine 4,000 years ago. 

     What jobs to think you could have then? Animals are awfully cute and cuddly Do you think you could be a veterinarian? Well, that is an incredibly long time ago, but, yes, you could have indeed been a vet. 

     Taking care of animals is one of the oldest jobs in the world. That's because animals and people have been living together for ages. Archeologists, (history experts who study very old people and places), have even found a 9,500 year old grave with a person and a cat buried together. And there's a dog and human sharing a grave from 14,000 years ago. Here's a weird one, guinea pigs were domesticated (turned from wild animals into farm animals) 600o years before turkeys.

     Egyptians wrote about vets taking care of animals 4000 years ago, so that means someone had to be teaching people how to be a vet. And if there are teachers, there are schools. Now, none of those really old schools still exist, but there is one vet school that is is quite old. The oldest vet school in the world in fact. It is in Paris and we were lucky enough to visit it. At the school, vets have been learning how to take care of animals for 230 years. That's a long time to collect some really cool things that vet school students use (and I'm not talking about pencils and erasers). 

     Remember, there is no internet, so no Google and no Wikipedia. So students who want to see what a sick animal looks like, need to see actual sick animals. So people came up with ways of keeping dead animals so they didn't turn all smelly and disgusting. They dried the animals. They made models of the animals. Sometimes they even injected the dead animals with plastic to make special models that still exist even today. It's all a bit creepy, but cool. 

     Have a look!

Would you call this animal a "splamb" or a "lamider"? Well, it is a lamb with eight legs just like a spider, but it is still called just a lamb. The French actually have a name for animals with birth defects like this. They call them monsters. This lamb was also beside a lamb with two heads and just four legs. Most of these poor animals don't live very long. 

They have more than just the animals themselves. They also have things they found inside of animals. All of you who have been 2nd graders know that we eat minerals and need those minerals to help our bodies be healthy. You also know that minerals are what make rocks. Well, sometimes those minerals you eat in your spinach, milk or cereal turn back into rocks inside of you. A little bit of something can get caught in your stomach or intestines or gall bladder and the tiny minerals can start sticking to it. And more minerals stick to those. And more minerals and more... All those minerals make a rock that is now stuck inside of one of your organs. The rock in this picture was found inside a horse's gall bladder. It is a little bigger than a football and weighs as much as a kindergartner. Ouch!

But not all the rocks are that big or that grey and ugly. The little rocks in this photo are beautiful pearls, but they didn't come from oysters. These pearls came from inside a COW!

I bet you thought cyclops was just a monster from old stories. Well, here is a real cyclops monster. This piglet was born with just one eye.  

As not to scare anyone too much, I made these pictures small. If you're not scared, click on them to make them much larger.

Vet students aren't the only ones that needed models. Doctors needed them too. These are models from one of the best model makers who ever lived. He made these models more than 200 years ago and these are not fake models. They are real people (and that's a real horse) who are over 2oo years old. It is amazing to see how complicated our heads are. There are so many muscles, blood vessels, tendons, nerves, veins...

Surrounded by Science

Not only am I lucky enough to be living in Paris right beside the oldest zoo in the world, I am also right beside several fantastic science museums. I will start this post with a little trip to the Grande Galerie de l'Evolution (Grand Gallery of Evolution). It's like France's version of the Smithsonian of Natural History. Lots of animal bones and models and excited school children not listening to their teachers. Their special exhibit right now focuses on whales, but you probably guessed that from the photo of the cool statue.

They don't call it the Grande Gallerie for nothing. It is a large and wonderful building.

Ravioli and friends (for those of you from Community Park, Ravioli is a giraffe and Littlebrook's mascot).

So you're in the ocean, you're hungry, but you forgot your fishing rod. What do you do? Well, if you're an anglerfish like this fellow, you're in luck, because you have a fishing rod attached to your head. I wonder if it ever accidentally tickles him when he is sleeping?

The rare uni-whale? Not quite. But it is a whale. If you look closely at this narwhal, you can see that the "horn" is not exactly centered. However, that is not a horn. It's actually a tooth. A left tooth to be exact.

Not only do some whales have big teeth, they have big mouths. In fact, a humpback like this one can open it's mouth and swallow a gulp of water the size of a big school bus. That would give Miss Frizzle and the gang quite a fright wouldn't it? So what does this enormous mouth eat? Tiny shrimp.

This little fellow has the opposite problem. He's got a big head and a tiny mouth, but it's just the right size for picking crabs off the ocean floor. He also has sharp teeth to crunch the hard shells and get to the delicious gooey middles.

This is called the Grand Gallery of Evolution, so here's a little evolution. Where did whales come from? Well, the first thing we would really call a whale didn't show up in the oceans until about 40 million years ago. Before that fossils show us that whales were having, well, a whale of a time adapting to their new watery world. Yep, new watery world. Their old world was dirt. Whales breath air. Still do. Always did. They came from animals that used to live on the land. About 70 million years ago, the bones from this creature above walked on land and swam around in the water to hunt for food, like a crocodile.

Jump ahead a few million years, and now this girl shows up. She spends most her time in the water. Her feet are more webbed like fins than feet. 

And now we're only 40 million years ago again. This early whale had the big flat whale tail we all know. And it's no fluke. Ok it is a "fluke", so I'll have to say it is no accident. It uses the big paddle-like tail to speed it along through the ocean. Its two front legs are now full flippers to help it steer. So what happened to the back legs? Look below.

They are still there, but they are really tiny and useless. Some snakes have two very tiny bones that used to be their back legs too.

How many fingers does a whale have? Five of course. The two of you have so much in common.

No, that's not whale hair. Although whales do have short hairs all over their bodies. The long stringy parts are baleen. They act like giant colanders to sort out the things that are too big to eat and trap the small delicious things. Remember from the big-mouthed humpback before. Big mouthed whales eat tiny shrimp and such. Baleen is made from the same thing your fingernails are. They can grow back just like your fingernails. Now if we could find an enormous pair of toenail clippers and a very cooperative humpback, we could do a great experiment.

This what happens to bad panda bears in Paris. They lock them up in small glass boxes. Oh just kidding, that's a horrible idea. This is just a weird stuffed panda bear that does look like it is stuck in a glass box. Come to think of it. It's pretty horrible either way. 

The end. Thanks for tagging along on this little field trip. Look below to see what's coming up in a future science field trip.

Yeah, it's what you think it is. A two-headed cow. Come back to the blog in a few days to the rest of this weird museum.

The Oldest Zoo in the World

Imagine a small playful half-dog half-pig thing. That's my new favorite animal. It is called a bush dog and I found it at the zoo. Not the Madagascar zoo. A zoo in Paris. The oldest zoo in the world in fact. My wife and I are in Paris, France for 6 weeks while she works. We actually live next to the zoo and several science museums. How perfect is that? I will tell you all about Paris and show you around the really cool science sites here, but first the zoo. It's always good to start with furry animals. (By the way, the first furry animal you see is a bush dog...an adorable little bush dog.)

Click on the Movie to take a Tour of the Zoo

Deforestation...Reforestation

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be able to help replant some trees in Madagascar. I was volunteering for a day with Missouri Botanical Garden's Conservation Department. We drove a few hours northwest of our city, Antananarivo. The area is beautiful open country like eastern Montana, but it is not supposed to be so open. There should be a lot more trees and much larger forests. Trees are a very important part of this habitat. Insects, birds, mammals, reptiles and even other plants depend on them. But the trees are also very important to the people who live around here. Trees provide them with houses, charcoal for heat and cooking and materials for making products and crafts that may earn them some money. Most of the people in this part of the country are quite poor. Over half of them live on less than $1 a day. When everyone needs the trees, they cut them down and use them faster than new ones can grow, so the forests get smaller and smaller and smaller. 

Many scientists from the island and all over the world are trying to make the forests grow again. It is not as simple as just saying, "You can't cut down trees anymore." Why not? [You may now pause to actually try and answer that with your class.]

Replanting trees in and around the small forests that are left is just one important step. That is what we are doing in the photos below. Can you think of some more steps that could be taken to protect the forests and the people at the same time? [You may pause again to answer this one as well.]

This is the small, very small, forest fragment we were trying to protect. The green is the forest, but most of the large trees have all been cut by a logging company who sold the trees. Unfortunately, that means the local people didn't even get to use the wood.

Here we are planting small trees. There about 20 of us and we each planted about 15 trees, so about how many trees did we plant?

This is a dangerous place for a little tree. For six months of the year it is very hot and wet and then the next six months are cold and dry. We used bamboo slivers to build teepees around each tree and then stuck fern fronds on the outside of the teepees to protect them from the drying sun and winds.

It was no accident that we used bamboo and fern fronds. They are both natural, and won't become trash when this is all over. They both grow very fast, so it is quite easy to grow and use more. Products like this are called sustainable, because they can be used by people without hurting the environment. Are the styrofoam plates and plastic forks and spoons in the cafeteria sustainable? Is there a solution to that problem? [The second to last pause to answer questions, I promise.] In the photo, some men are making bamboo slivers by simply hitting the dry bamboo stalks with hammers. It splits very nicely into long skinny pieces. 

Bonus Question: 

This area of Madagascar was never just one big forest. It always had some grassland. And on that grassland there were vast herds of large grass-eating animals. So what big grazing animal do you think it was? 

[Click on the movie the find out the answer.]

Well, Which was the Weevil?

The one on the left. But that's about as god as camouflage can get, so don't feel bad if you guessed the one on the right. It was a stick from the tree the weevil was found on.