Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.

Fishes of the Mfimi River in the central Congo basin of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kasai ecoregion or part of the Cuvette Centrale?

Despite the cultural and economic importance of fisheries to communities in the region, the Mfimi is one of the least well-documented river systems in the central Congo basin. Here we present a preliminary listing of species collected during two surveys sampling 35 sites along the main channel, in major tributaries, and in some marginal habitats. A total of 2195 specimens representing 141 species were collected and archived at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and in the teaching collections of the University of Kinshasa. Five species are considered as potentially new to science, and range extensions of numerous species into the Mfimi are recorded. Based on the data presented we conclude that the fish communities in the Mfimi share affinities with those of the Cuvette Centrale to the north, rather than the Kasai basin with which the river is currently connected via an inflow at the Kwa-Kasai junction.

Designation of the neotype of Triatoma dimidiata (Latreille, 1811) (Hemiptera, Reduviidae, Triatominae), with full integrated redescription including mitogenome and nuclear ITS-2 sequences

The taxonomic status of Triatoma dimidiata (Latreille, 1811) is, by far, the most discussed within Triatominae. Molecular studies have recovered at least three independently evolving lineages in T. dimidiata across its range. The original description of T. dimidiata (as Reduvius dimidiatus) included few taxonomic characters, and no types were assigned. To define and describe the cryptic diversity within T. dimidiata sensu lato (s.l.), a neotype must be designated. For this purpose, all 199 specimens identified as T. dimidiata from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution – National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History, ranging from Peru to Mexico, were studied. Only one specimen (from Tumbes, Peru) matched the combination of characters as listed in the original description, and it is herein formally designated as the neotype for T. dimidiata. The neotype is morphologically described and DNA sequences of its whole mitochondrial genome and the nuclear second internal transcribed spacer region (ITS2), commonly used in triatomine molecular systematics studies, are presented and compared to other publicly available sequences of T. dimidiata s.l. in GenBank. Our results suggest that T. dimidiata sensu stricto (s.s.) is somewhat rare and, therefore, unlikely to serve as a major vector of Chagas disease.

Educate Kermit Roosevelt Through Sport Hunting and Train Him for Government Missions. Roosevelt Scientific Mission to English Equatorial Africa in 1909

The practice of sport hunting in colonized areas presents a set of knowledge and techniques indispensable to self-control and the domination of territories elsewhere by colonial empires, by their leaders and, more generally, by the political elites of the Northern states. During his scientific mission to English Equatorial Africa in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt responded to a double commission from the Smithsonian Institute and the American Museum in Washington. In this African mission, he brought and trained his youngest son Kermit, aged 20, in an initiatory journey. This article proposes to study this ritual of passage and the practice of sport hunting in the English colonial space as a revelation of the socio-racial hierarchies at work in the territories dominated by the English Empire.

Beyond Charles Knight: Women paleoartists at the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT Under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Charles Knight helped shape popular images of the prehistoric past in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies. Although he was the most famous, Charles Knight was not the only paleoartist working at the American Museum of Natural History at this time. Behind the scenes, there were several women paleoartists who made significant contributions to museum displays and publications illustrating the prehistoric world. Often overlooked, this chapter highlights the contributions of Elisabeth Rungius Fulda, Helen Ziska, Lindsey Morris Sterling, and Margret Joy Flinsch Buba.