Pursuing praxis

I used to think I was born 150 years too late. All the stuff I liked and wanted to do, appeared to be obsolete. Biology had been reduced to genes and molecules, it seemed. 

Then I discovered that people actually studied animals with their bare eyes and bare hands. Then I quit studying for the MCAT and started carving a path towards evolutionary biology.

Now that I’ve been "in" for two years - what do I do? That is, besides read, take classes, talk, read more, write, finish projects, research new ones, track down ideas, apply for stuff, and organize the time, resources, and opportunities for the next twenty steps down the road? Well, museum work is a great way to do research. Huge collections of animals (and other stuff - if you’re a geologist, perhaps) exist in institutions around the world.

The American Museum of Natural History is one of those institution. I’m here to measure bovid heads, teeth, horns and femurs. Numbers are key - large sample sizes help ensure the signal of information (if any) swamps out measurement error, ecological variation, and other variables. So, it is actually very important to have oodles of the same or similar things. For example, sample sizes of several dozen are a minimum, in my book, for each sex are desireable. Of course, not all skulls have associated femora, or other needed data. This drives the need for large sample sizes even higher.  

For the visual learners out there, I’ve got a few pics. It’s long, dirty work. With the larger specimens, it can be somewhat physical, as I have to maneuver myself around the specimen, instead of sitting in a chair and rotating it on the table. With the little guys I can hold in the palm of my head, I can easily measure 50 or more a day. Today, I squeaked out 18 elands. Argh.

Addendum:

I like the fact that my work requires exceedingly basic tools: water and music to keep me going, a metric ruler and/or measuring tape, non-stretchy string of some kind, a notebook and pen, a camera perhaps (and a tripod and level, if you’re serious about taking pictures), a blanket to protect the specimens, and that’s it.

Finally, this is one of two giant eland I came across in a drawer, "giant" being an adjective and not part of the species or common name. The length of the outermost ridge on these guys was over 20cm longer, and the circumference of the base of the horns was about 8cm greater than the next-closest specimes. Both were from the Sudan, so I wonder if it was a populational or regional variance. It would be difficult, and not an obviously wise use of money, to find out. It’s also been 70-90 years since they were collected; hunting pressure has noticably decreased the frequencies of many species, types, and variants that qualify as trophies.