Cradled in a bed of felt and fiberglass in the basement of Carnegie Museum of Natural History is the fossilized jawbone of the first thing in history to ever be called Tyrannosaurus rex.

The 66-million-year-old carnivore’s jawbone still bears the serrated, banana-sized teeth that were used to rip through the flesh of its prey.

When this fossil was discovered in Montana in 1902, it was a revelation. What is today one of the most recognizable dinosaurs was then completely unknown. The find was but one piece of the puzzle that would become the T. rex holotype, or the name-bearing specimen upon which the entire species is based.

The museum purchased the fossilized T. rex skeleton from the American Museum of Natural History in 1941, and it continues to thrill visitors in Pittsburgh as part of the Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition. But the head on display is a reproduction. The real fossil skull bones are too heavy, fragile, and scientifically significant to be on public view.

Instead, they reside in one of two underground rooms referred to by museum staff as the “Big Bone Room” and the “Little Bone Room,” where the bulk of the museum’s vertebrate paleontology collection is kept and cared for.

The collection’s size, breadth, and scientific significance distinguish it as one of the finest in the world, containing specimens—including the T. rex holotype—that continue to shape humanity’s understanding of the history of life on Earth.

“These rooms hold one of the world’s great vertebrate paleontology collections,” says Matt Lamanna, the museum’s Mary R. Dawson Curator  of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Into the Bone Zone

Vertebrate paleontology is the study of prehistoric animals with backbones, and their fossils are carefully stored in nearly every square inch of the “bone rooms.”

The Big Bone Room (which, like its smaller counterpart, is named for the size of the space, not the size of its specimens) is larger than a basketball court, with low, whitewashed ceilings and dozens of shelves holding fossils, some still wrapped in protective materials.

Photo: John Schisler

The Little Bone Room is a short jaunt down a hallway, where the polished concrete floors are still veined with tracks that were once used to move heavy specimens via rail cart into the museum’s basement over a century ago.

Like the Big Bone Room, the space boasts rows of movable shelves and drawers that date back to the early 20th century. All told, the collection contains about 120,000 specimens, approximately 500 of which are holotypes. They range in age from 450 million years old to 500 years old and come from every continent, including Antarctica.

Since Andrew Carnegie started it in the 1890s, the collection has produced groundbreaking discoveries. This includes the first 50-million-year-old mammals ever found in the Arctic—a find made in the 1970s by paleontology pioneer and former head of the museum’s vertebrate paleontology program Mary Dawson. It also boasts the holotype skeleton of Anzu wyliei, a 7-foot-tall feathered dinosaur that received its name from Lamanna and three colleagues in 2014.

The contents of the bone rooms draw researchers from around the world. The museum’s fossils of the gigantic, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs known as sauropods are among the most scientifically important on the planet.

“More information about sauropods has been derived from our collection than maybe any other,” says Lamanna.

“The Carnegie paleontology collections—you just can’t beat them,” adds paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Davis. “Especially for large dinosaurs.”

The bone rooms are Davis’ domain. She’s the museum’s collection manager of paleobiology, a position she took in April 2024 following the retirement of longtime collection manager Amy Henrici.

Davis cares for a staggeringly diverse assemblage of fossils, most of which are not on display.

Some are smaller than the head of a pin. That includes the holotype specimen—a tooth—of the 56-million-year-old Teilhardina magnoliana, one of the geologically oldest primates ever discovered in North America. In life, the tree-dwelling, marmoset-like creature weighed less than an ounce. Dental fossils are often the only surviving evidence that these tiny animals existed.

Other specimens are comparatively huge. One is the fossilized skeleton of a mastodon, an elephant-like animal that roamed North America until about 12,000 years ago. Even in pieces, the specimen is stunning, with a church-bell-sized skull.

Photo: John Schisler

Believed to be among the largest mastodon skeletons ever found, it was one of Andrew Carnegie’s first acquisitions for the museum and was on display until 2013, when the museum removed it to restore some of its bones. That conservation work was completed last year, and the mastodon now rests where Davis can keep an eye on it until it is ready for exhibition again. Lamanna hopes that day will come soon, especially after the museum’s recent $25 million dollar gift from longtime patrons Dan and Carole Kamin, part of which will be used to renovate the dinosaur exhibition and neighboring galleries.

Davis’ job is to ensure that each fossil is kept in the best shape possible—this includes checking that they are correctly identified, recorded in the museum’s database, and safely stored. Davis also helps other scientists use the collection, from fielding data requests to overseeing the use of a forklift to access large specimens.

Some of those large fossils are on a shelf near the mastodon. They are the manhole-cover-sized vertebrae of a dinosaur species whose initial discovery helped put Carnegie Museum of Natural History on the map: Diplodocus carnegii.

The first fossils of this sauropod were unearthed in an 1899 expedition funded by Andrew Carnegie. Later nicknamed “Dippy,” the famous dinosaur spawned casts that have been distributed around the world, and the original is still on display in the museum.

The Diplodocus fossils kept in the Big Bone Room, however, mostly don’t belong to that first find. Instead, they’re part of a second Diplodocus that was discovered in the same quarry the following year and used to fill in some missing parts of the specimen on display. That doesn’t mean they are any less significant.

“You could absolutely make a case that science has learned more from the second specimen of Diplodocus carnegii than it has from the first,” says Lamanna. That’s why a collection like this is so vital.

“It’s super important to have real fossils on display, but there’s a trade-off,” the museum’s longtime paleontologist continues. “Doing so tends to decrease access to the fossil for research. When we have specimens down in the collection, they can be studied, measured, photographed, and 3D-scanned from all angles. And that’s often how knowledge of paleontology advances.”

Dinosaur Color Theory

A drive for discovery is what brought Davis to the museum.

The Arizona native grew up the child of two scientists—an engineer and a pharmacist. She was drawn to paleontology as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, where she pursued research projects on dinosaur appearance and color chemistry that she later built upon for her PhD thesis at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The research I did was into this pigment system called carotenoids, which are involved in the expression of pink, red, yellow, and orange, among other colors,” says Davis. “They are very tricky because they are unlikely to fossilize. What we find in the fossil record are melanin-based colors, which are black, brown, and gray.”

Photo: John Schisler

Davis turned to birds—descendants of dinosaurs—to examine how color may have been expressed in prehistory. Alongside her graduate adviser at UT Austin, Julia Clarke, Davis evaluated colors of more than 4,000 living bird species, as well as dinosaurs’ distant relatives, crocodiles and turtles, to determine the likelihood of carotenoid colors appearing in their extinct cousins.

She found that it’s possible that dinosaurs sported yellow, orange, or red skin features.

Lamanna was eager to learn more about Davis’ research after Clarke introduced the two of them. They worked together on Antarctic fossils, and Lamanna was impressed by her intelligence and enthusiasm.  

When the collection manager position opened, Lamanna thought of Davis right away. He figured the museum’s ornithological and paleontological collections would be an ideal professional home for her.

She agreed.

“This work is super rewarding,” says Davis. “I love being surrounded by fossils all day, and then also getting to do my own research.”

In With the Old and New

The collection manager job is a big one, and not just because of the size of its specimens. Davis is a steward to over a century of paleontological work, evidenced by the original tea-colored, cursive-written field notes still associated with many fossils.

Some notes are from a dig in Utah that helped build the foundation of the collection.

That excavation, begun in 1909, was led by Carnegie Museum paleontologist Earl Douglass. He was unearthing what would turn out to be the fossilized skeleton of a giant Apatosaurus when his team came upon the bones of another dinosaur, then another, and another.

Over 14 years, they collected 350 tons of prehistoric bones from that single locality, which today is known as Carnegie Quarry at Dinosaur National Monument.

“Much of what was there ended up here,” Lamanna says. “By most estimations, it’s the greatest single locality of Jurassic-age dinosaurs that’s ever been discovered anywhere in the world. It rocketed our museum into the stratosphere.”

The vertebrate paleontology collection continued to grow in size and scientific significance over the decades. More fossils came from digs around the world, including those in Egypt and Antarctica led by Lamanna.

Despite the allure of fresh-from-the-dirt discoveries, the oldest specimens can still yield great things.

Lamanna recalls a find made in the mid-1980s by Davis’ predecessor, Henrici. She was a preparator at the time, working on a hunk of rock from Dinosaur National Monument. It wasn’t believed to contain anything significant. But as Henrici chipped away the rock, she discovered one of the only lower jawbones of a Stegosaurus ever found.

“That’s why we hang on to this stuff,” says Lamanna. “New eyes come along, new technologies come along, new viewpoints and expertise. You learn new things from old stuff.”

Even a closer look at a well-known specimen can yield exciting findings.

Below the terrifying teeth of the T. rex holotype jaw are two or three gouges on its chin.

“We think this animal was nipped by another
T. rex at some point in his or her life,” says Lamanna. He points out how the surrounding bone shows signs of healing, indicating that the Cretaceous-era conflict occurred long before the dinosaur’s death.

“What’s awesome to me is that these show us evidence of two different animals and an interaction between them,” he continues. “It’s a literal moment  in time, captured for us to learn from 66 million
years later.”

Through that framing, the museum’s bone rooms are a trove of prehistoric stories, some told already, some still waiting to be discovered.

“This place is a library of the history of life on Earth,” says Davis. “The specimens are incredible on their own, but so are the people that built this collection. It’s amazing to be part of that history now, and to keep taking care of it for generations to come.”

The post What Lies Beneath appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Middle school students aren’t known for their long attention spans. But on a gray day in late March, a whirring laser cutter at Carnegie Science Center is holding a group of teens rapt.

 The students from Pittsburgh Schiller STEAM Academy hover over the machine, which is about the size of an office copier, and watch their invention come to life.

Soon, they pull out custom-designed pieces for assembling an airplane glider—their first project inside Carnegie Science Center’s newly renovated and relocated BNY Fab Lab.

After spending the first decade of its existence in a separate building that also housed Highmark SportsWorks®, the Science Center’s digital fabrication laboratory has moved into a former educational theater space on the main building’s third floor.

The new Fab Lab is more than just a fancy makerspace. Staffed by knowledgeable educators who are available to guide anyone who stops in, it’s an incubator for invention. In the center of the room are a dozen computer terminals where anyone can start creating their designs—for everything from jewelry to action figures and drones. Lining the walls are the machines that will turn visitors’ wildest imaginings into reality: laser cutters, vinyl cutters, sticker makers, equipment for soldering and circuitry, and more than a dozen 3D printers housed in a room around the size of a spacious high school classroom.

Science Center leaders hope this move into the main facility will translate to even more visitors—from school groups to teens to senior citizens—stopping in to design and make stuff.

“Part of finding the right path for one’s future is feeling successful at it and feeling like you could do it,” says Jason Brown, Henry Buhl, Jr., Director of Carnegie Science Center, who helped create the Science Center’s original Fab Lab a decade ago. “What the Fab Lab provides is a judgment-free zone where people can experiment and iterate and see what they like, see what they’re good at.”

Visibility Boost

When the Fab Lab opened in 2015, the Science Center intended to make its high-tech tools like 3D printers accessible to everyone.

“This cutting-edge technology was out there, but very few people had access to it,” explains Brown. “We wanted to provide the opportunity to connect people to it, especially kids, so that as the technology grew, they could imagine themselves growing with it.”

Photo: Becky Thurner

At the time, the SportsWorks building seemed like the best location for an experimental concept like the Fab Lab. But as enthusiasm for it grew, Science Center leaders felt it needed a more visible location.

The new location on the third floor is also almost twice as large as its previous digs. The old location and Mobile Fab Labs—which transport the Fab Lab concept to schools, libraries, community centers, and more using two vans—saw thousands of visitors each year, Brown says. But he expects a lot more people to visit the new space.

“We’re going to have many more passersby that I think will hopefully, for lack of a better term, do the impulse buy and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to see what’s in there and go in and try something out,’” Brown says. “Now, literally 500,000 visitors a year will walk right by the door.”

Brown notes that the bulk of the programming in the new space will be defined as “FLASH” workshops—which stands for Fab Lab Art and Science Hangout—with STEM-themed walk-in activities that last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes and can accommodate up to 30 people.

“It’s going to be much more open and experimental than a set workshop,” Brown explains.

If visitors like the experience, they can buy tickets for more time-intensive workshops or attend certification classes to learn more. The new space will be open during regular Science Center hours and for evening events, such as teen nights and 21+ nights.

And with the move comes a few new additions: a larger laser cutter, more 3D printers, handheld CNC routers, and a sticker printer. They join a roster of existing tech, including computers with design software and even robotics equipment.

Designed for Flexibility

Despite constant advancements in technology, the Fab Lab’s technology still manages to sound straight out of a sci-fi book.

People may be familiar with a 3D printer that layers material upward to create an object, but the new Fab Lab also has a resin printer, a relatively new innovation that shoots lasers into a vat of liquid to create high-definition objects.

“The science is just baked into all of it,” says Jon Doctorick, Science Center director of STEM outreach. “Come on in and try the tech that you’ve only seen on YouTube or whatever. Come and try it and see how it works.”

When Brown and Doctorick worked to create the original Fab Lab, the team innovated to make it fit the Science Center’s goal of being open and accessible to all.

“We had found a really unique path to digital fabrication in that we applied the Science Center model to it, that we made it accessible to everyone, including second, third, fourth graders and, apparently, no one had really done that before,” Doctorick says.

Photo: Becky Thurner

The model worked so well that Doctorick and his team have helped set up Fab Labs elsewhere, including three Mobile Fab Labs at Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, a permanent one at Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a Mobile Fab Lab at the Science Spectrum museum in Texas.

“We roll it out to schools, community centers, other places, and take everything off, set it up in a community space, and then run hands-on activities with whomever is around,” Brown says. “Whether they feel proficient at it or not, they can go and have a really good experience, and then hopefully get their feet wet.”

Relying on a decade of Fab Lab experience, the Science Center designed a space that can change with the times. The new Fab Lab is completely modular, with easily rearrangeable furniture and more electrical outlets than currently needed, allowing them to reconfigure and accommodate technology that may not even exist yet, Doctorick says.

“Some exhibits, when they open that day, they’re baked in that way—any changes can be somewhat difficult,” Doctorick says. “Whereas with the Fab Lab, the very purpose of that space is to change over time. The Fab Lab as it is today is not like the Fab Lab as it was 10 years ago.”

And their knowledge in operating the Fab Lab will only grow with the new space. The open programming and increased foot traffic mean more people will come to the Fab Lab and experiment with the technology.

“It’s my hypothesis that great ideas from the community are going to emerge from this,” Doctorick predicts.

It’s a space designed for the kind of collaboration that the Schiller students naturally initiated during their visit.

Groups of kids leaned over one another’s computer terminals, peeking at designs and occasionally helping by pointing out a flaw in the shape of a wing or asymmetry that threatened the glider’s ability to fly.

The computers are closely lined in rows, making it easy for the kids to collaborate, and the staff encourage discussion by asking visitors questions during workshops. It’s an environment designed to attract everyone from elementary-age kids to seniors.

Photo: Becky Thurner

“The team there is so supportive of people, and they really just want to get them to try things out,” Brown says. “People walk out of there feeling successful, and they walk out of there feeling like they did something fun and new and different.”

That feeling of success could spark the next generation of innovators. The Fab Lab runs the Mentors in the Making program that pairs teens with professionals in STEM fields, who then learn to use the equipment alongside them in weekly sessions over the course of five months.

“We saw the need to provide students with an adult STEM mentor and give them the opportunity to do digital fabrication and help better their community,” Doctorick notes.

As part of the program, the cohort identifies problems in society and then designs machines or devices that address them. Doctorick says one creative young student interested in the water quality of the Ohio River designed an encasing for a device to conduct water quality readings.

It provides them with experience using new-age technology, a place to develop critical thinking, and a mentor who can help them find a place in the STEM field.

Doctorick says one reluctant student in the Mentors in the Making program went on to volunteer at the Fab Lab, then work as a staffer for the Fab Lab’s summer camp program, and eventually pursue computer science in college.

It’s an experience the Science Center hopes to give any and all who wander inside its new digs.

As Doctorick notes, “I want it to be a resource for patrons who are coming in for the first time, and experiencing the world of digital fabrication that they’ve only maybe in passing heard about.”

The post Moving Into the Future appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Photo: Joshua Franzos

Lisa Haney was in the seventh grade when her fascination with ancient Egypt began. She had a world history teacher who made it come alive through creative assignments, including one in which they mummified Cornish hens from the grocery store. Haney even created a shoebox diorama of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb. “One of the main reasons I wanted to work in a museum is to be able to touch all the things that are in the museum,” says Haney. Now, Haney is living her childhood dream as the Egyptologist and curator of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s upcoming Egypt on the Nile exhibition. Since joining the museum in 2020, Haney has led a multiphase reimagining of the museum’s Egypt gallery that includes conservation of the 4,000-year-old Dahshur boat and ongoing work that visitors can view in the temporary exhibition The Stories We Keep: Conserving Objects From Ancient Egypt. Eventually, the Dahshur boat will become the centerpiece of Egypt on the Nile when it opens, anticipated late next year. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Haney earned her doctorate in Egyptian art and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, and held positions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She says it’s her calling to share her expertise on ancient Egypt and be a responsible steward of material in the museum’s care. “Science is always changing and evolving,” she says. “The more we learn, the more it changes how we think about and understand ourselves and the past.”  

Q: Why is now a good time to update the Egypt gallery?

A: Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt had been open for over 30 years and, in that time, we have learned so much more about ancient Egypt. For example, we discovered that Senwosret III, the owner of the Dahshur boat, had a second funerary complex located in Abydos that we did not even know about when Walton opened. There are so many new discoveries and exciting stories we want to share. This also gives us the opportunity to present ancient Egypt from new perspectives that speak to the inseparable connection between nature and culture, and are more aligned with our commitments and goals as a natural history museum.

Q: Why is it important to continue conservation on the Dahshur boat, and what new revelations has that work yielded?

A: Archaeological wood is very fragile and does not usually survive well. The fact that we have such a large-scale wooden object in our care is something that is really special. We have learned a lot about how past conservation work affected the boat, which helped with planning its current treatment. We also know from past rounds of multiband imaging undertaken in 2017, as well as some of the new photography, that the boat was once fully painted.

Q: The visible lab that allows visitors to chat with working conservators is a unique part of The Stories We Keep. What has the experience been like for the conservators?

A: Every day from 11:30 to noon and 2:00 to 2:30, you can visit the conservation lab and speak directly to a member of the conservation team. They genuinely enjoy being able to share their work, and people always have lots of questions. The ability to have a direct, one-on-one experience like this is really special. It makes people feel like they are a part of what is happening at the museum and showcases the range of different skills conservators need.

Q: How is the planning going for Egypt on the Nile?

A: I’m the content expert for the exhibition and part of a larger team that has been working very diligently to create the best possible experience for our visitors. Right now we are designing the final floor plan and case layouts, looking at graphics, and laying out all the really exciting and engaging interactives that will be part of the exhibition.

Q: Like many other museums, the Museum of Natural History has decided to no longer display human remains, including mummified individuals. What do you want visitors to understand about that change?

A: We are looking to be at the forefront of best practices regarding the stewardship of the individuals in our care. For ancient Egypt, specifically, their tombs, texts, and material culture tell us a lot about what they hoped would happen to them after they died and how they wanted people to engage with them. That has influenced our decision-making and policy creation.

Q: To visitors, ancient Egypt may seem quite distant from Pittsburgh. How can your work create a connection?

A: As a city on the rivers, I think Pittsburgh has a really clear connection to ancient Egypt. River life is part of its cultural identity. We hope to connect with our audiences through that lens to help them see that life in ancient Egypt was rooted in the Nile River and the surrounding landscapes. It’s not that different from our own local culture and life here in Pittsburgh.

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Mrs. Kennedy stared at the ground. Her pink Chanel suit was stained with the blood of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, who’d been assassinated hours earlier. Silently, she stood aboard Air Force One and watched as Lyndon B. Johnson placed his left hand on her husband’s Catholic prayer book. He raised his right hand in the air and took the oath of office. The inauguration was over in half a minute. 

To open a newspaper and see Jackie Kennedy in that fragile state was shocking to Americans who were drawn to her elegance and charisma. Andy Warhol was among those struck by the images. 

“Warhol likely saw this icon of glamour and was drawn to her stoicism and sadness,” says Heather White, director of learning at The Warhol. “Kennedy was the youngest president we’ve ever had, and his wife was introducing new styles and fashions. … Everyone was obsessed.”

A year later, Warhol released his portrait series, Jackie, with more than  300 screenprints created from magazine and newspaper coverage of that fateful day in Dallas. Guests can view Warhol’s isolation of Jackie’s grief in the six prints currently on display at The Andy Warhol Museum. The image shown here is the only one of these prints that doesn’t reveal her entire face. Instead, she looks down at the ground, her hair shielding her from the camera. 

“People were impressed with the way she carried herself, which was focused on by the media,” says White. “The White House began to be referred to as ‘Camelot’— the Kennedys were almost royalty.”  In the selected print, however, Warhol grants Jackie a moment of refuge. Here, she is not an untouchable fashion icon or on the front page of  any newspaper; she is allowed to be vulnerable. 

Within each print, Warhol inked the widow in blue, gold, or white. White explains that these colors are similar to the palette of St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church—the church that Warhol was raised in—likening Jackie to a saint. Even decades after Jackie was unveiled, Warhol remained captivated by her radiance. In his Exposures publication from 1980, he wrote, “As we walked through the galleries every person recognized Jackie. They didn’t come too close. They stopped for a minute, looked, and whispered. You could hear her name in the air: ‘Jackie. Jackie.’ … Being with her is like walking with a saint.”

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As this past school year approached, Brad Adams was chatting with his daughter, a high school junior, about the upcoming Pittsburgh Regional Science & Engineering Fair.

“She started doing the Science Fair in the ninth grade and said, ‘I wish there was this opportunity in the sixth or seventh grade,’” recalls Adams, who teaches at Indiana Area Junior High School alongside his wife, Lisa. “That’s a conversation at home that got us involved in research. What about our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders?”

Previously, due to financial and logistic constraints, Indiana’s middle school had not been among the dozens throughout western Pennsylvania and Maryland to send kids to the Science Fair, a Pittsburgh tradition that dates back to 1940.

But Brad Adams’ conversation with his daughter would turn out to be well timed. 

Shortly thereafter, he discovered an opportunity to get his own middle school students involved in the Science Fair, hosted by Carnegie Science Center in early April.

Thanks to grants via the Science Center’s Lucchino Science Inspiration Fund, Adams was able to bring 23 first-time students to the North Shore, where they presented projects about all things science at the regional science competition.

Featuring 230 judges and 65 volunteers, the 86th annual iteration of the event attracted 476 students from 75 middle and high schools.

Increasing access to Science Center events and resources is the objective of the Science Inspiration Fund, which was established six years ago and offers grants to middle schoolers.

“We’re trying to get students to participate who wouldn’t otherwise participate,” says Steve Kovac, associate museum director for service & engagement at the Science Center. “The kids that we’re trying to reach are ones that maybe don’t have a mentor or role model or someone to show them that, ‘Hey, this is something you can do.’ We’re trying to even the playing field between where they fall in terms of ZIP code and what kind of access they have.” 

While Adams had been interested in getting his students to the Science Fair, the commitment and coordination of doing so seemed daunting.

That’s where the Science Inspiration Fund came in, providing teachers with stipends and workshops while reimbursing students for the material costs of their research projects. 

“It took a lot of the anxiety away,” Adams says. “How do you get started? How do you get the kids to dip into an actual subject that they’re interested in?”

Brady, a sixth grader from Indiana Area School District, was one of the students participating in the Science Fair for the first time.

Inspired by a family member who deals with acid reflux, Brady’s project examined the acidity of various fruits—including lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruit—in order to better encourage their dietary decisions. (Of note: Eat more grapefruit and oranges, fewer lemons and limes.)

“I really liked it because it’s about science and showing your mind to people, showing what you know,” Brady says of his first experience. “I really love chemistry, first of all, and some people have acid reflux problems, so they should know this information.”

“There are some incredibly bright students out there, and that’s the great thing about the Science Fair—it taps their potential in a way that doesn’t get tapped by writing down notes, reading them, taking a test, or taking the SAT.”

Jason Brown, Henry Buhl, Jr., Director of the Science Center

Indiana Area Senior High School also sent students, one of whom went on to be selected for an all-expenses-paid trip to the prestigious International Science & Engineering Fair in May for her project about integrating prosthetic materials with the human body. They joined students from other schools around the region who explored a variety of subjects, such as the culinary arts (the best way to bake a cheesecake) and the future of robotics in medicine (how to improve recovery times from surgery), as well as botany (which fruits grow best in Pittsburgh). 

Alegria, an eighth grader at St. Kilian Parish School in Cranberry, focused her project on the impact of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook on child learning development based on her mom’s belief that nothing good comes from kids having access to social media.

“My mom was like, ‘You’re going to hurt your brain. You’re not going to retain information as well,’” Alegria says. “So, I was like, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong!’” 

After her Science Fair project, Alegria will enter the next debate with her mom about the perils of kids’ social media consumption equipped with new insights: Her experiment showed that being distracted by social media had less of an impact on puzzle completion times among her tween and teenage subjects than it did people in their 20s. 

Others won cash prizes, recognition from judges, and college scholarships. But for all attendees, the Science Fair was a chance to explore their curiosity and dig deep into the topics and issues that most interested them.

“There are some incredibly bright students out there, and that’s the great thing about the Science Fair—it taps their potential in a way that doesn’t get tapped by writing down notes, reading them, taking a test, or taking the SAT,” says Jason Brown, Henry Buhl, Jr., Director of the Science Center. 

“This is a totally different way of tapping into that world of brilliance. Our goal is to have a science fair that represents everyone—all of the districts from around the region.”

The post Inspiring More Kids appeared first on Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh.

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the December 1940 issue of Carnegie magazine about three dinosaurs—Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, and Dryosaurus—that had been recently put on display. All three were discovered during a museum field expedition to Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah and can still be seen in the museum’s Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition.

Of the many kinds of dinosaurs found, the oddest of the lot is the Stegosaurus, or armored dinosaur, which is twenty-one feet long, stands nine and one-half feet at its highest point, and must have had at least the robust weight of the largest of living elephants. Unlike the Camptosaurus and Dryosaurus, it was a quadruped; and although the massive front limbs were short, it walked on all four feet. The hind limbs were long, giving the vertebrae of the back a steep slope toward the front. This characteristic, with the backward sloping tail, gave the animal its sharply arched vertebral column. The front parts of the jaws of the Stegosaurus were toothless, and what small teeth it did have in the back of its mouth could not be seen from the outside at all.

The most conspicuous peculiarity of this bizarre and fantastic animal, however, is the structure of large bony plates rising massively along the spinal column and terminating in large bristling spines or spikes more than two feet long near the end of the tail. This dermal armor is arranged in two alternating rows projecting upward and slightly outward. On the sides of the plates are well-developed blood-vessel impressions indicating that they were covered with closely fitting skin. In the region of the throat, at least, there were closely packed, small, rounded ossicles protecting that part of the body.

Another very unusual characteristic of the Stegosaurus was its central nervous system. The brain was very small; in fact, the smallest ever known relative to the size of the animal. Passing backward along the neural canal to the sacrum, one finds an enlargement many times that of the brain cavity: probably a coordinating center for the control of the massive hind parts of the body. As Bert Leston Taylor says in The Dinosaur:

Behold the mighty dinosaur, 

Famous in prehistoric lore, 

Not only for his weight and strength 

But for his intellectual length. 

You will observe by these remains 

The creature had two sets of brains 

One in his head (the usual place)

The other at his spinal base. 

Thus he could reason a priori 

As well as a posteriori. 

No problem bothered him a bit. 

He made both head and tail to it.

So wise he was, so wise and solemn, 

Each thought filled just a spinal column,

If one brain found the pressure strong 

It passed a few ideas along;

If something slipped his forward mind 

‘Twas rescued by the one behind;

And if in error he was caught 

He had a saving afterthought.

As he thought twice before he spoke 

He had no judgments to revoke;

For he could think without congestion, 

Upon both sides of every question

Oh, gaze upon this model beast 

Defunct ten million years at least.

Read the full article. 

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In many ways, it looks like your typical prom story: mulling over an outfit to fit the theme, messing up makeup right before the dance begins, equal parts anxiety and excitement over how the night goes.

But when 16-year-old Ava is shopping for her prom dress, it carries a special weight. It’ll be her first time wearing a dress since coming out as transgender.

Ava’s story, and those of other attendees at The Andy Warhol Museum’s LGBTQ+ Youth Prom last year, are the subject of (pride/prom), a feature-length documentary from the museum’s boutique production studio, The Warhol Creative.

The 2024 prom was the event’s 10th anniversary, and the theme—Welcome to the Queernival—gave the team at The Warhol Creative an opportunity to explore the emotional depth of the queer experience: joy, hardship, and all the gray areas in between.

Ava accidentally came out to her mother, Chrissy, in a message intended for someone else. When Chrissy found out, she hugged Ava.

But the film doesn’t shy away from the messy parts: In a tearful interview, Chrissy admits she struggles to use she/her pronouns for Ava, often settling on they/them or occasionally misgendering her.

“I want to be that safe place for my kid,” she says in the film. “As a parent, that’s what you should be. Your kids should always be able to come to you as who they are, and you just accept them.”

News clips about anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and sentiments make up a small part of the film’s narrative, but the challenges the young people face is only one part of their experience.

New York-based director Sam McCoy let the subjects of the film guide it, and the documentary is imbued with giddy excitement. In one scene, Vlad, a 16-year-old transgender boy, draws on a villainous curled mustache for the prom. In another, Chrissy refuses to stop saying “body-ody-ody” when discussing the fit of dresses on her daughter, much to Ava’s dismay.

“It was all about capturing them and their essence and them as human beings,” says McCoy, who uses they/them pronouns. “It really was documentation and making sure that they were being captured authentically.”

During a private screening in March, the audience was rarely quiet, sharing laughs as Ava and her mom bantered while dress shopping and ooo’ing and aww’ing as the kids tried on outfits. When the credits rolled, a chorus of cheers and whistles carried through the theater.

“It was all about capturing them and their essence and them as human beings. It really was documentation and making sure that they were being captured authentically.”

Sam McCoy, Director of (pride/prom)

The team at The Warhol Creative turned the film around in just a few months after the prom in June 2024, bolstered by a capable team of The Warhol Academy filmmaking and postproduction fellows in The Pop District office next door to the museum.

A sizzle—or short promotional video—for (pride/prom) produced in 2023 even attracted the eye of one of Pittsburgh’s most established queer figures, actor and singer Billy Porter, and The Brutalist producer D.J. Gugenheim, both of whom became executive producers.

The project gave fellows—and former fellows turned Warhol Creative hires like Aaliyah Lewis and Ezra Jones—their first film credits. From the sizzle  to the final cut, upwards of 30 fellows worked on the film.

“For most of us, this is our first feature-length film credit,” says Jones, assistant editor and junior producer. “We all have IMDb pages now, whether it be editor or producer—that’s an awesome thing to have that you can show people and say, ‘Hey, yeah, this is what I’ve done.’”

There will be a public screening of the film at The Warhol on June 20. And while there are no plans for a film at this year’s prom, that won’t stop Vlad from planning an elaborate outfit for the cryptid-themed dance.

At a panel after the screening, Vlad says the film has a simple but important message: “community, community, community.”

“As we have this communication with each other and this love for each other and this support for each other,” Vlad says, “we will continue to survive, and not only to survive, but to flourish.”

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A New CFO for Carnegie Museums

“I’ve been visiting the museums all my life, and I still feel the awe that the four Carnegie Museums inspire on every visit,” says Beth Wright, the new Vice President, Treasurer, and Chief Financial Officer for Carnegie Museums. “I can now look forward to being a part of bringing the joy of the museums to future generations.” Wright joined Carnegie Museums in April after most recently serving as director of finance and operations for Chartiers Valley School District. She has also served in senior leadership roles at Propel Schools—a regional network of eight public charter schools—and the accounting firm R.D. Hoag & Associates.

One of the Nation’s Best Art Museums  

Readers of USA Today have chosen The Andy Warhol Museum as one of their favorite art museums in America. The Warhol came in at No. 10 on USA Today’s annual Readers’ Choice Awards for 2025, with the newspaper noting the museum’s expansiveness—“the world’s largest collection of Warhol art and archives” spread across eight floors.

 “Making some of these small changes in what we call a particular plant can change how people think about that plant and how people think about the problem.” 

– Mason Heberling, associate curator in the Section of Botany at the Museum of Natural History, speaking about invasive species and the museum’s current Uprooted exhibition to The New York Times

CMU Student Artists Show Their Work at The Warhol    

The Andy Warhol Museum for the first time hosted an exhibition of art by students from Carnegie Mellon University, its namesake’s alma mater. This spring, the museum co-presented Holding Still, Holding On with the university’s School of Art MFA program, which featured new works by the Class of 2025—Frankmarlin, Izsys Archer, Tingting Cheng, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, and Max Tristan Watkins. “This is an amazing collaboration with The Warhol Museum for the third-year thesis exhibition. I’m incredibly proud of everybody,” said Kattie Hubbard, director of the MFA program, in a TribLive story.

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Who:
Ray and Joneen Betler 

What They support: 
Carnegie Science Center

Why it matters:
“I see the opportunity to expose young people much, much earlier than I had the opportunity to be exposed to science and technology and engineering.”  –Ray Betler

 A career in engineering seemed to always be right there for Ray Betler; he just needed to find a bridge to it.

His stepfather encouraged him to enter the field, which was thriving in the 1960s and ‘70s at  Pittsburgh companies like Westinghouse Electric. But, as a kid from a working-class community in South Park, there were precious few opportunities  to gain a toehold.

“I never had a chance to do internships and get exposure,” he says. “That’s why I have this affinity and commitment to young people and science and engineering.”

Ray is now retired after a remarkable career at Westinghouse, where he became the company’s youngest-ever president and chief executive officer. He and his wife, Joneen—a couple since they were teenagers—want to help young scientists and engineers forge their own path through their support of Carnegie Science Center. They note that the Science Center can be a bridge to careers in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—and be a place where kids of all income levels and backgrounds can get inspired.

“To me, the Science Center is like the touchstone,” Ray says. “It’s the one asset that we have in Pittsburgh that everybody regionally can relate to in terms of science and technology.”

Ray and Joneen have been donors to the Science Center since the early 1990s, and Ray has been a Science Center board member for nearly as long. At 32, he was promoted to VP of Engineering at Westinghouse Transportation—the youngest in the company’s 120-year history—before ascending to become its youngest president and CEO when he was just 38.

As a child, Ray rarely visited museums or even Buhl Planetarium, now part of the Science Center. Inspiration had to come from elsewhere. Fortunately, a high school physics teacher saw promise in Ray, and connected him and a few other students with a Saturday enrichment program for promising young engineers at Westinghouse Research Center.

Years later, and after earning degrees in engineering and business from Carnegie Mellon University, he returned to Westinghouse where he not only ascended through the ranks at a historic pace, but also looked to cultivate a new generation of talent. He created a robust internship program, which brought in hundreds of budding engineers to learn and work each summer.

If Westinghouse is the place where young adults can start their STEM careers, the Science Center provides the initial spark of interest, Ray says. He has sought to bridge the two institutions through employee incentives and other programs. Westinghouse gave out museum memberships to employees as prizes, held its annual holiday party at the Science Center, and sponsored the museum’s annual Science Center awards.

“I made sure there was a close relationship with the company, and we were constantly trying to engage with the high schools and colleges to promote STEM-related activities,” he notes.

But the Betlers’ interest in supporting the Science Center isn’t just about inspiring local kids to go into STEM fields. They’ve spent many afternoons at the Science Center with their three sons—now all grown—and have since accompanied their 10 grandchildren there on visits. Even though four of their grandchildren live in Connecticut, they make sure to visit the Science Center on every trip to Pittsburgh.

“The youngest grandkids don’t live here, so they go twice every time they come,” Joneen says. “We also get them back to Pittsburgh to do the summer camps. It’s really nice.”

The Betlers are especially excited about ongoing transformation at the Science Center, including the recent relocation and expansion of the BNY Fab Lab on the third floor of the main building.

“I see the opportunity to expose young people much, much earlier than I had the opportunity to be exposed to science and technology and engineering,” Ray says, “and an opportunity to support families in this area that maybe didn’t have the opportunity to see and get exposed to the Science Center. That’s really what interested me and has been extremely gratifying.”

Learn more about how you can support your museums!

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Photo: Courtesy of NASA

Astronauts don’t get a lot of fresh veggies in their diets, but NASA continues to make progress on zero-gravity gardening. In 2015, astronauts on the International Space Station made history by  becoming the first to eat food grown in space—red romaine lettuce, which they dressed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

2

Pittsburgh boasts more public staircases than any other city in the United States, a fact celebrated not only by the city’s pedestrians but also by local artists. Artist: Laura Jean McLaughlin

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Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963)  consists of 5 1/2 hours of footage of his boyfriend, John Giorno, sleeping. The inspiration for the project came partly from Giorno’s love of napping.

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Photo: courtesy of National Museum of American History

One of the world’s first synthetic dyes was created by accident when an 18-year-old English chemist named William Henry Perkin was experimenting with treatments for malaria. His concoction didn’t combat the disease, but it did produce a brilliant purple stain that he called “mauveine,” or mauve.

5

Hugs feel good, and they’re also good for your health. Medical studies have shown that regular hugging can reduce inflammation, lower blood pressure, promote production of the “love” hormone oxytocin, and even reduce the severity of the common cold.

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