Natural History

PROVIDENCE - Gina Borromeo is well-versed in ancient artifacts, but one recent question from a museum curator caught her off-guard: “Do you want a sarcophagus?’’ And not just any sarcophagus. This was a white coffin with marble dating as far back as the second century that depicted followers of the Greek wine god Dionysus. It was brought back from Europe by a wealthy Rhode Island couple who donated it to the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium in 1904. For years, the coffin sat unceremoniously in the lobby of the building at Roger Williams Park.

. . . And on the eighth day, Terrence Malick took over. He, too, created heaven, earth, ocean, and the firmament. The bang was big. It was beautiful. It was abstract, expressionist, and microbial. Great spurts of lava turned kaleidoscopic with rage. Clouds of natural gas billowed up like mastodons. Amniotic corkscrews torpedoed through water. A dinosaur lay felled beside a creek. Bubbles slid along wet earth like prehistoric pucks idling between air-hockey points. Sometimes the soundtrack swelled with Mahler.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History will soon exhibit some of the world's best nature photography on the National Mall. The museum says it will show 48 photographs in "Nature's Best Photography: Windland Smith Rice International Awards. " The images will be on display March 30 through Jan. 6. More than 20,000 images from 47 countries were reviewed in the competition named for photographer Windland Smith Rice. It was judged by experts in photography, science and conservation.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History will soon exhibit some of the world's best nature photography on the National Mall. The museum says it will show 48 photographs in "Nature's Best Photography: Windland Smith Rice International Awards. " The images will be on display March 30 through Jan. 6. More than 20,000 images from 47 countries were reviewed in the competition named for photographer Windland Smith Rice. It was judged by experts in photography, science and conservation.

WASHINGTON -- A new program dedicated to studying and explaining the world's oceans is the latest effort by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. "This is a remarkable time for ocean exploration. New technology enables scientists to go to depths of the ocean that were previously inaccessible and to discover organisms and ecosystems that have never been seen," museum director Christian Samper said yesterday in announcing the program. The $60 million effort is to include a new Ocean Hall at the museum, to open in 2008, as well as a new head of ocean research and a...

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Frederick H. Pough, a museum curator and mineralogist who wrote the definitive guide to collecting gems and minerals, died April 7. He was 99. Dr. Pough died after suffering a heart attack while attending a symposium near his home in Pittsford, a Rochester suburb, according to his family. In 1953, Dr. Pough authored "A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals" while serving as curator of physical geology and mineralogy at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.

'People, Mr. Daly, want the next thing," says a character to ex-museum guard Larry Daly (Ben Stiller) in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," and there's Hollywood's rationale for sequelitis in an over-budgeted, computer-generated nutshell. The follow-up to the surprise 2006 hit movie reeks of No. 2: It's bigger, noisier, shinier, and dumber, and it has no earthly reason to exist. The kids will scarf it down like junk food and move on. Still, let's savor the few pieces of wit that have made it through the sausage factory intact.

PICK OF THE DAY Piano man We took a stroll down memory lane and watched a YouTube clip of a younger Josh Groban singing ‘‘You're Still You" on ‘‘Ally McBeal. " Next, the more recent ‘‘Higher Window" music video shows the singer-songwriter crooning at a piano, helping move a huge piano, and playing an upright piano on the back of a pickup truck. Tonight he's live and will deliver a collection of album faves. 7:30 p.m. $65, $95. TD Garden, 100 Legends Way, Boston.

WASHINGTON — New research shows that the great dinosaur die-off made way for mammals to explode in size — some more massive than several elephants put together. The largest land mammal ever: A rhinoceros-like creature, minus the horn, that stood 18 feet tall, weighed roughly 17 tons, and grazed in forests in what is now Eurasia. It makes the better-known woolly mammoth seem a bit puny. Tracking such prehistoric giants is more than a curiosity: It sheds new light on the evolution of mammals as they diversified to fill habitats left vacant by the dinosaurs.

This probably falls under the category of too much information, but when I was a kid growing up in Boston, I used to have a recurring dream -- not quite a nightmare -- about getting locked in the old Museum of Science overnight. The dioramas would slowly come to life, and while I don't remember all the particulars, my neck still prickles when I think about the barn owl flapping its wings against the glass and the severed T. rex head swiveling its eyes my way. Maybe I even managed to get the coins out of the optical-illusion goblet; who knows?

Wine has its chattering classes too, and for some time now its pet subject has been something called terroir. Like entrepreneur or mise en place, terroir is a French loanword that requires a whole English sentence to convey the meaning. Narrowly construed, it's the natural conditions prevailing in a particular spot that distinguish the wine of that place. Terroir has been called the "whereness" of wine. It might be more correct to say that terroir, when it occurs, is just a place ventriloquizing a grape.

PICK OF THE DAY He came, he saw, he conquered The day after Christmas sounds like an opportunity for LA-based artist Jedediah Caesar. The School of the Museum of Fine Arts alum uses natural and man-made debris including packaging and scraps to create sculptures evoking archeological strata, geodes, and fossils. ‘‘Jedediah Caesar: Soft Structures" is an exhibit of new works inspired by Caesar's visits to the MFA and Boston. Today from 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m. (through April 1)

NEW YORK - Joseph M. Chamberlain, who helped advance astronomical education and entertainment by leading planetariums in New York and Chicago into a new era of technology, instruction, and visitor experience, died Nov. 28 in Peoria, Ill., where he lived. He was 88. His death was announced by the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Mr. Chamberlain's love was sailing, and he taught celestial navigation courses during his 16 years at the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan, 12 of which he spent as its leader, and during his 23 years as director and president at the...

There's more than natural beauty to see for those tooling around New England this fall. For those who also have a taste for culture, three consortiums of art institutions (with an occasional natural history museum thrown in) can help travelers focus their plans. The newest of these is Museums10 in Massachusetts's Pioneer Valley. Museums10 comprises six art venues, two historic sites, the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College, and the Yiddish Book Center. "It's like a mini Smithsonian, but in multiple locations," says Alexandra de...

Annie Proulx’s novels can be as discrete and orderly as a series of postcards or as leisurely as the ebb and flow of Heart’s Content Harbor in Newfoundland, but they are almost always shapely and finely tuned, with form following function and loyal to landscape — like the work of the most sensitive architects. Tough, sweet, and droll, her short stories are even more controlled. Proulx’s three volumes of Wyoming stories prove her not just a tale spinner and humorist in the great tradition of Mark Twain, but an exemplar of writerly discipline.

WASHINGTON — New research shows that the great dinosaur die-off made way for mammals to explode in size — some more massive than several elephants put together. The largest land mammal ever: A rhinoceros-like creature, minus the horn, that stood 18 feet tall, weighed roughly 17 tons, and grazed in forests in what is now Eurasia. It makes the better-known woolly mammoth seem a bit puny. Tracking such prehistoric giants is more than a curiosity: It sheds new light on the evolution of mammals as they diversified to fill habitats left vacant by the...

WINCHESTER - Through March 28, the Griffin Museum of Photography becomes an outpost of the animal kingdom. Some of the creatures to be seen there are under water. Others have lived only on the page. A few seem to be waiting outside a psychiatrist’s office. Whatever the locale, there’s nary a picture with a human or human handiwork to be seen in any of the three shows currently hanging. “Dark Sharks/Light Rays: Photographs by Karen Glaser’’ offers a titular hat trick: It simultaneously rhymes, puns, and describes succinctly.

As the ever-louder chorus of songs greeting the dawn attests, birds are flocking back to their summer homes. And right on their tails are the bird-watchers. There are an estimated 80 million of them in this country, from people who just like to check out visitors to the backyard feeder to serious types with high-powered scopes and thick nature books, who prefer to be called "birders" and happily plunge into tropical rain forests and trek across tundra in search of exotic species.

Taxidermy is a subject most of us rarely think about, unless we happen to be at a natural history museum or at a backwoods diner where a deer’s head presides over the cash register. But for a time, around the turn of the last century, it was a dynamic career path offering artistic satisfaction, scientific challenge, and the promise of white-knuckle adventure. Nobody embodied these like the swashbuckling taxidermist and big-game hunter Carl Akeley, whose work (and name) graces the Hall of African Mammals in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.