Promote Your Local Museum! (It’s so easy and fun!)

What beloved specimen at your local museum do you want the world to know about?

Kirk Johnson is a paleobotanist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He took this photo (at the University of Alaska Museum during a recent trip to Fairbanks) of a mummified bison from the Ice Age. It was frozen in solid soil and uncovered by gold miners who were artificially thawing out the surrounding Earth in 1979. There are claw and tooth marks in the mummy that have allowed scientists to finger the bison’s killer: An American lion.

There are lots of relatively small, locally oriented museums all over the country, harboring neat finds like this. Most of us don’t even know about the treasures stored in these small, local museums, like yours. So, visit your local science and natural history museums, photograph your favorite exhibit, and send the pictures — along with any nifty information you picked up from reading the labels and signs to Maggie Koerth-Baker (at Boing Boing) at this email address: maggie.koerth@gmail.com