1961-1962 - American Museum of Natural History

Minnesota were before the state introduced additional birds
of another race, from another part of the country, to try to improve
the quail hunting. Or, another scientist might want to
check the amount of strontium-90 in the 1900 population compared
with that present in the birds occupying the area today.
These are oversimplified, hypothetical examples, but they do
illustrate frequent types of use made of the reference collections.
Also, older collections are of great value in indicating
changes in the composition of the flora and fauna of the different
parts of the world. The search for knowledge from the collections
is limitless and challenges the imagination. A prominent
Cleveland physician made arrangements recently to study our
mammalian skeletal collections to learn more about the origin,
causes, and distribution of arthritis. A New York dentist has
gone over the skulls of fossil mammals in our collections to
further the knowledge of dental occlusion. In the field of anthropology
the collections tell the story of cultural interchange,
temporal sequences of occupation of regions, migrations, and
development of various implements and artifacts. Older collections
are being reexamined and analyzed with modern computer
processing methods to reveal new and fascinating information.
The new atom-dating techniques have inspired new interest in
old collections; scientists are returning to them to extract much
valuable data on the time of occurrence of various people in
certain areas or the duration of certain cultural patterns. In
short, the collections reveal an almost limitless amount of
knowledge, depending only on our abilities to extract and interpret
the information.
While the collections form the basis of most museum research,
studies on the preserved materials must be augmented
by studies on living forms, both in the laboratory and in the
field. For example, our Department of Micropaleontology, in
its extensive investigations of the foraminifera of the world
(which include mostly fossil species), has set up a facility for
rearing living foraminifera so that we may learn something
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