"Rotifers"

This week's memo arrives courtesy Dr. Meg Daly, Directory of OSU's Museum of Biological Diversity.

To help ourselves prepare for the upcoming dinosaur exhibit at COSI, Katherine O'Brien and I traveled to New York to visit the exhibit mothership, the American Museum of Natural History. We were accompanied on this trip by Dr. Laura Wagner, the OSU faculty member whose experience running the COSI Language Pod has made her our go-to for connecting academic research with COSI exhibits.

Although our primary focus was on dinosaurs and on developing ways that we can use the massive collections in the Museum of Biological Diversity to support learning about them, I couldn't help but be distracted by some of the non-dinosauran treasures on display. Featured prominently in the hall of Biodiversity were incredibly detailed glass models of microscopic plants and animals in which even the internal anatomy of these tiny organisms are rendered in glass. These models are the work of the renowned father and son team of Leopold and Rudof Blaschka. The detail of the glass models exceeds what the average person would see under a modern, research-grade microscope, an especially astonishing feat of technical and observational skill given that the models are more than a century old.

Learn more about the Blaschkas and their sea creatures in glass