News release About the exhibit About the book Meet the scientists Meet the writer, Carl Zimmer Meet the artists Meet the learning researchers Meet the project director FAQ

News release

When: 9:30 a.m. Sept. 10 open to public Where: NU State Museum (Morrill Hall) 14th and Vine Streets

Explore Evolution permanent exhibit opens Sept. 10 at NU State Museum

Lincoln, Neb., Sept. 7, 2005 -- Using cutting edge research, a new exhibit at the University of Nebraska State Museum gives a modern shine to Charles Darwin's 146-year-old theory on evolution. The permanent exhibit, Explore Evolution, which opens to the public Sept. 10, was developed by a consortium of six partner museums led by the NU State Museum and prominently features the work of two UNL scientists. More

About the exhibit

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Exhibit galleries in six museums throughout the Midwest:

Exhibit Museum of Natural History University of Michigan Exhibit opened January 13, 2006 www.exhibits.lsa.umich.edu	Texas Memorial Museum University of Texas at Austin Exhibit opened October 1, 2007 www.utexas.edu/tmm/
Kansas Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center University of Kansas Exhibit opened November 1, 2005 www.nhm.ku.edu	University of Nebraska State Museum Exhibit opened September 9, 2005 www.museum.unl.edu
The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History University of Oklahoma Exhibit opened August 27, 2005 www.snomnh.ou.edu	Science Museum of Minnesota Exhibit was on display between October 15, 2005 and February 5, 2006 www.smm.org

		Virus and the Whale: Exploring Evolution in Creatures Small and Large Judy Diamond (Editor) with Carl Zimmer, Linda Allison, E. Margaret Evans and Sarah Disbrow	Available at the NSTA Science Store: Virus and the Whale: Exploring Evolution in Creatures Small and Large
Inquiry-based activities for middle-school youth. Grades: 5 - 8 Pages: 215 Product Number: PB196X ISBN: 0873552636 Copyright: 2006 Published by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Press. Contents

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Photo courtesy Anna Himler

Dr. Currie's web page at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Title: Associate Professor of Bacteriology in the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
  
• Education: Ph.D. University of Toronto
  

Cameron Currie studies some of the world’s smallest and most ancient cooperatives—fungus-growing ants and their associates. Currie focuses on the ecology and coevolution of animals and microbes, specifically how microbes shape the biology of higher organisms. Currie has made a major breakthrough in the study of attine ant farms of Central and South America. Mutual dependency between the ants and a fungus they grow as a crop has long been known to science, but Currie has discovered two more participants in this cooperative: a bacterium and a specialized crop pest. His discovery was the first documented case of a four-way symbiosis in nature. The symbiosis dates back more than 50 million years and appears to be less a cooperative association than a coevolutionary arms race. Currie has discovered that the ants have evolved mechanisms for dealing with a potentially devastating crop pest, including special chambers on their body that house and support a type of bacteria that produces an antibiotic against the pest.

Currie’s groundbreaking research earned him a 2001 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Doctoral Prize in Canada. He continued his study of this complex symbiosis as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and then as assistant professor at the University of Kansas. A five-year $2.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation has enabled him to conduct research trips to Argentina, Ecuador, and Panama to bring back samples of ant nests to study in his lab. The NSF-funded project has included collaboration with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.  Through his research into the evolution of antibiotic use by ants, Cameron hopes to shed light on the evolution of resistance in the diseases faced by humans.



Sherilyn C. Fritz


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Photo courtesy Tom Simons, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Dr. Fritz's web page at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Title: George Holmes University Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Education: Ph.D. University of Minnesota

Sherilyn Fritz researches climate change and its impact on environments past and present. She works at the interface of geological, biological, and atmospheric sciences, exploring the complex interactions of all these systems. Much of her work involves taking core samples from lake sediments in search of fossil diatoms (one-celled algae) that have accumulated in the sediment layers over time. Diatoms are very sensitive to lake chemistry and are good barometers of climate change. Fritz reconstructs a lake's environmental and climatic history from the different kinds of diatoms present at different times.

The recent discovery of a new diatom species unique to Yellowstone Lake gave Fritz and Edward Theriot, a diatom expert at the University of Texas at Austin (see bio), an opportunity to investigate the emergence of a new diatom in the fossil record. By taking core samples from the lake, the scientists exposed a continuous record of diatom fossils dating back to the formation of the lake 14,000 years ago, and along with it, a unique record of evolution. The fossil record shows that within the first 4,000 years, the diatoms of Yellowstone Lake gradually changed. Fritz and Theriot hypothesize that the region’s warming climate may have contributed to the emergence of the new species, named Stephanodiscus yellowstonensis after its hometown lake.

Fritz is also engaged in coring studies at Lake Titicaca in Boliva/Peru and in the North American Great Plains.  Her research is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Park Service.



Philip D. Gingerich


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Photo courtesy University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology

Dr. Gingerich's web page at the University of Michigan
Dr. Gingerich's homepage

• Title: Ermine Cowles Case Collegiate Professor of Paleontology, Professor Geological Sciences, and Director of the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
• Education: Ph.D. Yale University

Philip Gingerich’s research focuses on vertebrate paleontology and the evolution of mammals, in particular whales and primates. His extensive fieldwork in Pakistan and Egypt has yielded important early and intermediate forms or “missing links” in the fossil record that help to document the origin and early evolution of whales. Major discoveries include the earliest known whale, Pakicetus, and the archaic whale Rodhocetus, both of which had legs and lived on land.

Gingerich has also carried out extensive research into rates of evolutionary change. He is interested in understanding how the process of evolution, acting from generation to generation, produces micro-evolutionary and macro-evolutionary changes in longer (i.e. historical and geological) scales of time. Other interests include research into the impact of environmental and climatic change on evolution. Ongoing fieldwork with students in Wyoming reveals that a period of rapid, short-lived global warming is linked to the appearance of modern mammals.



Rosemary and Peter Grant


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Photo courtesy Rosemary and Peter Grant


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Photo courtesy Rosemary and Peter Grant

Dr. Rosemary Grant's web page at Princeton University
Dr. Peter Grant's web page at Princeton University

B. Rosemary Grant

• Title: Senior Research Biologist, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University
• Education: Ph.D. Uppsala University, Sweden

Peter R. Grant

• Title: Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology. Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton Unversity
• Education: Ph.D. University of British Columbia, Canada

Rosemary and Peter Grant research the evolutionary impact of climatic and environmental change on populations of finches inhabiting the Galápagos Islands. The Grants began the research in 1973, returning to the Galápagos every year for more than thirty years to take detailed measurements of the finches and to keep track of variations in climate and food sources. One of their goals was to investigate whether natural selection produced evolutionary change quickly enough to be observed and measured. The Grants were able to chart evolutionary changes in finch beaks and bodies not only over the span of 30 years, but sometimes from one breeding season to the next. Their painstaking research is considered to be one of the best studies of speciation ever conducted.

The Grants are interested in a wide variety of questions in evolution, ecology, and behavior. Current goals include a better understanding of how complex communities develop from simple ones, and how macroevolutionary patterns (large evolutionary changes, such as the origin of beaks or wings) arise from microevolutionary processes (small changes, such as beak size and shape).



Henrik Kaessmann


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Photo courtesy Henrik Kaessmann

Dr. Kaessmann's web page at the University of Lausanne

• Title: Associate Professor, Center for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
• Education: Ph.D. University of Leipzig, Germany

Henrik Kaessmann researches the genetic similarities and differences between humans and their closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes. He earned his doctorate in the laboratory of Svante Pääbo at the University of Munich and then at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. In a major study published in 1999, Kaessmann, Svante Paabo, and colleagues compared a segment DNA from humans and great apes to determine which parts were identical and which were unique to each. The comparison confirms previous studies showing that humans are almost genetically identical to chimps and that we shared an ancestor about 5 to 6 million years ago.

Kaessmann undertook postdoctoral training in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, where he worked on the origin of human genes and gene structures. He is currently at the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research questions are the genetic differences that set us apart from other primates and what is genetically unique to humans and their closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, compared to non-hominoid primates.



Kenneth Y. Kaneshiro


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Photo courtesy Robert Chin, University of Hawaii

Dr. Kaneshiro's web page at the Center for Conservation Research and Training

• Title: Director, Center of Conservation Research and Training, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Education: Ph.D. University of Hawaii

Kenneth Kaneshiro researches the dynamics of sexual selection in Hawaiian Drosophila, an astonishingly diverse group of flies found only in the Hawaiian Islands. The 800 or more species of flies in Hawaii may have descended from a single species that blew to the islands from somewhere around the Pacific Basin several million years ago. Kaneshiro hypothesized that sexual selection played a more important role than natural selection in the explosive adaptive radiation of this group, at least in the initial stages of species formation. Results from experiments conducted in Kaneshiro’s laboratory at the University of Hawaii confirm that mating preferences among female flies play a significant role in the formation of new species.

In his position as Director of the Center for Conservation Research and Training, Kaneshiro also investigates the role of sexual selection in populations faced with extinction. A better understanding of the biology of rare and endangered species may help biologists find ways to recover species on the verge of extinction.



Svante Pääbo


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Photo courtesy Svante Pääbo

Dr. Pääbo's web page at the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

• Title: Director, Department of Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
• Education: Ph.D. University of Uppsala, Sweden

Svante Pääbo is a leading authority on the genetic basis of human evolution. In 1999 his laboratory team, including Henrik Kaessmann, worked on a major study of human and chimp DNA.  The results showed that humans and chimps are almost genetically identical and that they shared a common ancestor about 5 to 6 million years ago. Pääbo first studied Egyptology and molecular biology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, where he developed techniques to extract DNA from fossils. Pääbo and colleagues succeeded in extracting DNA from a 40,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil and then compared it with modern human DNA. Paabo’s team built an evolutionary tree based on the differences that had accumulated between the genes of Neandethals and Homo sapiens. Recently, Pääbo has focused on the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees to learn more about how and when the two species diverged.



Edward C. Theriot


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Photo courtesy Marsha Miller

Dr. Theriot's web page at the University of Texas at Austin

• Title: Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor of Molecular Evolution in the Section of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Director of the Texas Memorial Museum       
• Education: Ph.D. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

Edward Theriot’s research focuses on the evolution of diatoms (one-celled algae), a major component of marine and freshwater ecosystems. Theriot was the principal investigator on the Yellowstone Evolution Project, a study that explored the evolution of a diatom species in Yellowstone Lake after the Ice Age. Joining Theriot on the project was Sherilyn Fritz, a geologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From core samples taken from the lake bottom, the scientists exposed a continuous record of diatom fossils dating back to the formation of the lake 14,000 years ago. The fossil record shows that within the first 4,000 years of the lake’s history, the diatoms of Yellowstone Lake gradually evolved into a new species. Theriot and Fritz hypothesize that the region’s warming climate may have contributed to the emergence of the new species, named Stephanodiscus yellowstonensis (after its hometown lake).

Theriot came to the University of Texas from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, were he was Vice President of Biodiversity and Evolution, as well as curator of the diatom herbarium. In his current position as professor of molecular evolution, Theriot directs a DNA lab and algal culturing facilities and maintains a diatom collection. As director of the Texas Memorial Museum, he is interested in building the museum’s collection of rare and important specimens and enhancing the general public’s understanding of biodivesity.



Charles Wood


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Photo courtesy David Fitzgibbon, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Dr. Wood's web page at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Title: Lewis Lehr/3M University Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Director, Nebraska Center for Virology
• Education: Ph.D. Columbia University

John Klausmeyer, Exhibit Preparator/Artist Exhibit Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan This image is available in higher resolution form for accredited media to illustrate stories on Explore Evolution only. Please contact to receive this file.

Cliff Hollestelle www.askart.com/artist/H/cliff_hollestelle.asp?ID=106052

Ron Pike, Exhibit Design Specialist University of Nebraska State Museum