- How does geology affect us all?

How do plants and animals depend on each other to thrive?

And how do they all end up here in a museum?

Today we are going to dig deep into these topics and more.

What the heck are these?

- These are mastodon tusks.

Mastodons were living in Western New York.

- We could have been neighbors.

- Hi, I am Chrisena and we are visiting the Buffalo Museum of Science.

♪ Let's go, let's go.

♪ - Let's go!

♪ Let's go, let's go.

♪ ♪ Let's go.

♪ - [Chrisena] The Buffalo Museum of Science opened its doors in 1929 and its collection includes more than 700,000 specimens.

The museum believes in embracing science to address challenges and create solutions that can help protect our diverse natural world.

- [Holly] Hi, good morning.

- Hi.

- I'm Dr. Schreiber.

- Nice to meet you Dr. Schreiber.

I'm Chrisena.

So what are we looking at here?

- So here we're looking at some of the wide diversity of fossils that exist in the fossil record.

A fossil is any evidence of past life.

We see a variety of that here displayed.

It can be a piece of a plant like this palm, it can be bones from a dinosaur or other type of animal, something from the ocean like these seashells or trilobite, or, there's a huge variety of them.

We can head into our exhibit over there.

- [Chrisena] Lead the way.

(cheerful music) - Fossils are formed when an organism dies and is quickly buried by sediment, and then over millions of years as that sediment turns to rock, the bones or shells are also turned to rock.

Say if an organism was to die in like a river or a lake where say sand is being pushed on top of it, another way that could happen is through a volcanic eruption where ash is covering and burying the organism.

- What can we learn from these fossils?

- They are the record of the history of life.

So they are the only way we can study what life looked like in Earth's past.

Starting with animals that lived in the ocean, like this giant armored fish.

And then through time we see animals starting to live on land, like this early amphibian right here.

It changes to things like dinosaurs.

(thrilling music) - Wow, this definitely doesn't look like any animals I've seen today.

- [Holly] No.

Here we're seeing that transition from dinosaurs and their extinction into animals that lived during the last ice age.

So an extinction is a point in Earth's history where there are no more individuals of a specific animal or plant on earth anymore.

It is completely gone.

There's a variety of different causes of extinctions.

It could be anything from climate change, to volcanic eruptions, or even an asteroid impact like we saw at the end of the age of the dinosaurs.

Geologists agree on five great mass extinctions, the dinosaurs being the the most recent, at about 66 million years ago.

Some people say we may be in the midst of the sixth great mass extinction.

- Really?

- Yes.

There has been a loss of biodiversity, around the world, mostly caused by humans, both inadvertently and due to our actions.

- Now you said biodiversity.

What does that mean?

- So biodiversity is just the variety of plants and animals that we see on earth, all the way from the smallest bacteria, to the plants, to the largest animals like whales.

So we are in our biodiversity exhibit.

- There are bears?

- Yes, there is.

We have bears, we have lions, we have giraffes.

A little bit of everything.

Biodiversity is important because a diverse ecosystem is a healthy ecosystem.

And to have a healthy ecosystem, you need a variety of plants and animals and we rely on healthy ecosystems for everything we need to live.

Food, water, all of our materials.

- Now I've heard that polar bears are endangered.

Is that true?

- Yes, they are.

They have become the symbol for animals that are endangered from climate change and human encroachment on their land.

This is a mastodon and it is an example of something that has gone extinct largely due to the changing climate.

So a mastodon is related to elephants, but they would've lived in a different type of environment, a very cold environment, and they would've been covered with fur.

At the end of the last ice age, mastodons were living in Western New York.

- We could have been neighbors.

So during that ice age, would this mastodon still have had access to a lot of biodiversity - Through span of the species?

Yes.

But then at the end of the ice age, the environment was changing.

Glaciers that had once been, covered the area has started to melt, which affected plants and animals and caused the environment that was here to collapse.

(sad music) - Hi.

- Hi, nice to have you here.

- Nice to meet you.

- Come on in.

Welcome to our geology storage room.

- Thank you.

- A lot of the collection that we have on the table over here comes from a local dig site called the Hiscock site.

While they were digging out there, they were finding mastodon bones.

On a regular basis, we probably have about 5% of our collection on display for the public to see.

We work with our exhibits team really closely to do in-house exhibits, but there are going to be some items that never go on display, if they're in poor condition or they can get damaged even farther.

This is where we take care of them, store them, and treat them.

- So these are all bones from a mastodon, but they're all different.

Where, do you know where they came from on the mastodon?

- Yeah.

So they believe they found over 20 individual mastodons at the dig site, but they don't think they found one whole one.

So we have a lot of teeth like these ones right here.

We have a tusk, a tibia, a vertebra, and that's another vertebra that was most likely stepped on by another mastodon.

- Ouch.

(cheerful music) - What the heck are these?

- These are mastodon tusks.

These are real tusks from the dig site that they uncovered.

We have them wrapped in plaster because they are a little fragile and damaged already.

So this is how we preserve them to take care of them and they'll probably never go on display - Quite large.

- That is a very large one, I believe it does still hold the record for the largest mastodon tusk in New York State.

- That's very cool.

- Of my favorite specimens is the mastodon tooth right here.

This is one single mastodon tooth.

That's one tooth.

- Yes.

- And you can see right here, there was a sample taken out of it.

This was radiocarbon dated to get an age.

This one dates back to 10,430 years old.

- What is, what is carbon dating?

- It's just a way to date some of the specimens we have.

There's still organic material in these bones, they're not fully fossilized, so we can test them.

Some fossils are much older.

We have specimens in our collection that date back to the Devonian age, which is about 380 million years old.

- Wow, that's old.

- That's very old.

- Can we, can we go take a look at?

- Let's go.

- Okay.

These are some of our brachiopods, they're ancient marine invertebrates.

These are just 380 million years old.

- Wow.

Now are these, these are fossils.

- These are full fossils.

No organic material remains in them anymore.

- What is organic material?

- Organic material is some of the remains of the original specimen.

These ones have been fully fossilized, so no organic material remains from it.

It is just the shape that remains from the rock that is fossilized.

Now how, how do you know how old these are?

- Mostly because of their, the age in which we find them in Western New York area.

The Western New York area is mostly known for its Devonian age.

- And these were aquatic?

- Yes.

- You said.

- I find them at the Hamburg Beach all the time.

- How did you get started doing this?

- I actually started as an undergrad doing archeology, and I was interested in doing dig sites, and I did a few local ones around the western New York area.

- [Chrisena] So this is a huge collection.

How do you keep track of all of it?

- We actually have a very good volunteer program and I have some geology volunteers that have been working here for many years.

They come in every Monday and they help me work on this collection.

- So a lot of teamwork.

- A lot of teamwork.

- Let's go say hi.

Okay.

- Hi there.

- Hi.

- You must be Joe.

- I am Joe.

- Nice to meet you.

I'm Chrisena.

- Chrisena, pleasure.

- Yes.

What are you working on here?

- This is a little piece of rock.

A long, long time ago on the planet earth, it's about four and a half billion years.

There weren't any animals, there was just plants, and the plants gave off oxygen as a waste product.

And so the plants lived and they gave off more and more and more oxygen till it got to be so much oxygen in the atmosphere that the iron that was dissolved in the seawater, didn't like to have the oxygen and it settled down as rust at the bottom of the sea.

So all over the world, there's rock that's this old that has these banded layers of iron.

This is called a piece of banded iron formation.

This is from Ontario, north of Lake Ontario.

Now this was a different kind of rock.

So what happens is when we go into the earth, the deeper we get, the hotter it gets and it gets hotter and hotter.

It could get so hot that rock begins to melt, and as the crust of the earth moves, the rock will get squished and we'll have all these structures and sheetlike structures and we call that metamorphosis.

- Joe, what's your favorite thing about working here?

- Oh, I like geology.

I like studying the rocks and the minerals and the fossils and the history of the planet earth.

But even more than that, I like a lot of the people here.

We work with scientists and visitors from the public, so we get everybody from very young to very old, participating and learning about the earth and studying geology.

And we could look at things that we could hold in our hands, like the rocks, and minerals, and fossils, and we could study those too, here in the lab and elsewhere.

And always learning, always growing - [Chrisena] Well, that was a blast, learning through the past.

Hearing about how plants and animals are dependent on one another was fascinating.

And I'm grateful that museums preserve our geologic history, so that we can interact with it today.

What's something you might do to help protect the plants and animals in your neighborhood?

Well, I've got some fossils to dig for and some journaling to do.

Rock on.

(upbeat music) (rocket launcher handle clunking) Phew!

It's a good workout.

(clunking continues) 3, 2, 1 (rocket launching) Oh!

(Chrisena laughing) That's so cool.

(upbeat music)