Star of India
The Star of India is one of the most famous gems in the world. Weighing in at 563 carets, it is the largest star sapphire ever found. It was discovered in Sri Lanka. This signature star-like phenomenon is also known as an asterism.
Giant Japanese Spider Crab
Half a billion years in the making, these are some of the most exquisite trilobite fossils that I have ever seen. You can almost imagine that these little animals are still alive and still crawling along some ancient ocean seabed. They hail from the Cambrian Period, when the Earth was still mostly covered with water. They lived for 300 million years, before going extinct. Throughout their evolution, trilobites exhibited most lifestyles expected of modern marine arthropods, including acting as predators, scavengers and filter feeders. Their name, trilobite means three-lobed. Those are not antenna, but rather eye stalks, which may have been used to poke through covering sand. Trilobites had highly advanced eyes for their time. These were compound eyes, similar to that of modern insects.
Anne and Dan at the AMNH
…and put it in your pocket. Well, maybe not with any of these fallen stars. No, not my Anne or Dan, I’m speaking about the rocks around them. That’s Anhighito (behind them), that word is Inuit for the tent, the woman (in front) and the dog (on the right). These three stones all came from Cape York, Greenland. For years and years the Inuits mined these meteorites for iron and made weapons and tools with the ore. Then the 19th-century explorer Robert Perry came along, got one of the Inuit drunk and then got him to show him the meteorite. Perry took the meteorites, kidnaped the Inuit and his father and now they are on display at the American Museum of Natural History for you to see. No, not the Inuit or his father, but they’re still there at the museum or at least their bones are. They just are not on display.
American Bison
Çatalhöyük Neolithic Art
Çatalhöyük is a Neolithic site located in what is now modern Turkey, where families packed their mud-brick houses close together, sharing walls and traipsed over the roofs to climb into their rooms from above. One of the world’s first cities, Çatalhöyük was first founded 9,000 years ago and saw mankind’s transition from a hunting and gathering society to an agricultural one. While neither the oldest nor the largest Neolithic city, Çatalhöyük is a very important site for Neolithic art. The painting shows a hunting scene. Two stags flank a group of ten men. Some of whom are carrying bows. All of the men appear to be wearing highly stylized leopard skins for clothes that seem to emphasis form over function. I can’t decide if this is a fashion statement or just artistic license.