Message from the Director

It's Museum Store sale time, and we couldn't be more excited! A whopping 30% off and free gift-wrapping await you this upcoming Friday. Here's an insider tip-get there in time to join our very last coral reef tank visit of the year at 12:30, as the popular tour will be on hiatus for the holidays.

We're also very excited to announce our big Giving Tuesday project: a brand new installation based on a much-loved underwater Cretaceous diorama from the old Ruthven museum. Our Exhibits team is really excited about this project, and so is the University; we were selected as a featured project for Giving Tuesday, which means that if we're one of the first 10 projects to reach 50% of our goal, we'll receive a 50% match! Please check out our page (link will go live on Tuesday, featuring a special video we made with our friend Caitlin Jacobs, LSA Carbon Neutrality Program Manager) and consider supporting us as early as possible on Giving Tuesday.

--

Lucie Howell, Director

This Month at the Museum

December 1
Museum closed

December 3
Giving Tuesday (link will become active on Tuesday)

December 6, 10:00 a.m.–3:45 p.m.
Museum Store sale

December 7, 11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Scientist Spotlight

December 24, December 25, December 31, January 1
Museum closed

December Weekend Programs

Schedule subject to change. These programs are only scheduled to run on Dec. 8, 14, and 15.

11:30 a.m. - Cow Eye Dissection Demo

12:30 p.m. - Museum Highlights Tour (Dec. 14 only) / Walking With Whales Tour (Dec. 8 and 15 only)

1:30 p.m. - How To Become A Fossil Demo

2:30 p.m. - Cow Eye Dissection Demo

Click here to see the up-to-date planetarium schedule for December.

Special Feature: Making a Sustainable Splash

We're launching a new project on Giving Tuesday, but we couldn't resist sharing a sneak preview with our wonderful newsletter audience!

This spring, we're planning to bring a very familiar scene to life: a diorama by internationally renowned diorama artist George Marchand.

Marchand was an exhibit preparator at this museum until his retirement in 1969, and one of his most enduring legacies is his 7-piece set of Life through the Ages dioramas. Life through the Ages would become prototypes for dioramas that Marchand and Irving G. Reimann, the museum's "Prefect of Exhibits," sold to museums around the country including the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh.

University Museums
Section of Exhibits

Annual Report for 1949-50

Although Marchand's depiction of an oceanic Cretaceous scene didn't quite fit into the new museum building when we moved in 2019, we've kept an interactive video of the diorama for visitors to enjoy in our Life Through Time gallery.

Now, we're thrilled to recreate the Cretaceous diorama as a public-facing scientific art installation visible from Washtenaw Avenue. As Ann Arborites know, Washtenaw Ave. is one of the busiest streets in the city; there's also a major pedestrian bridge that will have a nice clear view of the installation.

We're not just re-tracing our steps, though! This is a perfect opportunity for us to pilot a more sustainable and Earth-friendly approach to diorama-making.

Almost all of the materials we're planning to use come from discarded building waste right here on campus. The 20 LSA buildings across the University go through a lot of wear and tear, often replacing dozens of ceiling and carpet tiles every single day. Plus, many damaged or surplus hand sanitizer stands that LSA installed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were languishing in storage, just waiting to find the right use.

We're partnering with LSA Sustainability to give these unwanted materials a second chance by transforming them into a beautiful new installation that will combine art, science, and sustainability.

The link below won't be active until Tuesday, but we hope you'll join us in bringing this project to life. If you have any questions about donating, please contact Nora Webber at [email protected] or 734-936-5834.

Support the museum on Giving Tuesday

Ask a Scientist

Visitors to our Micro Lab can submit questions to this semester’s resident scientist, Emma Carlson, who studies biofilms in the U-M Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department. If you’d like to ask Emma something, just come by the Micro Lab and write your question on the sheet! We’ll gather a few questions to answer every month in this newsletter.

December is your last chance to ask Emma a question! Starting in January, we'll be featuring a brand new resident scientist.

Q: Why does my dog smell like corn chips? / Why doesn't my dog smell like corn chips?

Emma says:
Dogs, just like humans, are covered with different types of microorganisms. Some incredibly common microbes to find on our beloved furry friends are strains of Pseudomonas or Proteus bacteria, and both of these microbes can give off a corn tortilla odor! Dogs pick up these bacteria on their paws from the environment, so depending on where you live and where you walk your dog, that may influence how much of a corn chip smell they have.

This same idea applies to humans—different environments result in different human microbiomes (the human microbiome is the community of microorganisms that exist together in and on a particular human). But in most cases the microbes we have as humans don't make us smell like corn chips...or at least I hope not!

Behind the Scenes: Museum Updates

Biruk Teka Gidreta, Mechanical Engineering graduate student and Science Communication Fellow, demonstrates how water bouncing off a lotus leaf can teach us about hydrophobic surfaces with high-tech applications.

Our current cohort of Science Communication Fellows have finished developing and prototyping their research-based tabletop activities, and many of them brought their activities to the public for the very first time at our first Scientist Spotlight of the year!

You can catch U-M Science Communication Fellows from current and past cohorts at the next Scientist Spotlight on December 7, 2024, right here at the museum.

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