Category: Fulbright – Szczecin Poland

 

What follows are a few final photos from my last week in Szczecin and arrival in northern Maine.  The last week was very busy with me trying to finish projects, get everything leaned and sorted and, it seems, a going away party every evening (from neighbors, colleagues, office, Rotary).  My neighbors took me out and on the way we had to visit the cemetery.  This is, again, the second largest in Europe and something that Szczecin is very proud of.  I include two more pictures here.  The first is of some German graves that have been preserved.  The second picture is a couple of Polish graves from the late 1940s.  What is interesting here is that the flowers and candles are in evidence here as everywhere else.  The Poles take their cemeteries very seriously.

In front of the old geology building are some large boulders of granite and gneiss.  A nice display, and educational.  We should have some of these in front or behind Folsom Hall – Chunzeng, what do you think?

Another street corner with the beautiful old German architecture.  I have said many times that Szczecin should better market their city to tourists.  There is no old rynek square as in Poznań, Torun or Gdansk, but there is still much beauty to be seen.  The second picture shows the same corner building with one of the old water pumps in the foreground; there seem to be one of these pumps every block or so (I would guess they also served as fire hydrants).

This is the edge of what I am told is the second largest cemetery in Europe.  This goes on and on.  This picture was taken during Easter weekend, but even away from the holidays the number of flowers – many of these are fresh flowers – and candles that decorate the graves is amazing, at least by our standards.  Family is very important to Poles, who have an almost Japanese respect for ancestors.  Note that many of the grave sites have benches for visitors.

This is a building not far from where I work.  Those surely are bullet holes.  These are now fairly hard to find, as most of the buildings have been refurbished, but damage from the war was still pretty common until recent years.  This building is near a pretty major intersection and fighting there must have been furious.  The Germans were defending one of their home cities, and not far from Berlin.  There are few older buildings in this immediate area, with a modern shopping mall now on the opposite corner.

 

Beer at a favorite local watering hole, the Cutty Sark Taverna.  Here are colleagues from Poland, France, Turkey and China.  Another restaurant has a Celtic décor with a signature from Sinead O’Connor, who had a famous altercation with Pope John Paul II.  The Poles seem to take everything in stride.

In the churchyard is this little WWI memorial.  This village was German a hundred years ago.  None of these families would still be here.  I am informed that the Poles are making increased efforts to preserve the old German cemeteries as part of “their” history.

A biology colleague of mine in the department is part of a choir and I have gone to church with her to see the group perform.  These are just a couple of photos from the outside and inside.  Small church built in 1875 in the little village of Dobra, northwest of Szczecin ad about a kilometer from the German border.

This is a new species, from the early Eocene of Ocean Drill Program Hole 752A in the Indian Ocean.  The skeletons have a fairly small size (40 micrometers) but a basal ring with many sides and an apical structure with many windows tha tis unusually complex for the time.  The new species is named after United States Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) who in 1946 established the international exchange program of scholars that allowed me to do research in Szczecin Poland, which resulted in the discovery of this species.

I am working towards the submittal of one of the two major papers that will results from this Fulbright Scholarship.  This paper includes description of two new species.  I do not generally describe new species, and these are only my second and third new species from the Cenozoic Era (I have described a variety of new species from the Cretaceous).  Basically, I describe a new species when I see something very different than anything previous known, otherwise I tend to describe new subspecies or varieties that are within the range of variation of an already described species.

The photo here is being described as a new species, Dictyocha castellum McCartney, Witkowski and Szaruga, from the early Eocene.  The species is unusual in that besides the usual four spines at the corners of the basal ring, there are eight secondary spines, two on the flanks of each corner.  Thus the overall appearance is similar to the old Medieval star fortresses, so that name is derived from the latin word for castle.