Today marks the celebration of Chinese New Year – the beginning of the Year of the Horse. Though Chinese culture is not well represented in the collections of the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, which is the primary subject…
Walter J. Breckenridge captured this young coyote with his still camera in Milbank, South Dakota (just across the border to Minnesota) on June 8, 1935. (Images from the negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records)…
An excerpt from My Life in Natural History, by Walter J. Breckenridge, former preparator (1926-1946) and director (1946-1970) of the Bell Museum of Natural History, illustrated by images from the Bell Museum records at the University Archives: “Back in the…
On May 29, 2013, the student scanners in Digital Library Services (DLS) began scanning Drawer #1 of the 56 drawers that contain the more than 6,000 glass plate and film negatives in the Bell Museum records. A mere 8 months…
So is this life as we know it now in Minnesota – life in the “polar vortex”? We are cold. We are exhausted by the sheer amount of effort required to put on so many layers and articles of clothing….
This week marked the start of the spring semester at the University of Minnesota, yet as the temperature remained below zero in the Twin Cities for most of the week, it didn’t feel very spring-like on campus. Thanks to former…
In early July my fiancé and I, along with his brother and wife, spent two nights and three days camping at Schoolcraft State Park in northern Minnesota. The park is named after Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the geologist that discovered the…
In Chapter 9 of his autobiography, My Life in Natural History, Walter J. Breckenridge shared his field experiences with Birds of Prey. In his role as taxidermist and exhibit preparator at the Museum of Natural History, Breckenridge was tasked…
– Robins, tame, and Mrs. Julius Hortvel of Minneapolis, August 12, 1924….
The New Year was especially exciting at the University Archives, as during the second week of 2014 the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History project surpassed 100,000 individual scans. To date, over 110,000 archival materials – photographs, negatives, pages from field notebooks,…