Seabury Pioneers: Field Trip: Slater Natural History Museum

As part of our study of animal variations and adaptations, we visited the Slater Natural History Museum at the University of Puget Sound this week. This little gem of a place has an excellent collection of animal specimens for students and researchers to study. Here are all the things we got to do:

We toured the "Fur Fridge" a refrigerated room full of animal pelts and furs:

We saw a collection of preserved amphibians:

We looked at their collection of Crossbills, a member of the finch family, and discussed their cross-tipped beak and how it is specially adapted to get seeds out of conifer cones. We also talked about the color variations - males are red so they are easily noticed when they are looking for mates, while females and young are green or yellow.

Many of the students easily identified the young male in the middle (below), starting to develop some of his red coloring.

We looked at the differences between Ostrich eggs, Emu eggs, and hummingbird eggs, and posed with a lovely Rhea (a South American flightless bird similar to an Emu):

We compared the noses, claws and fur/armor of armadillos, sloths and anteaters to see how these things differed depending on where they lived or what they ate:

Long, curved sloth claws (above) are good for holding onto trees.

Big, sharp claws for digging and long thin noses help anteaters (above) dig ants out of the ground.

We also looked at the differences between a Porcupine, an Echidna and a Hedgehog (above). At first we thought the Echidna was the Porcupine ... then we weren't sure which was the Hedgehog and which was the Echidna. It turns out that though Hedgehogs and Echidna look similar, they are not closely related. Echidna are a special type of mammal, called a monotreme, that lays eggs.l

Finally, we spent some time examining specimens and sketching them. I particularly liked the barn owl and snowy owl sketches, seeing as I'm partial to "wise old owls" - but I was very pleased with how closely everyone observed the animals they were drawing and how much detail they included.