… a baby Avocet! – Avocet, one young on hand, Turtle Lake, North Dakota, 1925 Museum taxidermist Jenness Richardson captured these young Avocets with his camera while on a collecting trip to Turtle Lake in North Dakota in 1925. -…
Car enthusiasts are currently descending upon Minneapolis to attend the Twin Cities Auto Show which opened over the weekend. The latest and greatest in chrome and horsepower will delight automobile enthusiasts through March 16. After seeing several advertisements on local…
This Wednesday in our series chronicling the adventures of former Bell Museum preparator and director Walter J. Breckenridge, we share just how far – or high – Breckenridge went in order to study birds. In his autobiography, My Life in…
Part of the thrill for me in working on the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History grant project is traveling to all sorts of new places around the state with each new image from the collections that come across my desk. As…
In February of 1916, Thomas Sadler Roberts, associate curator of the Zoological Museum, released the first of what he termed “Occasional Papers,” a series of bulletins issued from the “Zoological Division of the Geological and Natural History Survey.” The content…
Well it is Wednesday again, which means it is time to revisit the wilderness adventures of Walter Breckenridge, former preparator, curator, and director of the Bell Museum of Natural History. His description from his autobiography, My Life in Natural History,…
I’ve been watching a lot of slow motion instant replays recently as a result of being an avid watcher of the coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Did the snowboarder/skier get enough rotation in their jump?…
As I mentioned yesterday, dozens of negatives in the Bell Museum records aren’t about nature, but are of a personal nature as they contain images of Thomas Sadler Roberts’s family. The presence of family portraits amongst portraits of birds and…
Followers of the Exploring blog will recognize that since we began the project we’ve been exposed to a lot of birds due to the content of the collections that we are scanning. When you digitize and process the personal and…
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…