Last week I got to spend 1.5 hours at the museum on day 1 and 2.5 hours in the lab on day 2. On day 1 I got to talk to a camera crew about both my internship and my high school experience. This was a very unique experience for me because I didn’t get to just talk to a group once about what I do but students years from now will be hearing from me. It’s really cool for me to know that I get to do that, especially because I pioneered the internship program at our school. So for me it’s a way to show future students that if they want to do something at our high school they can. I also happened to be at the museum at the same time as another student from our school and a good friend of mine, Ian, who has been working on scientific illustration in the lab. (He’s in the second picture below.)
The second day began with me finally getting to see the Judy Block, which I talked about a while ago while it was on the 4th floor, installed in the Paleontology Hall. It’s a pretty impressive specimen; check out the pictures below! I also worked with another volunteer, Hollister, to look at a small piece of the Judy Block that had been removed from the main specimen. We also looked specifically at a small piece that was broken off and broken in half. We came to the conclusion that it’s most likely part of a shark spine. The interesting thing was that the inside of the bone contained small, round, red objects within the grooves on either side of the yellow center. We’re really not sure what these things are, but they did look somewhat like red blood cells. That being said we both acknowledged that blood has only possibly been found in a bone, not as old as this one, once that we knew of. So it’s very possible that it could be something else, but we were just exploring the options which is what science is.
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