Week 3

Week 3 has come to a close. I cannot believe that we are going to be half way through our internship soon. This week we had a lot of fun museum activities, as well as a full week of work with the collection. We went on a tour of the Herpetology Department, and saw a lot of cool specimens. When asked about his favorite specimen housed in the collection, our guide David told us he thought the remains of Lonesome George was one of the more unique specimens. Lonesome George was the last of a certain species of Galapagos tortoise who recently died. Ellen Thomas also came in again on Thursday to give us a lecture on cladistics. The cladistics lecture was really quite interesting and afterward we walked around the fourth floor of the museum, which is an exhibit about the origin of vertebrates that is arranged by clades. The work continues on the rehousing, imaging, and databasing of the specimens. Everyone has finally gotten into the groove of using the camera and photoshop so the pace of work has picked up a bit this week. Some of the foraminifera that have been imaged this week are especially beautiful, and here is an example of a few.