January 2014

Friday Fungi: The Year of the Horse

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…


Coyote Cute

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)…


Wednesdays with Walter: Hibernating Bears

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…



Patterns from Nature

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….


Friday Flora: Spring Semester?

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…


Itasca State Park: The Headwaters Then and Now

In early July my fiancĂ© 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…




Friday Fungi: 100,001 and counting…

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,…