Natural History Magazine | Featured Story

Partner Highlight

February 2008

The following story is contributed by The Academy of Natural Sciences, one of Natural History magazine’ s Museum Partners. Members of any of our partner organizations receive Natural History as a benefit of their museum membership. To see a list of the participating institutions and links to their Web sites, click here.

The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia’s Natural History Museum, is the oldest continuously operating natural science research institution and museum in the Americas. It was founded in 1812 “for the encouragement and cultivation of the sciences, and the advancement of useful learning.” The Academy has continuously redefined its mandate to be “useful” through research and education that reflects the societal needs of the times. In 1948, for example, long before water pollution and environmental degradation became topics of public concern, the Academy established the Environmental Research Division. This marked the beginning of a broadened research orientation for the Academy, which included applied research in aquatic ecosystems as well as the traditional systematics research—discovering and cataloguing organisms.

The museum’ s halls showcase not only dinosaurs, dioramas of mammals, two ancient Egyptian mummies, and other permanent or special exhibitions but also live animals, including birds, mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates.

Academy Science at the Top of the World

Photos: ANSP

THE vast, remote and largely frozen expanses that make up the Earth’s Arctic region could hardly be more removed from, and more unlike, the crowded and bustling cityscape that surrounds The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yet the Academy’s relationship with the Arctic is intimate. Arctic expeditions constitute a significant part of the Academy’s history of exploration, and a number of fascinating items are retained in the Academy’s collections as a result of these trailblazing efforts. “For more than 150 years, the Academy has been probing the mysteries of life in the far north,” says the Academy’s Senior Fellow Robert Peck. “From birds and mammals to plants, insects and mollusks, there is almost no group of organisms occurring in the Arctic and sub-Arctic that the Academy has not studied. Our library and archive complement these collections with a treasure-trove of richly illustrated accounts of
polar exploration.”

The renowned explorer Robert Edwin Peary led a number of expeditions to the Arctic, ultimately staking his claim in 1909 to be the first to reach the North Pole. In 1891, Peary led an Academy expedition to Greenland: his first major expedition to the extreme north. He traced the northern limit of the island’s interior ice cap and traversed the northern extension of its mainland. In doing so, he completed geological and geographical surveys, proving that Greenland was indeed an island. He also took advantage of the unique opportunity to study the “Arctic Highlanders,” a tribe of about 230 people cut off from the rest of humanity and the world by the sea and insurmountable glaciers. The Academy’s collections contain numerous holdings from this expedition, including photographs, letters, reports, lists of specimens, equipment, and perhaps most dramatically, the well-worn and well-traveled American flag carried by Peary throughout the expedition.

Robert Edwin Peary aboard the Kite on his Academy expedition to Greenland, 1891–92.

Ewell Sale Stewart Library/ANSP

On a later Arctic expedition in the summer of 1908, Peary was accompanied by fellow Academy member Harry Whitney, who disembarked at Greenland while Peary ventured on to the North Pole. An accomplished hunter, Whitney’s primary aim was to hunt musk-ox and polar bear to add to his collection. After early failures to achieve this goal, Whitney made the bold decision to remain in Greenland through the Arctic winter. He was not prepared for the extremely cold and desolate conditions he was to face, as he had no proper winter gear and very little equipment aside from guns and ammunition. But fortunately for posterity he did have a camera. Whitney survived the extreme cold thanks to the indigenous people, whose singular generosity and customs he carefully recorded. And despite conditions most inhospitable to photography, including temperatures reaching 50 degrees below zero and the relentless “long night” of Arctic winter, he took a wealth of photographs now preserved in the Academy’s library.

Although the Academy was not directly involved in any of the major expeditions to the Antarctic, artifacts from legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition of 1906–07 found their way here. Donated to the Academy in 1915, remarkable photographs from the expedition depict the crew and their activities on land, water and ice; their ship, longboats and dogs; as well as topography including icebergs, ice floes and glaciers.

Since 1999, the Academy’s Dr. Ted Daeschler has led several expeditions to the Arctic in search of 370-million-year-old fish fossils in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. This remote region, more than 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle,

Daeschler negotiates the rugged terrain in Nunavut, Canadian Arctic.

had never before been systematically surveyed for these fossils. In 2006, Daeschler announced the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae, a creature with a suite of characteristics transitional between four-limbed animals and their lobe-fin fish precursors. The discovery made international headlines and was one of the major science stories of the year, as it is helping to unravel the history of the pivotal Devonian Period when life first began to leave the cradle of water and move onto land.

In February, we’re bringing the polar regions to us with our new exhibit “Ends of the Earth: From Polar Bears to Penguins.” “Ends of the Earth” takes visitors from one end of our globe to the other to explore the fascinating worlds of the Arctic and Antarctic through interactive and artifactbased exhibits and multimedia experiences. “Ends of the Earth” explores the unique nature of the Earth’s polar regions, the current science being undertaken there, and how these regions are indicators of climate change on our planet.