A couple of people have brought to my attention that I have not done a blog in a while. By way of excuse, this have hectic: I am in writing mode. As you know if you have been following this for a while, the primary research interest this semester is silicoflagellate (“silicos”) double skeletons, which are very poorly known and understudied, by biologists and paleontologists; I will change that. I am now at work on two papers, both on that subject but at opposite ends of the spectrum. One is on the earliest known silicos, where I have been able to interpret the double skeletons for a couple of species. The other end of the spectrum is the modern silicos, and I am working on a paper for a BIOLOGY journal (my first!).
An article in a scientific publication has a thousand details. Forget the text, there are figures to be drafted, plates to be made of many photographs (from the light and scanning electron microscopes), with every specimen having an age and locality that has to be documented and cross-checked, all the umlauts and accent marks in the citation list, in the proper format specific for that journal, the methods section needs paragraphs on how the samples were collected and processed, slides made, photos taken, it goes on and on. And then everything needs to be written in the very terse and concise manner. I tell my students, who too often send me assignments that were not proof-read even once, that my papers go through 20 drafts. It is no joke.
But, the day after tomorrow I am going BIRD-WATCHING. And I mean THE bird. There are I think two small objects in all of Europe that are the most valuable and that everyone should see if they can get the opportunity. One is a silly painting in Paris (the Mona Lisa), the other is the Berlin specimen of Archeopterix. And don’t tell me that the former is worth more than the latter – if both were up for auction I think we might be surprised. The Archeopterix is the most famous individual fossil in the world, bar none, and perhaps the most illustrated small-sized scientific object.
It was found in Solnhofen Germany, in about 1875, and was sold to the Humboldt Museum für Naturkunde soon after for 20,000 Goldmarks, which was surely a lot of money even then. There have been a number of other specimens found since – the London specimen being second most famous – but the Berlin specimen is the one that has the skull, on a neck that is folded backwards, with the wings splayed nicely to show all the feathers – you know the picture (and there is a cast on display at the Northern Maine Museum of Science). I will be making my pilgrimage to the museum, which I understand has much else besides THE bird. And as I have had little opportunity to buy gifts on this sabbatical I will be a tornado in the gift shop.
