Global Warming 55 Million Years Ago Artful Boxes of Joseph Cornell

3 global warming 55 million years ago 6 artful boxes of joseph cornell 8 bradley & hubbard lamp makers 10 alien id chart Smithsonian Institution SCIENCE, HISTORY AND THE ARTS NUMBERNUMBER 15 1 ·WINTERWINTER 2007 2007 smithsonian online Global radio. From the ringing of the Appalachian banjo to Haitian meringue piano, Scottish ballads, Comanche flute, protest songs and the Uruguayan accordion, with a few clicks of a computer mouse, Smithsonian Global Sound will send to your computer a continu- ous stream of music from every number 15 · winter 2007 corner of the world—at no charge. All audio tracks are selec- Published quarterly by the Smithsonian Office of Public Affairs, Smithsonian Institution tions from the eclectic and re- Building, Room 354, MRC 033, P.O. Box spected library of Smithsonian 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012, for Folkways Recordings. As a selec- Smithsonian Contributing Members, scholars, tion plays, listeners can click the educators, museum personnel, libraries, “Recording Info” button on their journalists and others. To be added to the mailing list or to request this publication Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, a Colombian group that computer screen to learn more in an accessible format, call (202) 633-5181 plays folk dance music on Folkways Recordings about the track and the CD— (voice) or (202) 633-5285 (TTY). available for purchase online—on John Barrat, Editor which it is featured. Listeners can choose from an index of genres, such as Silk Road Ra- dio, Songs of Protest, Music of Appalachia, Fiddle Radio, Radio Latino, Radio Haiti and Evelyn S. Lieberman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs even a channel featuring the favorite Folkways tracks of Greatful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Online video performances and interviews round out this cyber-age well- Kathy Lindeman, Publications Director spring of the music that the world is listening to.—www.smithsonianglobalsound.org Telephone: (202) 633-2400 E-mail: [email protected] ‘Women of Our Time.’ Aviator Amelia Earhart, Actress Mae West and First Lady Internet: www.si.edu/insideresearch Eleanor Roosevelt are among the 36 memorable faces gracing the online exhibition Contributing Members who seek information “Women of Our Time: 20th-Century about the Smithsonian or about their Photographs From the National Portrait memberships may write to The Contributing Gallery.” Each portrait selected for this Membership, Smithsonian Institution, MRC exhibition captures a significant mo- 712, P.O. Box 37102, Washington, D.C. ment in its sitter’s life. Taken together, 20013-7012, or call 1 (800) 931-32CM or (202) 633-6300. the stylistic diversity of these images is a testament to the depth and breadth of On the cover: A fossil leaf of Populus wyomin- creativity in photographic portraiture in giana, possibly a relative of living poplar trees. the 20th century. From the soft-focus P. wyomingiana expanded its range north into Wyoming some 55 million years ago, after the pictorialism used in the early 1900s, Earth became warmer, during the period known such as Arnold Genthe’s 1916 silver as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. print of dancer Isadora Duncan, to con- After the climate cooled again, P. wyomingiana trived portraits of Hollywood stars— disappeared from this region. Excavated in Nickolas Muray’s colorful photograph Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin by Scott Wing, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian’s National Mu- of actress Anna May Wong, for in- seum of Natural History, fossils such as this are stance—these images chart the evolu- helping scientists predict how modern-day plants tion of photographic portraiture in the will respond to global warming. See story, Page 3. 1900s. Short biographies accompany (Photo by Scott Wing) each portrait, as does a brief summary of the circumstances surrounding how each image came to be taken. Anna May Wong, by Nickolas Muray, 1937, —www.npg.si.edu/cexh/woot from “Women of Our Time” 2 INSIDE SMITHSONIAN RESEARCH · WINTER 2007 PALEOBIOLOGY Fossils hold clues to predicting how plants will respond to global warming By Michael Lipske Special to Inside Smithsonian Research hen Scott Wing is hunt- ing for plant fossils in the badlands of W Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin—a vast, lightly peopled zone of sagebrush and weathered hills that the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleobotanist has visited off and on for more than 30 years—sometimes his attention strays. “You can hardly help it,” he explains. “If you’re collecting fossils, you’re sitting in a hole in the ground. In between using the pick and the shovel to make the hole big- ger, and pulling out the biggest pieces of rock and splitting them open with a ham- mer, it’s not uncommon to think about what the landscape would have been like” back when the Bighorn Basin was still being formed and the fossil leaves Wing seeks were alive and green. If Wing’s hole in the ground could transport him to that time—55 million In Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, Scott Wing searches for fossil leaves in sediments laid years ago, when the late Paleocene era was down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. (Photo by Francesca Smith) giving way to the early Eocene era—the scientist would find himself surrounded What Wing is learning about this long- 55 million years ago grew even warmer. In not by desert sagebrush and rattlesnakes ago world is helping scientists understand just about 10,000 years, the basin’s cli- but by palm trees and ferns, alligators and how plants will respond to the global mate went from Floridian to something cat-sized horses. “The climate was very warming being caused today by the burn- more like southern Mexico. different,” he says, and the landscape ing of massive amounts of fossil fuel and “It was a global warming on top of an “would have looked something like a for- the resulting build-up of greenhouse already globally warm situation,” Wing est in Florida.” gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the at- says. Earth’s average surface temperature The Rocky Mountains that surround mosphere. rose 4 to 8 degrees Celsius and stayed that the Bighorn Basin would still be rising, way for the next 80,000 to 100,000 years. rivers crossing the basin would be deposit- Thermal maximum The Bighorn Basin’s eroded hills expose ing massive quantities of mud and sand Wing is studying fossils from a sliver of rock from the Paleocene-Eocene bound- shrugged off by the mountains, and those time known as the Paleocene-Eocene ary. That rock contains evidence of sediments would be capturing the plant Thermal Maximum, or PETM, a geologic changes brought on by the PETM: fossils parts that Wing digs for every summer. eyeblink when that warm, moist world of (continued) INSIDE SMITHSONIAN RESEARCH · WINTER 2007 3 Wing calls this work “one of the most important things that we do with this fossil record.” of primates and other mammals that mi- the Northern Hemisphere some 20,000 plants—invading Southern species that grated to North America when the warm- years ago. “So it is known that plant pop- replaced earlier basin plants—over oth- ing exposed Arctic land bridges to Asia ulations have the capacity to adjust their ers. That makes the fossil plants from the and Europe. But only recently have pale- ranges relatively quickly,” Wing says. But Bighorn Basin the first “real examples” of obotanists like Wing had proof of how the when the glaciers withdrew, they left be- how rapidly plants can respond to warm- PETM affected plant life. hind a landscape scraped clean of vegeta- ing in an already warm world, Wing says. “Things started to click in the summer tion, exposing territory ripe for coloniza- of 2003,” says Wing, who that season tion by plants. Hot topic found the first fossil leaves and pollen That wasn’t the case during the PETM. Knowing how plants have responded to known to be from the PETM. Since then, Even before that global warming event, global warming in the past may help in six PETM plant sites have been identified, North America was carpeted with forests predicting the effects of future climate all in the Bighorn Basin, and in Novem- to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. “There change. In fact, the PETM is a hot topic ber 2005, Wing and his team reported were already plants living all over the among scientists, and not just those with their findings in the journal Science. place,” Wing says. Thus the climate their eyes on the past. “We had a confer- change caused by the PETM favored some ence last summer, and there were close to Pushing north What they have learned is that during the PETM, global warming pushed several kinds of plants northward into the basin. These include ancestors of warmth-loving plants like the paw-paw and poinsettia. Fossils reveal these same plants had long thrived in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. But during the 10,000 years that worldwide temperatures climbed to PETM levels, several species of Southern plants surged north some 1,000 miles. Then, at the end of the period of global warming, those plants disappeared from the Bighorn Basin. The last time plants anywhere on Earth changed their ranges so widely and rapidly was when glaciers retreated from 4 INSIDE SMITHSONIAN RESEARCH · WINTER 2007 200 people there who were all working on 55 million years ago. The shapes and sizes various aspects of this event. It’s a very of leaves, whether of plant species still liv- lively topic right now,” says Wing, adding ing today or those from the distant past, that there is a good reason for all the inter- are highly correlated with climate.

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