For over 30 years, Museum naturalist and diorama master Stephen Quinn has shown students the art of drawing animals—from their skeletal composition, to their musculature, to the nuanced patterns of their coats and gaits. The course always draws students with a range of backgrounds, including expert medical illustrators and comic book artists as well as enthusiastic beginners. And every year, Quinn sees a few familiar faces.
One belongs to George Corbin, who has taken the course five times and has already signed up for Animal Drawing’s spring session, which will run for eight weeks beginning on Thursday, March 15. An art history professor and research associate in the Museum’s Department of Ornithology, Corbin began taking the course while pursuing a certificate in natural science illustration from the New York Botanical Garden. Working full-time, he was unable to attend many daytime courses at the garden, and the Museum’s nighttime option allowed him to hone his drawing skills.
“I can’t easily get to Asia, Africa, or other exotic places,” says Corbin. “But sketching the dioramas allows me to work with real specimens, with accurate fauna as well as flora. Steve is a master craftsman, and he’s great at reinforcement and offering positive suggestions to students.”
Join John Logsdon as he traces the factors behind JFK's decision to send astronauts to the Moon. Image courtesy of Flickr/Manchester-Monkey
On Monday, March 5, join John Logsdon, space history and policy expert and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, as he traces the factors leading to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to send astronauts to the Moon and the steps Kennedy took to turn that decision into reality. The program, hosted by Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson, begins at 7:30 pm and concludes with a signing of Logsdon’s book John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Below, Logsdon answers a few questions about Kennedy’s legacy in the field of space exploration.
How did Kennedy’s thoughts about a Moon mission evolve throughout his presidency?
John Logsdon: When Kennedy entered the White House, he had no strong views of the future of the U.S. space program. His first inclination was to make space an area of U.S.-Soviet cooperation. But the world’s positive reaction to the 1961 launch of Yuri Gagarin convinced Kennedy that the United States had to enter, and win, a space race. Read more »
Not long ago, a descendant of John William Draper, a celebrated 19th-century naturalist, gave the Museum Draper’s collection of fossils from Whitby, England. The set, mostly ammonites, was neatly stowed in a wooden box along with a handwritten list of contents dated 1844 and a price stamp of 28 shillings.
“It’s a lovely cabinet of curiosities,” says Neil Landman, curator in the Division of Paleontology, who suspects Draper bought the collection whole, perhaps as a gift for his children or because it was “the kind of thing any respectable naturalist would have owned.”
Born in England in 1811, Draper emigrated to the U.S. in 1832 and rose to prominence as a chemist, botanist, historian, and pioneering photographer. He served as president of New York University from 1850 to 1873 and was a founder of the NYU Medical School, where he taught chemistry until a year before his death in 1882.
At the time Draper acquired the set, Europe was the epicenter of fossil hunting. The Jurassic beds of the Whitby area were an especially rich source of ammonites—the sine qua non of fossils at the time, says Landman, because paleontologists had only lately realized they could use ammonites to date rocks. But as explorers in the American West began uncovering dinosaur bones and other fossils in the 1850s, the focus began to shift to the New World. Had Draper purchased such a set in the 1880s, says Landman, the fossils would have been American. Read more »
Advances of modern cosmology such as dark matter, dark energy, and the drama of cosmic evolution have given us a completely new picture of the universe. In this podcast from the fall, join Joel Primack, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and cultural philosopher Nancy Ellen Abrams as they explain the new universe and relate it to life here on Earth.
This podcast was recorded at the Hayden Planetarium on November 14, 2011.
Curator John Sparks is blogging weekly about the upcoming exhibition, Creatures of Light, which opens on Saturday, March 31.
Although they look like alien beings right out of a (low-budget) horror film with huge, dagger-like teeth, enormous mouths, and their own lights, many of the deep-sea creatures we feature in the exhibition can be found in the deep, perpetually dark waters right off shore from our major cities, such as the Hudson Canyon near New York City and the San Diego Trough off of southern California. To collect these bizarre creatures, we tow a special net behind a boat far below the surface, an important method of collection not just for fishes, but for all kinds of invertebrates, and one that’s allowed us to learn more about the ocean’s inhabitants than any other technique. Once we retrieve the net from the depths, we sort and photograph the still-glowing catch on board. These images show some of the extraordinary deep-sea creatures we collected on a recent expedition off of southern California.
