Nerdfighters: Good morning John it's Friday!
Hank: I'm home from tour. I'm not well; I acquired an illness! Ahhhuhuhhhhehhuhhh.
I'm gonna take all the sniffles and coughs from the recording of this video and put them
in right now... [nose-blowing]
[SNOOOOORK] [assorted other nose noises]
But just before I went on tour, I was doing just fine. I was healthy and happy and I got
to visit Emily Graslie at the Chicago Field Museum. Emily Graslie is the host of The Brain
Scoop. She and Michael Aranda created that show here in Missoula, then it got acquired
by the Chicago Field Museum and she moved there, which was sad, but it also means that
she can take me on a behind-the-scenes tour of one of the biggest natural history museums
in the world! So not so bad!
Emily: This is a single tapeworm. Hank: Yeah, that's what I thought it was.
Emily: That is wrapped around a metal plate. If you have a tapeworm, and you try to get
rid of it and you break one of these segments off -- all of the sexual reproductive organs
are located in the head, so it will continue to reproduce, so you have to get the head
out. Hank: Wouldn't it be weird if our reproductive
organs were in our head? Emily: Yeah.
Hank: Oh! Wow! E: It's a giant clam.
H: That is a giant clam. We need to put a banana next to it.
E: A banana for scale? H: It just looks... it just looks like a normal-sized
clam when I do this.
(Laughter) H: Oh.
E: That happens more than... yeah.
E: Whoa! I've never seen these! Other: (laughs)
H: H --- oooooooh! E: Woooooooow!
H: Hi, big jar snakes. E: That's a big jar snake.
H: Now I can go in the vials. My hands are getting really warm.
E: Well, they -- they have to -- H: I expect they might be a pretty good insulator.
H: Like a real one? E: Yeah, it's a real one! It's one of the
best specimens ever collected! H: Like... oh man! I have a friend who's super
into dimetrodons.
Person: Yeah! E: This is one of my favorite things -- this
is a fossilized pine-cone. H: What?!
E: All the organic material was replaced by limestone. Couple hundred million years old.
No big deal. This is the last -- H: The only -- the only dodo skin?
E: -- specimen. They were actually this tiny in real life. They made really good chicken
nuggets, that's why they became extinct.
H: Yeah! Bird heads! E: Yeah. Why not?
E: This is the egg of an elephant bird. The extinct elephant bird. It was, um, on the
island of Madagascar. To give you a sense of scale -- I don't have any bananas, but
this is an ostrich egg. And this is a real one, a lot of museums have a replica, but
we have an actual one. H: This is an actual egg, like if I dropped
that then it would be like, I, like I would have to feel bad about that for the rest of
my life. E: Yeah, I -- I don't know, there's probably
less than half a dozen of these in any museum collection in the world. Don't quote me on
that. I mean you could, you could put it in, someone will tell me that I'm wrong.
H: Could we take the banana for scale? E: Yeah.
H: Take it places. E: Yeah, the banana for scale.
H: Put it next to things. E: This is the squirrel that I taxidermied
recently. H: Yeah! You made a squirrel! Yeah!
E: Yeah, it's from our How to Taxidermy a Squirrel episode!
E: And the guy who, who is the president of the museum in Berlin, not only is he married
to the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, he also has an amazing mustache that
is like this huge schwoopy thing, and I was standing over there and the bar was here,
and he was standing in front of it, and his mustache perfectly mimicked the horns of the
buffalo behind me. It was so perfect.
H: So when Emily arrived at the Field Museum, she found that there was one diorama space
in the Hall of African Mammals that just wasn't. It was just plywood. In this wonderful, beautiful,
gigantic natural history museum. And then, for some reason, in the Reptile Room there
was a case full of African mammals. Hyenas. So her first thought was "Why don't we put
those hyenas in a diorama in the African mammals room? Cuz they're not reptiles."
Turns out that maybe the hyenas kinda got ignored because they're not the most glamorous
of animals? But she thinks that's kinda unacceptable, and I kinda do too, so they're doing an Indiegogo
campaign to place the hyenas in the diorama in the Hall of African Mammals where they
belong. But it's expensive, so they are offering all kinds of amazing perks.
Tour was so fantastic, thank you to all the people who came out to the shows, I hope that
you had as good of a time as I did, it seemed like you did. John, I will see you... oh...
maybe before Tuesday? Oh?
I got this video of Emily holding a sign, YouTube.com/brainscoop, so you could see the...
click on that and subscribe!