Zoological

The General Museum: Part II – Look toward Ward

As we shared in a blog post a few months ago, the University’s “General Museum” – the museum established by the 1872 act that created the state Geological and Natural History Survey – started humbly. It wasn’t until three years…


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…




Tuesday Tweet: Behind the Scenes

In an August blog post here on Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History we shared the images of a group of young Chickadees perched on top of a stump. These obviously posed images were taken at Brook Lodge near Lake City, Minnesota…


The Survey, Year III

After a brief and hastily conducted “retrospective” survey in the fall of 1872, followed by a full year foray filled with salt determinations and peat assessments in 1873, Newton Horace Winchell, the director of the Minnesota Geological and Natural History…



Nature Paparazzi

In Hollywood, photographers who take pictures of celebrities going about their day to day routines are known as “paparazzi.” Might the same term be applied to this group of young men seen photographing this fawn in Itasca State Park on…


How to… track animals in the snow

Last week in the Star Tribune, Bill Marchel of Brainerd, Minnesota contributed an article on the utility of snow in tracking animal behavior, “… there’s a tattletale residing in our woods and fields. Lying, waiting, it is able to recall,…