Snapshot: A Colossal Castoroides

This week I’m in Madison, serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, a gig that’s introduced me to many wonderful faculty, staff, and students. Among my favorite encounters, however, has been with a university resident who’s been dead for around 13,000 years. On a tour of the zoology museum, I had the opportunity to […]

On My Way to Burning Man

This post originally ran in September of 2014 and I’ve not been back to this wild desert party since. I’ve just returned from Burning Man, a Mad Max bacchanalia in the desert of western Nevada. I went to see what my civilization was up to, what fiery pinnacle we’ve invented. I also wanted to see […]

From the Edge of Beringia

This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago. During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a […]

Clovis and the Virus

Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was […]

Old Art, Older Animals

When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The […]

Searching for the First Americans in the Smithsonian

This post originally ran January 5, 2016 In the quarter light of a few remaining bulbs in a decommissioned hall of the Smithsonian, Kirk Johnson, the museum director, pushed back drapes of clear plastic. The National Fossil Halls was being undressed for demolition, dioramas and murals half torn down, everything had to go. In his […]

Dioramas Return, With Teensy Inhabitants

When the old mammal hall closed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, it was the end of an era at the museum. The museum’s mammal dioramas were of the old school, displaying the stuffed mammals in their environments. They were in a dark, low-ceilinged part of the museum, and I almost always walked […]

Quirky Little Nature Essays Don’t Seem Quite Right Today

My favorite kind of post, in the years I’ve been writing here at LWON, has been about little moments of urban nature. A few weeks ago the bumblebees were all over the sunflowers at the community garden, and they were wonderful. I’m still excited about the vulture I saw swoop down to the railroad tracks […]