Paleontological Research Institute

First of all, we are safely at Bill's house. Long day in the car. I'll use the blog time tonight to tell you more about the big event of yesterday with Elaine.

We had a private tour of the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca.

Here's the deal- one of Elaine's first jobs was as an assistant to the director of the institute. That woman was apparently their most influential director ever, and when the current director (Warren Allman) learned that Elaine knew Dr. Palmer well, he really wanted to talk with her.

This is in the research library- getting acquainted.

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Dr. Allman was a wonderfully gracious host. He gave us a tour of all the behind the scenes parts. This is the type specimen collection. The PRI has the largest collection of fossils in the world, and they have over 16,000 type specimens (keyed out without ambiguities, as perfect as possible, organized and labeled, etc)

They have millions of fossils in their complete collections. They aren't even all in their database yet.

These are micro-specimens. They have been mounted for viewing under a microscope.

And we got a private tour of the public part of the musuem. I'm only going to show you a few things that were unusual to me. Remember, I grew up in this part of New York where we would fill our pockets with fossils every time we went outside.

These are crinoids with the heads attached. Very ususual to find the heads. The "stems" break up into little segmented tubes and they are some of the easiest fossils to find. But they are animals in the same family as starfish. The heads are rarely preserved as fossils.

These are impressions of sea urchins.

And this is a book printed in 1684. It is the oldest book in the PRI collections, and is devoted completely to mollusks and shells.

We spent two hours there, so obviously saw lots more than this. The private tour was great. They were really interested in hearing personal memories of Dr. Palmer, and we got to ask questions like you never would on a self-tour. Not to mention seeing the labs and collections.

There is one more thing from the PRI that I want to share, but it needs to have its own post. I'll catch that one another day.

IF you are ever in Ithaca, and this sort of thing interests you, it's definitely worth a stop.

Tomorrow, final stop for this trip... home.

See A Day with Elaine