While I don’t claim to have a photographic memory, my work over the past several months on the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History project has fine-tuned my ability to remember images. Having viewed over 12,000 images from negatives, lantern slides, and…
University Archives underwent an office remodel last week. File cabinets were moved across the room, cubicles were deconstructed, shifted, and rebuilt. At one point during all of the commotion, one of the movers found an interesting item… – Envelope from…
In addition to preparing specimens for exhibits and giving talks to museum visitors about mammals and birds during his tenure as curator and director of the Bell Museum of Natural History (1926-1970), Walter J. Breckenridge was also involved with academic…
With Minnesota fishing licenses set to expire tomorrow, we thought we should share some of the fishy photos from the negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records to commemorate the close of the 2013 angling season. Cast your…
Are you sick of glass plate negatives yet? I certainly do post a lot about them. The fact is I spend the better part of my day looking at the scanned images of the negatives, deciphering the hand-written notations on…
A close friend of mine recently shared a quote from her 2-year-old son, “Bears can scare people, Mom. And monsters, and snakes, and lions. All sorts of animals can scare people.” After I read his realization, I had to laugh,…
There have been multiple occasions where I’ve gasped while reviewing the images from the glass plate negative collection of the Bell Museum of Natural History. I saved many of those gasp-worthy images to share for this very week because they…
In the Annals of the Museum of Natural History 1872-1939, Thomas Sadler Roberts, museum director, listed the following entry for January 20, 1928 on a detailed timeline of museum activities and milestones: An original double elephant folio edition of John…
This Saturday marks the 73rd anniversary of the dedication of the Museum of Natural History building on the corner of Church St. and University Ave. on the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities campus. The building was dedicated on Saturday,…
Ever since I came across the newspaper clippings and annual reports that made reference to two live beavers that occupied a small pool outside of the Animal Biology building on the University of Minnesota campus from 1917-1924, I have been…