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Bones can tell amazing stories. For every skeleton there is something specific about its structure that is telling about the life of the creature it belongs to.
This past Friday was a visit UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The Museum houses a large collection of specimens, specifically the remains of creatures that are tetrapods, which means they have four limbs. The main purpose of the museum is for research, and not for public viewing. The main room is filled with large gray closed cabinets. On the outside there are labels of the kind of creature the box contains, and where that creature is from. In the back of the museum is a room that is mainly a skull collection.
Alongside seeing the museum, we also had a brief lecture by Alan Shabel, a graduate student at UC Berkeley. The lecture went in a number of directions. I think that he was a little unsure about what to teach a group of artists and designers. What would we want to know about vertebrate zoology? I don’t think we even knew (or still know) but it was interesting nonetheless. He gave us a general idea of the study of ecology and evolution based on studying the skeletons and remains of animals, in the context of their environments.
One can look at any vertebrate, and find the same bones that we humans have, but that they’re shaped and oriented in a completely different way based on their functional needs. In the classroom that held the lecture, there was a skeleton of a pigeon. Its pelvis is very small compared to their sternum, while our pelvis is larger when compared to our sternum. This makes lots of sense, because a pigeon needs more support in the upper half of its body for flying, while we need more support down below so that we can carry our body weight while walking and running.
The most interesting thing about skeletons is the integrity of their forms. One can look at a skeleton, and know that the way it is made is right way. This of course comes from millions of years of evolution, in which nature was “tinkering” with the forms of living creatures to what best supports life in a specific environment.
In our lecture, Shabel discussed how particular animals used “anvils” to break their food out of shells. Among these animals are sea otters, or mongoose that will throw clams against a rock. Someone asked, why don’t other creatures do the same? Why do some use tools, and others don’t? The answer came that they just don’t need to. Either they’ve evolved to use another method, or their source of food doesn’t require such tools. I think the manner in which we, as humans, regard the behavior and adaptations of animals is rather snobby. We think that animals that behave in the way that we do are the most advanced, when in actuality, most every animal is extremely advanced in its own way of living.
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Bones can tell amazing stories. For every skeleton there is something specific about its structure that is telling about the life of the creature it belongs to.This past Friday was a visit UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The Museum houses a large collection of specimens, specifically the remains of creatures that are tetrapods, which means they have four limbs. The main purpose of the museum is for research, and not for public viewing. The main room is filled with large gray closed cabinets. On the outside there are labels of the kind of creature the box contains, and where that creature is from. In the back of the museum is a room that is mainly a skull collection.
Alongside seeing the museum, we also had a brief lecture by Alan Shabel, a graduate student at UC Berkeley. The lecture went in a number of directions. I think that he was a little unsure about what to teach a group of artists and designers. What would we want to know about vertebrate zoology? I don’t think we even knew (or still know) but it was interesting nonetheless. He gave us a general idea of the study of ecology and evolution based on studying the skeletons and remains of animals, in the context of their environments.
One can look at any vertebrate, and find the same bones that we humans have, but that they’re shaped and oriented in a completely different way based on their functional needs. In the classroom that held the lecture, there was a skeleton of a pigeon. Its pelvis is very small compared to their sternum, while our pelvis is larger when compared to our sternum. This makes lots of sense, because a pigeon needs more support in the upper half of its body for flying, while we need more support down below so that we can carry our body weight while walking and running.
The most interesting thing about skeletons is the integrity of their forms. One can look at a skeleton, and know that the way it is made is right way. This of course comes from millions of years of evolution, in which nature was “tinkering” with the forms of living creatures to what best supports life in a specific environment.
In our lecture, Shabel discussed how particular animals used “anvils” to break their food out of shells. Among these animals are sea otters, or mongoose that will throw clams against a rock. Someone asked, why don’t other creatures do the same? Why do some use tools, and others don’t? The answer came that they just don’t need to. Either they’ve evolved to use another method, or their source of food doesn’t require such tools. I think the manner in which we, as humans, regard the behavior and adaptations of animals is rather snobby. We think that animals that behave in the way that we do are the most advanced, when in actuality, most every animal is extremely advanced in its own way of living.
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