Fossils will fuel museum's birthday blast

A meteorite, an extinct Irish elk, and the general public's first peek at rare collections of bird skins, snakes in jars, and bugs on pins help drive home what a treasure the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University is, as the nation's oldest natural-history museum celebrates its 200th anniversary.

Many Philadelphians have fond memories of when they visited it as children, or took their own children there to wonder at dinosaur bones and butterflies. It holds a world-renowned collection of 18 million cataloged plants and animals.

Pieces from many of the collections will be on display during its bicentennial, including exhibits representing tens of thousands of extinct species.

The museum holds Thomas Jefferson's collection of about 100 fossils, as well as the plants, birds, and other animals that Lewis and Clark brought back from their cross-country expedition. The original, beautifully drawn folios of John Audubon are in the academy's library.

The academy is also home base for scientists who study global warming in Mongolia, travel to Vietnam to study avian-flu carriers, and dig for fossils as far away as Patagonia, or as close as  New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Each month of the celebration, the academy will have themed programs to show off its various collections, including those featuring the work of female scientists, the environment, birds, mammals, insects, and seashells.

It may be 200 years old, but the academy seems to have figured out how to stay young. By affiliating with Drexel University last fall, the academy has a piece of the future in its arms — students to carry on the work of the academy's leading scientists in ornithology, paleontology, and entomology, to name a few fields.

The academy was founded, in part, to establish America's place in the world scientific community. It has done that very well.