– Roosevelt Ostrich in the National Museum, Washington D.C., undated. The Smithsonian Institution Archives has a record of a glass plate negative taken of the ostrich family collected by Theodore Roosevelt on his African expedition circa 1910. However, on…
When we started our Itasca themed week, we shared the story of how beavers were introduced to Minnesota’s first state park. It is only fitting then that we close our week-long celebration of the establishment of Itasca State Park with…
Yesterday’s Tuesday Tweet featured an image of an albino Grackle. That is not the only image within the Bell Museum records that documents color abnormalities in animals. In the 1940s, museum taxidermist Walter Breckenridge prepared a mounted display of three…
Hunting and fishing were important to the daily lives of Minnesota’s early residents as a source of food and income. For the most part, pioneers could hunt and fish all they wanted as very little regulation existed that addressed “taking”…
For several months now I have wanted to share some unique images from the Bell Museum of Natural history negative collection. The images document the preparation and construction of the iconic Bell Museum dioramas, or what museum director Thomas Sadler…
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 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…
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…