This weekend, I walked down to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History to check out their new Sant Ocean Hall (previous mentions on this blog).

The new exhibit hall has been under construction for a long time, and opened to the public the previous weekend. I've got a few photos here to share some of what I saw, but the museum also maintains their own Flickr page, which has additional (and better) photographs.

It's pretty cool. There are suspended specimens of both giant squid and also this coelacanth (with "pup" at upper right):


The exhibit has a lot of cool stuff having to deal with the geological aspects of oceanography, too, like this interactive exhibit about drill cores and how geologists interpret sediment. It would make an ideal visit for Historical Geology students:


The thing that caught my eye at first was a series of skeletons showing the evolution of whales over time, and in particular the shrinkage and eventual absence of their hind limbs and hips. I failed to note the name of the first one (falsely thinking I could look it up online!), but the more distant two specimens are Dorudon and Basilosaurus:


And they've got a nice C. megalodon jaw reconstruction holding lots of authentic teeth:


There are lots of smaller fossils, too. I was really impressed by the substantial portion of the hall which was given over to ancient oceans, as preserved in the sedimentary record. Here's a case showing some stunning fossils, including a MASSIVE asaphid trilobite and the best receptaculid ("sunflower coral") that I've ever seen:


A lot of trilobites are on display, most donated by Bob Hazen, of the Carnegie Institution and George Mason University. Here's a lovely Olenellus from Pennsylvania:


Also, you'll find Dunkleosteus, mosasaurs, and this Placinticeras ammonite with mosasaur bite marks running across it.


Here's a rudist clam, one of a half-dozen diverse and chunky specimens on display:


Lastly, I'll show a photo that's part of their display on the Burgess Shale. They include some imagery from Walcott's journal documenting actual fossil specimens that are displayed right along with it. Pretty cool -- a sort of window onto historical paleontological field work.


I also wanted to mention a really neat display called "Science on a Sphere," where a suspended sphere about six feet across gets imagery projected on it from the inside, accompanying narration that explains phenomena like plate tectonics, El Nino, the thermohaline "conveyor belt," and so forth. This YouTube video (not mine) gives a small taste of the Sphere as it explains surface currents using rubber duckies:



All told, it's a great exhibit, and you should check it out next time you're in DC.

Labels: fish, fossils, museums, oceans, smithsonian