Mario Cedeño Response 4/12

The American Museum of Natural History is very well known today for its vast and numerous dinosaur bone collection, and as Douglas J. Preston illustrates, how the bones were gathered and collected and how they ended up in the museum can be complex. The stories of how the bones were collected and by who can be very interesting, as with the stories of Marsh and Cope racing to out due each other to find the most dinosaur bones, and with Sternberg and the mummified duck-billed dinosaur he and his sons discovered in Wyoming. Reading these stories I was struck by how much of a history that objects in the museum have and how that history is usually not presented with the object in the museum display. I think learning about the unique history of the museum objects will add to the object's appeal and lure instead of museumgoers simply looking at an object without knowing its history.
In chapter ten titled “A Library of Bones” I found it interesting the great amount of information that can be gathered from studying bones. When combining the information that can be gathered from bones with other scientific disciplines such as geology and astronomy, scientists can discover things such as animal’s diet, habitat, location, muscular structure, age, and overall information about entire ecosystems and how the world was in the age of dinosaurs. How the museum cleans and stores its bones was also interesting. The fact that live beetles are used to eat the flesh and muscle off the bones of dead animals in the museum seems very lo-tech in the increasingly high-tech museum. Overall, Preston proves that bones are an integral part of the American Museum of Natural History.