At the end of the exhibition you can stop and enjoy fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) clips by @dradriansmith.bsky.social. I highly encourage you to check out his AntLab channel, I promise this footage of trap-jaw ants will brighten your Friday!

youtube.com/watch?v=H2ok...

Did you know ants communicate through scents? We built an ant "smell station" simulating some of the smells ants create, ranging from a pleasant chocolate odor that trap-jaw ants use to say 'back off" to a rotten egg smell used by African stink ants to call for help.

Thousands of species interact with ants, as predators, prey, or mutualists. Headlining the list are the anteater and aardvark of course. These life-like specimens are on loan from the Yale Peabody Museum.

Ant architecture is on full diplay, with a 20x life size field ant nest crafted by the one and only Sean Murtha and 9 aluminum nest casts from the inventor of the poured aluminum technique himself, Walter Tschinkel. These are works of art!

Learn about ant castes, like minors, supermajors, soldiers and of course honeypot ant repletes, who store food for their nestmates in their own bodies. I think of them like living soda dispensers.

Then it is time for the head-spinning diversity of ants. Some amazing scaled up ant heads here, many thanks to scans shared by Evan Economo's lab. Stunning photos by @alexwild.bsky.social compliment models and specimens here and throughout.

Seriously, lift those panels, they are great! Huge thanks to Kelly McQuade for figuring out how to make a realistic set of scurrying ants to give people that spine-tingling feeling of lifting a rock and watching them swarm.

Next, check out your "share" of ants. Patrick Schultheiss, Sabine Nooten & colleagues calculated there are 2.5 million ants for every person on Earth:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We visualize this w/ a cube (cuboid for my nerds). Plus, lift those panels for animated ants per square ft displays.

For real

No matter how many days pass it seems impossible to believe he is gone. The biggest consolation is that he built a sprawling community of researchers, students, technicians, artists, who are bonded by time spent together on Mark's expeditions, whether to the Gobi Desert or to Malachy's Irish Pub.

I never heard him raise his voice, saw him let a student pay for anything, or felt that he was irritated by the overwhelming deluge of requests for letters of recommendation, manuscript comments or access to specimens.

Yet, Mark really knew how to bring out the best in his students. He trusted us, gave us amazing opportunities, let us find our own ways to answer questions that interested us.

I was fortunate beyond measure to have been one of Mark's students. As an undergraduate, I imagined a graduate advisor would be some type of bearded philosopher with thick glasses. Instead, Mark was a rock star who was portrayed as "The Coolest Man Alive" in the Wall Street Journal.

Mark was the foremost vertebrate paleontologist of the century. He discovered hundreds of spectacular fossils in the field and published hundreds of papers including seminal work on feathered dinosaurs, dinosaur eggs, nests, and growth patterns, theropod phylogeny and so much more.

I love that the dinosaurs in the background are Pachyrhinosaurus - the same genus as the Bruce Museum's friendly greeters at the school group entrance. These guys are always there, rain or shine, to remind me why I come in every morning.

This is a popular version of our technical article in Science earlier this year.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This may have to do with the way great penguins incubate - out in the open, with eggs on their feet. That may have made them tempting targets for Haast's eagle. Smaller penguins in modern NZ nest in burrows and/or come ashore at night to avoid predators.

Art: Simone Giovanardi

We hypothesize predation drove the extinction of New Zealand great penguins and continue to exclude them from warm areas today. Potential predators would have included the giant Haast's eagle, which arrived in the time window when extinction appears to have occurred.