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bannerCMC Blog Zoology CSI By: Heather Farrington, Curator of Zoology Even at the dawn of the genetic age, it was

Have you ever wondered what our curators do on vacation? Are we true nerds at heart and spend our vacations doing something related to our fields – visiting museums, libraries, archives, digging up fossils, exploring nature, or visiting historical and cultural sites?

Looking for an activity to get you out of the house this summer, while maintaining proper social distancing? Want to learn more about the animals living around you? Consider participating in Project NestWatch!

The Photography Department of Cincinnati Museum Center holds about 1 million photographic prints, negatives, slides, glass plate negatives, and cased images such as daguerreotype. This article is about early photography using examples from our collection.

In the midst of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Cincinnati’s Mayor made the decision to give up. There was pressure from businesses, saloons, clergy and citizens to allow them to get back to normal daily life. How did the city get to this point and what happened before and after?

Below you will find a brief account of how we prepare bird skins for the museum collection. If you want to see this process in more graphic detail, we’ll provide some video links at the end.

Because most Native American pottery we discover through excavations or surface collections is broken into small pieces called sherds, people often ask us “what can those pieces tell us?” As it turns out, quite a lot!

Charles A. Lindbergh, an obscure 25-year-old air mail pilot, became an international celebrity when he became the first aviator to cross the Atlantic Ocean non-stop from New York to Paris, France.

A tintype is a wet-collodion process, same as the ambrotype, with the emulsion applied by hand, but on a dark lacquered iron plate instead of glass. The lacquer forms the dark background required to reveal the positive image. Tintypes are often coated with a protective varnish.

At the Hahn Site, located near the border of Anderson Township and Newtown, Ohio, CMC archaeologists have unearthed a plethora of prehistoric Native American artifacts.

Savior Maier and his son-in-law, F. L. Emmert, opened a saloon at the corner of Clifton and Vine streets in 1881. In the day-to-day operation of the saloon, Maier and Emmert learned that brewers were struggling to deal with the large quantities of wet mash, or spent grain, a byproduct of brewing. Seeing an opportunity, Emmert changed the focus of his business and started dealing in spent brewer’s grain.

Bird migration is at its peak right now in the Cincinnati area and on our Edge of Appalachia preserve. All of our bird breeders that leave for the winter are now back in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Northern Kentucky and singing in their territories.

The Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis) was a penguin-like, flightless bird found along coastlines in the north Atlantic. It was valued for its meat, fatty oils, and feathers, and was hunted to extinction in the mid-1800’s. As the bird became more rare, collectors paid handsomely for specimens.

Early immigrants, like Frederick Billiods, William Attee, Patrick Reilly, Peter Jonte, Thomas Wood and John Walker, opened breweries in Cincinnati that produced beers found in their native countries – France, England and Ireland – mostly traditional ales and porters.

The ambrotype is a direct positive image and uses the wet collodion plate process. The photographer mixes a liquid emulsion of gun cotton (combination of purified cotton with nitric and sulfuric acid), ether and alcohol.