A new exhibit celebrates the life and work of Carl Cotton.

In a grainy, 1950s film from the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, a man tenderly washes the remains of a weaver bird. The bird is dead, but the act is tender. He dries it with compressed air, stuffs it, and mounts it with wire in the museum’s diorama of African marsh birds. The film shows a number of people working on the diorama; all of them are white, except for the man stuffing the birds. His name is Carl Cotton, and he was the first African-American taxidermist to work at the Field Museum. For nearly 25 years, until his death in 1971, Cotton helped immortalize many of the animals that are currently on display at the museum.

Cotton has now become the subject of an exhibit at his former workplace, A Natural Talent: The Taxidermy of Carl Cotton, which is open until October 4, 2020. “The exhibit shows the human history behind displays that have been here for decades and decades,” says Kate Golembiewski, a science communicator at the Field Museum. “It’s amazing to be able to show a person who bucked the mold and made such a huge impact on the museum.” Tori Lee, an exhibition developer at the museum who curated the exhibit, adds, “Carl was unique in his ability to do everything well.”

The seed of the exhibit was planted when Reda Brooks, a budget coordinator in the museum’s exhibitions department, began looking into the archives for stories to spotlight during Black History Month, which the museum had never officially celebrated before. In the museum’s 125th anniversary book, she noticed a photo of Cotton preparing the Nile marsh diorama. “Reda showed me the photo and we were both shocked,” Lee says. “I consider myself a muse,” Brooks jokes.

Lee worked with Mark Alvey, the museum’s academic communications manager, to gather all the information that they could find about Cotton. “A lot of people had seen photos of him in the archives over the years, but no one knew a lot about how he came to work here,” Lee says. The duo scoured Ancestry.com and local obituaries for any trace of Cotton, and the museum’s social media team invited the public to share stories about Cotton. Soon, a number of Cotton’s friends and family reached out, and a portrait of his life began to take shape.

Cotton was born in 1918 and grew up in Washington Park, on the South Side of Chicago. He took up taxidermy at a young age and practiced on squirrels, birds, and dearly departed housepets, according to a video interview with Cotton’s childhood friend, the historian and civil rights activist Timuel Black, that plays on loop in the exhibit. He visited the Field Museum for the first time on a school field trip, Brooks says. Cotton worked as a stenographer and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, but taxidermy remained his life’s passion.

When Cotton first applied for taxidermy work at the museum in 1940, he was turned away. “The director of the museum replied and said, ‘If you want to be a curator here, you need to have a PhD, you need to have made yourself known in the field,’” Lee says. When Cotton reached out again in 1947, he made his passion clearer and also volunteered to work for free. “My ambition is ... not doing just ‘average’ taxidermy but turning out work comparable to that of Carl Akeley, Leon Pray, Leon Walters and other artists,” Cotton wrote, referencing the big-name taxidermists at the museum. The Field Museum hired Cotton part-time in the division of vertebrate anatomy, where Cotton did grunt work cleaning skeletons and preparing skins. He was promoted to full-time just a month later.

Lee watched the video of Cotton preparing the marsh birds many times while researching the exhibition. “It’s an incredible video of him working, but there’s no sound and you don’t hear him at all,” she says. “It made him kind of this silent figure for me.” When she read Carl’s 1947 letter, she couldn’t help but tear up. “He suddenly became a person with a voice, who really cared about what he did and wanted to get better,” Lee says, adding that the letter reminded her of her own application to work at the museum.

Cotton quickly rose through the ranks, Lee says. He worked mostly with birds, developing an exhibit on adaptive coloration and redoing much of the bird hall, but soon was called upon to work on the trickier reptiles and fish, as well as repair the larger mammals that had been taxidermied by Carl Akeley. Cotton also developed newer, experimental forms of taxidermy for animals with hairless skin: For example, he replicated a snapping turtle out of cellulose acetate. He was skilled at crafting plants, such as the lily pads in the Nile marsh diorama. “He went above and beyond what typical taxidermy was doing at the time,” Lee says.

While researching the exhibition, Lee was able to identify several of Cotton’s taxidermied specimens that were scattered around the museum with no labels. One specimen, a brown bittern hiding among brown reeds of grass, had been sitting in a classroom that Lee uses frequently. Now, all of Cotton’s known specimens on display are attributed to their creator, Golembiewski says. Cotton’s most famous work, Marsh Birds of the Upper Nile, remains on permanent display. “It’s one of the most famous and iconic pieces at the museum,” Brooks says.

This retrospective marks the first show Lee has curated at the Field Museum. “I’m not technically a curator, and making this show is outside my own job description,” she says. “It was a labor of love.” While the staff of the Field Museum has grown more diverse since Cotton’s days, Lee says there are still institutional barriers to entry for prospective curators of color, including the PhD that was expected of Cotton so many years ago. “That’s why places like the exhibitions department are more diverse than the curatorial department,” she says.

When the Field Museum was founded in 1921, it perpetuated the colonialism and scientific racism on which natural history was built. “Typically people of color were people on display at the Field Museum, seen as others, people to look at and study and examine, and not as scientists and not researchers in their own right,” Lee says. Races of Mankind, a 1933 exhibit that commissioned 104 bronze sculptures of people from around the world, "drew overt connections between race, biology, and hierarchy, making scientific racism a primary framework for the exhibition," writes Lucia Procopio in “Curating Racism: Understanding Field Museum Physical Anthropology from 1893 to 1969,” published in The Museum Scholar in 2019. The exhibition stayed up until 1969, which included 23 years of Cotton’s tenure at the museum.

Like many other natural history museums, the Field Museum has begun to reckon with this ugly history. In 2016, the museum opened a new exhibit that contextualized the racist history of the sculptures and identified many unnamed subjects. In October 2018, the museum announced a three-year redesign of its Native North America Hall, which originally opened in the 1950s under the name Indians before Columbus. The new exhibit, set to open in fall of 2021, represents a collaboration between museum curators and Chicago’s Native community. The museum is located on the traditional land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples.

Lee is hesitant to call Cotton the first black taxidermist in Chicago, though she hasn’t found any others just yet. She doesn’t know whether Cotton was aware of other taxidermists of color, such as John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved black man who taught Charles Darwin how to taxidermy birds. Lee hopes his story resonates with Chicagoans and inspires the museum to tell more stories about people from the African diaspora. “He grew up here, was raised here, and his family is still in the area,” she says. “It just felt like a good story that in some ways was uncomplicated in its goodness, about a good guy who loved his work and followed his dreams.”

Lee works on the fourth floor, which is the same floor where Cotton once worked. Nowadays, she recognizes bird specimens prepared by Cotton on display in conference rooms and common areas where she and Brooks eat lunch. “Sometimes when you work in a place that’s really old, you forget how many people have walked these halls,” Lee says. “It feels like he was here just the other day.”

In a place that comes and goes, slow archaeological work has to be done fast.

When the water laps up on the granite rocks and sandy embankments off the coast of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, ancient artifacts get wet. It isn’t a disaster. It’s been happening for thousands of years, in fact, in a daily rhythm—the water rushing in rivulets that turn into torrents along the beachy landscape, sweeping across the miles of exposed seabed and rising above it.

This May, alongside the gulls and crustaceans that skitter about, archaeologists will scamper away from the rising sea as their fieldwork is submerged. They’ll retreat.

With its pockmarked and inundated topography, the intertidal reef known as the Violet Bank is awash with history. Yet despite its name, the bank is a changing gradient of blues, grays, greens, and browns—a cryptic mix of rocky earth and transient sea. Now a preferred spot for low-water fishing—or pêche à pied‚ where locals chat in Jèrriais and probe the ebb tide for shellfish—the evanescent landscape remains treacherous, catching unsuspecting visitors with its rapid tidal shifts.

When an archaeological team from University College London visits the deceptive, disappearing bank in May, they’ll hardly be unsuspecting. They’ll know the tidal drill well, as they try to learn more about the origins of lithic (stone) artifacts and mammoth remains that have emerged from the crevices and ravines that are revealed by the surf with each tide.

The team was tipped off by the Société Jersiaise, Jersey’s learned society, whose members have spent hundreds of hours walking the bank, documenting actual and potential finds. While just a decade ago there was nary an archaeological record for the bank, in the last five years a mammoth tooth, flint tools, and middle Paleolithic technologies have turned up as society members have poked around the coast.

The team from the British mainland will soon haul in an arsenal of equipment to survey the site in greater detail and at a more sweeping scale, hoping to identify more objects that are continually being exposed by the tides. The UCL team is partnering with Jersey Heritage, an organization that manages the many castles, fortifications, and other cultural artifacts of the island—a place that's been inhabited by humans for millennia. But the team will need to be careful, and quick, as they survey an ever-changing shore.

“Historically the Violet Bank has been a place where it paid to be cautious,” writes Paul Chambers, the marine and coastal manager with the Government of Jersey, a self-governing dependency of the United Kingdom, via email. “The shallow reefs and numerous rocks from which it is formed have claimed many ships and the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sailors and passengers. This toll includes 400 men from the failed French invasion of 1781 who were shipwrecked while attempting to navigate the Violet Bank.”

Off the coast of Normandy—far closer to France than it is to Britain—Jersey is an island of push and pull. On the northwest coast, the Atlantic slams against the island's high cliffs. On the southeastern shore, the landscape is shaped by an archipelago of tidepools, sand dunes, and granite escarpments, on a small coastline with one of the fastest tides in the world. The spring tides here—when the difference between the low tide and the full swell of the sea is largest—open just a four-hour window of accessibility. And within that window, there’s only one hour when the tide isn’t moving and the land is still.

“I’ve never been anywhere that feels quite like it,” says Matt Pope, the lead archaeologist on the team. “Except for that hour of slack water, it’s a place constantly in movement. You need to have your wits about [you]. [T]he water is flowing through these gullies, and it’s like you’re walking through a landscape of rivers, amid the boulders and bubbling.”

It “creates an odd kind of working day,” he adds. “You’re constrained by this rhythm that’s non-negotiable.”

Before it began to be claimed by the sea around six millennia ago, the Violet Bank was easily traversable. The region was not part of Doggerland—the now-submerged Ice Age landscape that linked Britain with continental Europe—but was contiguous with that landmass, though rockier and more erosive. Pope and his team have begun to affectionately refer to “their Doggerland” as La Manche Land—a nod to the French word for the English Channel on which, and under which, the Violet Bank sits.

When the Holocene period began, the bank was characterized by distinctive gulches and ridges—topographical traits that are now apparent only at low tide. Neanderthals had certainly been eking out an existence elsewhere on Jersey, though their possible presence on the Violet Bank has not been scrutinized. But some form of human ancestor—maybe Neanderthal, maybe not—left hunting tools there, which were found in recent years by the Société Jersiaise. With Jersey’s rich record of Neanderthal habitation, the combination of the found remains and the topography—which may have been conducive to stalking elk and mammoths—make the thought of the Violet Bank as a Neanderthal hunting ground not altogether far-fetched.

“As far as we know, in Northern Europe, the only people that used these [tools] were Neanderthal populations,” Pope says. “We now have no more than 20 of these artifacts, but they’ve been found casually.”

Pope’s upcoming work will include a survey of the exposed bank using a combination of boots-on-the-ground archaeology and fast-moving, state-of-the-art drones that can identify objects with hawk-like vision. That’s the way archaeology is often practiced today in places that aren’t well understood: looking first, digging second.

“The drone captures it all ... and then you can decode what you’re seeing in a week,” Pope says. “Having an eye in the sky for intertidal work makes mapping a lot easier.”

The team’s survey will be the first archaeological work at scale on a site that has seen centuries of shipwrecked sailors and attempted conquests. During World War II, German soldiers were swept away by the unpredictable currents that rise up amongst the granite. Later, the Violet Bank itself nearly became a victim.

“That such fieldwork is possible [today] is a stroke of providence,” Chambers writes. “The biological, archaeological, and cultural wonders of the Violet Bank were nearly lost to science when, during the 1980s, it was suggested that an airport be built on the seashore there.” Thankfully it didn’t come to pass.

Pope says that the prehistoric lithic and mammoth remains found so far may have gotten wedged into fissures of submerged granite—a “resilient rock that’s not going anywhere anytime soon”—preventing them from being washed out to sea. Once wedged, clay may have sealed off the bits and pieces, which slowly dislodged over millennia.

"The preservation of an archaeological site in a coastal environment is particularly fortunate, especially when the material is particularly fragile,” says Jérémy Duveau, a paleoanthropologist at the Museum of Mankind in Paris who works on a Neanderthal-footprint site near Le Rozel, France, and is not affiliated with the upcoming surveys on the Violet Bank. “Indeed, the … action of the wind can be particularly destructive, as can that of the tide, as is the case for many sites located on the coast.”

Preserved along with the bank and the bits found among its bouldery clutter is an 18th-century fortification called Seymour Tower, built on a rocky tidal island—more of a large rock than a small island—that’s completely surrounded by the sea at high tide. It’s where Pope’s archaeological team will stay when they’re not working on the exposed bank during the four-hour window.

“It’s owned by Jersey Heritage, and they’ve kitted it out as a bunkhouse. It's got solar power, it has nice beds, a nice kitchen,” Pope says. “All human waste needs to be transported back to the mainland, though, so that’s a logistical problem.”

Sitting high in a tower is a great way to escape the sea, though, and will provide a retreat for the archaeological team during the long stretches of higher tide that render the bank inundated and inexplorable.

The fieldwork—equal parts medieval, modern, and marine—may also uncover aspects of Jersey’s hitherto unknown history on the Violet Bank. The human materials that have been discovered to date have been found across the island. But no one until the Société Jersiaise team came along bothered to look in the semi-surf just offshore.

Though always changing—ebbing and flowing, rinsing and repeating—the bank is scheduled for a tectonic shift. As with all land, especially islands, Jersey is vulnerable to rising seas, something that climate change all but guarantees for the shifting shoreline.

“These are places that are vanishing,” says Pope. “We had the initial Holocene submergence after the last Ice Age, and now we’re experiencing a second phase of sea level rise which will inundate these last accessible areas of intertidal landscape as we enter the Anthropocene era. For us, it’s a chance [to document] these last bits of landscape before they go … [this] human evolutionary story that’s going to be lost forever.”

When the archaeological team ventures out onto the bank, says Pope, the drone work will hopefully lead to an exacting topographical map of the bank and pinpoint any archaeological matter that turns up. For vested Jerseyans like Chambers, that’s certainly the aspiration.

“It is hoped that as well as being known for its marine life, moon-like seascape, and coastal fortifications, the Violet Bank will [soon] be regarded as an area of great archaeological interest.”

For hundreds of years, sailors have zipped across frozen lakes and rivers—but now chances are fewer and farther between.

James “T” Thieler has spent his whole life chasing thrills in sailboats. He first got his feet wet near Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he commanded his parents’ beat-up Hobie 16 catamaran through choppy water under the blistering sun. The most rousing part was “torturing” the boat, he says, trying to jump massive waves and drive the bucking thing high up on the shore. Thieler planned to spend adulthood floating around the Caribbean and working on boats, but by 1998, he found himself in Maine, instead. Up there, winters had sharp teeth, but sailors were undeterred. When there was little open water (also known as “soft water”) to be found, a cohort of them took to rivers and ponds in light, sleek, sail-driven crafts that could coast across the ice with runners or skates affixed to their hulls. It was extreme—fast, cold, and odd—and that piqued his interest. “I thought, ‘Boy, that looks really next-level,’” he says.

Thieler was hooked the instant he got out on the ice. “I picked up an old, cheap iceboat, sailed it 50 feet, and that was the end of that,” he says. Now he is a champion racer and the commodore emeritus for the New England Ice Yacht Association (NEIYA).

The speed of iceboating is what really drew Thieler in. Heavy, single-hulled sailboats on water typically top out around 8 to 12 knots. “It’s about as fast as you go in a traffic jam on I-95,” Thieler says. Though some sophisticated (and expensive) multi-hulled vessels can push 30 knots, Thieler adds, iceboating is something else entirely: An iceboat can easily exceed 80 miles an hour, and often goes much, much faster. “A hundred miles an hour is not unreasonable under perfect conditions,” says John Stanton, commodore of the NEIYA. Like bobsledders—kindred cold-weather spirits—iceboat racers often start from a standstill and then sprint across the frozen water. When the wind catches the sail, they launch themselves in, and then, depending on the type of boat, may lie flat on their backs, contorting themselves into the most aerodynamic shape they can manage. The whooshing wind, the morning cold—Thieler felt flooded, and he couldn’t get enough. “It knocked me on my butt,” he says. "I can't really think of any thrill that comes close."

Iceboating, also known as ice yachting, has been enchanting and thrilling people for several hundred years. It began in Europe in the 1600s, and landed in New York by the 18th century, Hudson Valley magazine reports. By the last quarter of the 1800s, the frozen Hudson River, which separates New York and New Jersey, was stippled with boats. In December 1875, the New York Daily Herald declared that iceboating “has assumed a dignity among the outdoor recreations of the year second to none,” and predicted that, since clubs devoted to the sport were popping up so rapidly across the country, “there is great promise of its future.”

Ice yachting gave dedicated sailors—including Franklin D. Roosevelt, who helmed an ice yacht called Hawk—something to do in the winter, and the spectacle captivated onlookers, too. “It is an inspiring sight to see a fleet of 20 or more ice yachts, with their white sails sparkling in the frosty air, circling around each other with the speed of the wind,” The New York Times reported in 1896, adding that when the breeze was generous, the boats outstripped the trains on the tracks flanking the river. “This was the fastest mode of transportation for a long time,” Stanton says.

For both racers and enthusiasts, iceboating is still exhilarating. “Every day is an adventure in that I see different areas that I wouldn't normally get to see,” says Kate Morrone, a New Hampshire–based ice cruiser who first sailed a hand-me-down iceboat that her father had raced in the Finger Lakes of New York in the 1970s and 1980s. “And the ice is beautiful in all its different forms.”

But now, many winters are feeling more like springs—and that leaves winter sports, from iceboating to backyard skating to skijoring, on unsteady ground. In a warming world, where ice is constantly cracking, calving, melting, and giving way, how long much longer does iceboating have?

Data compiled by the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows a downward trend in sea ice across the Northern Hemisphere between 1980 and the 2000s. During some mild winters, many lakes that used to be dependably icy now remain slushy or fully liquid all winter. For the iceboating community, Thieler says, “climate change has been a real bastard.”

Over the two decades he’s been sailing, the season has shrunk. It used to be that the action revved up around Thanksgiving and sometimes lasted into the spring; he once sailed on Tax Day, in the middle of April. “In northern New Jersey, I know old guys who said they used to park boats on the ice in November and leave them until spring,” he says. “Now, it’s Christmas Day and it’s 60 degrees out and you take a walk on the beach.”

After a dicey incident years ago, when a boat broke through the ice, Thieler won’t sail on anything less than four inches thick. (“You learn not to push it,” he says. “I’ll be at the diner up the road, eating a hamburger.”) The trouble is that there are fewer and fewer days, and fewer and fewer places, that reach that threshold. He avoids places with spidery cracks and pooling water, as well as particularly shallow areas, the intersections of creeks, and places near piles of rocks, because those quick-moving or easily sun-warmed places can get surprisingly soft.

While it’s never impossible to find a place to sail (at least not yet), he adds, the ice isn’t as reliable as it used to be. “There are small lakes in Rhode Island that we used to sail all the time, and now we get on them once every other year,” he says. “It’s getting harder to find areas we can go.” Like other iceboaters, Thieler spends the week checking weather reports. Many clubs also have “ice lines,” or voicemail hotlines you can call to hear a member rattle off a list of places that might stay seized up and solid. (Anyone with a tip about sturdy stretches is encouraged to leave it after the beep.) “We as a community really rely on the folks who are checking and reporting ice conditions,” Morrone says. By tapping into this brain trust, Morrone has sailed seven days this season, and says that people who don’t work a typical Monday to Friday workweek are often able to sneak a few more outings in. Thieler tries to choose a location by Thursday. When the weekend arrives, he often finds himself in the car, heading north.

For Thieler and others, being an iceboater in a world with dwindling winter is a test of patience, which often wears thinner than the ice. Competitors who race DN ice yachts—a small class named after the Detroit News, which introduced the design in the 1930s—were disappointed when this year’s European championships, in Sweden, were called off earlier this month, after a flash of warm weather and a bit of rain softened the ice that had hosted the World Championships just the day before. Thieler, who raced in the Worlds, thought it was the right call. “I would rather go home with no races and no injuries than go home with a cast on and my boat in 100 pieces,” he says.

“It’s not too big of a stretch to make the case that 2020 will go down as another bust for most of the iceboating community,” writes John Sperr, a member of the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club, on his boating blog. In February 2020, many of the ice line messages were similarly melancholy, with just the tiniest shards of hope. “As we all know, it’s been a pretty dismal winter when it comes to iceboating,” muttered the voice on the line for the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat & Yacht Club, in New Jersey, in a message for the week of February 16, 2020. The less-gloomy news was that things looked a little more promising farther north, the speaker continued, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, if some patchy areas would just melt a little and refreeze. (Quaboag Pond, which sits near Brookfield and East Brookfield, Massachusetts, was strong and slick, and a few iceboaters got some sailing in.) “Don’t give up yet,” the voice said. “We’re always a little optimistic around here. Let’s hope for the best.”

The sport is also dwindling because clubs are shrinking, Thieler says, and members tend to be older. “There’s an awful lot of gray hay and wrinkled skin in the fleet,” he says. “At 51, I’m sort of the new kid.” But there are still some new initiates, Morrone says, including college students. And there's always a fresh crop of lifelong soft-water sailors who figure they’ll take the winter sport for a spin. Last weekend, in Kingston, Ontario, Thieler watched a soft-water sailor zip across the ice for the first time. “I gave him a push,” Thieler says, “and the last thing I heard as he was sailing away was ‘Yeehaw!’”

Even when the ice cooperates, there are “definitely some planets that have to line up to make a good sailing day,” Thieler says. Ideal sailing conditions also include a steady breeze blowing somewhere between eight and 15 knots, and smooth, black ice that’s not covered by wet or heavy snow, and has limited air bubbles. Thieler prefers temperatures between 25 and 35 degrees, because bitterly cold days court frostbite: “You can lose the end of your nose before you know it.” A windless afternoon isn't necessarily a total wash: Mark Burns, the commodore of the West Michigan Ice Yacht Club, who has been boating for 25 years, switches to ice skates or skis when necessary, he says, to “try to make the best of it.” People do sail in less-than-ideal conditions, but there’s nothing quite like a perfect ice day, Thieler says. One of his friends, he says, compares it to choking down a flat beer, versus savoring a glass of champagne.

As those champagne days become rarer, they become more precious, too. Thieler and his girlfriend recently blew off some chores to drive to Canada to sail for the weekend. When climate change is coming for something you love, how can you not play hooky once in a while? There may be only so many chances left. It’s a carpe diem moment, with existential stakes. “Go do this while you can,” Thieler says. “In five or 10 years, we might not be doing this at all.”

Bend the macaro-knee.

On a night out in downtown Los Angeles in 2016, Emanuele Filiberto wanted pasta, and nothing else would do. “I saw hamburger trucks, taco trucks, even sushi trucks,” he says. “The closest thing was mac and cheese, but you cannot ask an Italian person to eat mac and cheese.”

Within six months he had his own pasta truck—a shiny, royal blue colossus streaked with the colors of the Italian flag—called the Prince of Venice. It was his first foray into the food-truck industry. A pasta devotee, Filiberto refused to let mobility compromise the quality of his dishes, and became the first person in the world to put a fresh pasta machine in a commercial food truck. “Nobody told me it was a bad idea,” he says over the phone.

Sound absurd? Business is booming. Sound lavish? You have no idea. Emanuele Filiberto di Savoia is the grandson of Umberto II, the last king of Italy. In other words, Filiberto is literally the Prince of Venice.

Aside from his commanding jawline and brassy, regal voice, little of Filiberto's character betrays his family background. “In America I’m very happy, because I’m totally unknown,” he says. “It’s good for me.”

Italy’s royal family was not exactly exiled on a high note. For aiding and abetting Mussolini in the years leading up to World War II, Italians voted in a 1946 referendum to abolish the 900-year old house of Savoy. As Italy pivoted to a Republic, the deposed royal family relocated to Switzerland, where Filiberto was born an only child, in exile.

He was young when he learned of his precarious situation. “I didn’t understand why the exile was for me. What did I do wrong?” Still, Filiberto says, “I cannot say I suffered. I just wasn’t free to visit the country I felt I belonged to. A lot of people have it much worse.”

In 2002, after the family fought to overturn the ban and Filiberto publicly apologized for the mistakes of his forebears, the family visited Italy for the first time in 65 years. Filiberto was 30 years old. “It was like discovering a country I always knew, but hadn’t yet been to,” he says.

The dashing, would-be prince won back Italian hearts and minds by hosting the Miss Italy Pageant and Amazing Race, and competing in Dancing With The Stars. “Which I won by an overwhelming margin,” he adds, frequently. He even appeared in a commercial for olives, promising viewers they’d make you “feel like a king.” His career in television landed him in Hollywood, for the pasta revelation on which his life would pivot. “Television was okay for a while, but pasta is my number one priority now,” he says.

For Filiberto, the truck is an effort to make up for time lost in exile. “I was away for so long, all I did in life afterwards had something to do with Italian culture,” he says. “Pasta is something Italians have in their DNA, it’s something they grew up cooking with their grandmother—they’re family recipes.” He does admit that his own grandmother didn’t do all that much cooking, as she was the Queen of Italy.

The prince had his work cut out for him. Not only was the American food-truck market saturated, but cooking dry pasta takes more than 10 minutes–far too long for the average food-truck customer. Fresh pasta, on the other hand, cooks in just over a minute. A simple solution would have been to produce the pasta in a commissary kitchen and boil it to order. Instead, Filiberto installed a 100-pound pasta machine and extruder right in the truck.

It was an indulgent choice. Executive chef Luigi Speranza, who went the commissary route with his Sola Pasta Bar food carts in New York City, finds it curious, but admires the image of cramming a pasta machine into an automobile kitchen. He points to the idea of "zero-kilometer cooking," an Italian culinary ideal wherein food is produced, prepared, cooked, and eaten in a fixed location. Of course, the truck drives dozens of kilometers a day.

Whether or not the groundbreaking design was meant to adhere to Italian standards, the Prince of Venice exceeds diners' expectations. Every morning, Filiberto's chef prepares 30 pounds of fresh pastas including conchiglie, penne, maccheroni, bucatini, and the ornate creste di gallo. Customers can watch their pasta come straight out of the extruder and into neat, tender piles. In princely fashion, Filiberto turned a late-night craving into a luxurious, streetside culinary experience at the intersection of fast food and fine dining.

The rest is a matter of sourcing. As Filiberto says, “there’s nothing to invent in pasta.” What few organic ingredients he doesn’t procure locally come straight from the motherland: pasta flour from Piedmont, extra virgin olive oil from Tuscany, black and white truffles from Campobasso. He insisted upon an Italian chef, in this case one Generoso Celentano, to man the pots and pans. The menu spans the length of Italy’s pasta-scape, from a Sicilian conchiglie alla Norma, to a Roman bucatini all'amatriciana, to the most popular dish, a Piemontese tartufo. A giant, cratered block of parmigiano reggiano sits by the window, into which Celentano will dump a pan of hot pasta to collect a film of warm, melted cheese before it’s plated and garnished.

In a field of one, Filiberto’s Prince of Venice is the leader in what can only be categorized as fast-fine dining with a view. It is “far better than what you’ll find at most restaurants,” wrote LA Times food critic Jen Harris, “likely the most impressive and elaborate food truck operation in the city.” Thrillist and Time Out: LA rank Prince of Venice among the best food trucks in all of Los Angeles—a competitive market, to be sure. “I wasn’t sure if Americans would want to eat pasta in the streets,” says Filiberto. “Now, I can say yes.”

Still, the Prince is humble about his role in the operation. “I mainly do cashier work. It’s better when Generoso is cooking.” He likes to move in and out of the truck, speaking about the food with customers who are likely oblivious to his background. “I like to hear the praise, I like to hear the critics,” he says.

With the success of the food truck, he’ll open a brick-and-mortar in Studio City in April. It wasn’t quite the kingdom he was born to rule, but the seat of L.A.’s pasta scene suits him well.

John Margolies played an outsize role in memorializing America’s outsize attractions.

American highways have something for everyone. Lots of litter. License plates galore. And, if you take the right route, a dinosaur car wash, or a supper club in the biggest fish you’ve ever seen.

John Margolies relished it all. The celebrated architecture critic and photographer developed an affinity for roadside attractions in childhood, when family trips kept his future fascinations a constant blur outside the window. “My parents’ generation thought it was the ugliest stuff in the world,” Margolies told The Washington Post in 2015.

In adulthood, Margolies hit the road to look for America—specifically, the America you find on the country’s blue highways, where a cornucopia of curios populate the roadsides. From the artistic to the garish—but most always the giant, the better to make an impression on those driving by—Margolies wanted to chronicle it all.

True to his architectural background, Margolies often chose subjects that were mimetic buildings—novelty structures built to resemble real-world items. That's why roadside America is full of windowed teapots and drive-thru donut, among other architectural oddities.

“If they were tacky, I didn’t care,” he said. “Tacky isn’t necessarily better or worse than any other kind of taste, although many people would care to disagree with that.”

Since Margolies died, in 2016, his vast roadside portfolio became available to the public, and has yielded troves of indelible images—a sort of alternate American history, written on the country’s criss-crossing highways and interstates.

As with travel itself, roadside attractions are transient. In the years since Margolies snapped these shots, some sites have disappeared altogether. Others are still there, albeit sometimes in different form, vividly persuading drivers to pull over and make the jump from oglers to customers.

In that way, Margolies’s four decades of roadside photography are a time capsule of the kitschiest forms of American capitalism—a sales pitch that says, Look at this giant plaster squirrel named Pearl. Now, please by some of our pecans.

Here, Atlas Obscura takes a look at some highlights from the Margolies photo archive, available through the Library of Congress.

In Thailand, humans and simians share harvesting duties.

Suppose, for a minute, that you live on Ko Yao Noi, a small island just east of Phuket, Thailand. An important Muslim feast is coming up, and you need coconuts—to make coconut milk for curries and sweets. What do you do? You could go to the market, but you’ll probably just call Bang San.

“I harvest others’ coconuts,” explains Bang San, 72, a native of the island. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years.”

For Bang San, picking coconuts is not a solo endeavor. If you live close, he’ll simply walk over. For longer trips, he might take a motorbike. Either way, he’ll bring his assistant, his most important tool, and arguably his most valuable possession: a rather grumpy macaque named Ai Thong.

Bang San claims to be one of only three people on Ko Yao Noi who use monkeys to pick coconuts. When locals, whose property may include a few trees with ripe coconuts that are far beyond reach, need coconuts for cooking, they’ll give him a call (or, more likely, a shout; Bang San doesn’t have a mobile phone). Bang San, along with Ai Thong, and perhaps another monkey if the job calls for it, are willing to travel anywhere on the island. “They’re not scared of riding on a motorcycle,” he tells me. “They love it!”

Arriving at a rural home one morning, Bang San releases Ai Thong, who, kept in check by a very long leash, immediately scampers up a coconut tree.

“I want the old, mature coconuts,” explains Bang San. “The monkeys can tell the difference: The mature ones are brown, the younger ones are green.”

Spurred on by vocal commands, Ai Thong briefly lingers 30 feet above our heads. Then he gets to work. Having chosen a nut, he spins it furiously with his hands and feet until it’s dislodged. It falls to the ground with a violent thud, rolling until it bumps into a parked car, causing some consternation among the homeowners. Ai Thong then moves on to another, and in a few seconds, there’s another alarming crash. Once the tree is depleted, Bang San grunts a command, and Ai Thong scampers down the tree and up another. After 15 minutes, the ground is studded with around 20 bowling ball-sized coconuts—a tiny haul by Bang San’s standards.

“I can get up to 1,000 coconuts a day,” he explains. “But there aren’t many coconuts this year.”

Ai Thong’s work is done; tethered to a tree, he sulks and evades my camera. For most jobs, Bang San would husk and transport the coconuts to a restaurant, a Thai-style sweets producer, or the coconut-milk maker at Ko Yao Noi’s market. Today, though, he leaves the coconuts with the family and receives a flat fee for his services. (Ai Thong is compensated in the form of sweet buns from 7-Eleven.)

Bang San is one of a dwindling handful of people who continue to use monkeys to gather coconuts. As Thai life becomes more modern, fewer people plant and maintain coconut trees, and even villagers on a tropical island are likely to buy coconut milk from the fresh market or, increasingly, in the form of UHT containers from a store. This means fewer and fewer gigs for coconut-picking monkeys, a practice that academics suspect got its start in Malaysia and Indonesia, and arrived in Thailand during the 1800s, or possibly much earlier.

Yet as coconut water and other coconut products have grown in popularity around the world, some Western news outlets have reported allegations of abuse and animal cruelty. But Leslie Sponsel, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Hawaii who has done extensive research on human-primate relationships in Southeast Asia, claims that, in his experience, working monkeys are generally treated humanely.

But if you’re not on a small Thai island, or if your coconut consumption takes the form of bottles of coconut water, it’s unlikely that a monkey was involved at all.

“Our groves are huge. If we used monkeys, we couldn’t pick this amount of coconuts.”

I’m talking to Booncherd Sethawong, a production manager at Chaokoh, one of Thailand’s largest producers of coconut milk, cream, water, and other products. We’re in the middle of a coconut grove in Thap Sakae, a seaside town in the province of Prachuap Khiri Khan, about 150 miles south of Bangkok. I’ve come here to see how coconuts are gathered on a much larger scale.

Thap Sakae is coconut country: The area is famous for its rich, fatty coconuts, and the town’s road signs are decorated with coconut images. This particular grove contains about 200 trees, yet even on this scale, gathering coconuts remains an almost entirely manual endeavor.

A team of eight humans works the trees. The men use long bamboo poles that end in a sharp, curved blade. When it’s not long enough—some of the trees appear to be nearly 60 feet tall—they add steel-cored bamboo extensions. Ai Thong can pick individual coconuts more nimbly than the average Thai homeowner, but these workers knock down entire bunches of as many as six coconuts with a single cut, resulting in an almost airplane-like WHOOSH as they fly through the air and a nearly ground-shaking THUD when they hit and scatter. Female workers follow, separating the bunches with machetes, and spearing and tossing the coconuts into piles with a harpoon-like tool.

“The groves are rough, they aren’t level, so we can’t really use machines to gather coconuts,” Booncherd tells me, when I ask why automation doesn’t appear to play a role in coconut harvesting. He adds that workers also have the ability to select only the most mature coconuts, which machines can’t do. “The gatherers here know what to look for; they’ve harvested from these same trees before.”

After being loaded into a tractor pulling a truck bed, the coconuts are transferred to Chaokoh’s local processing center, at which point they are husked, their juice is collected, and they are chopped roughly and sent to Bangkok, where they’ll be grated and squeezed to make coconut milk and cream.

“At most, we’ll get about 3,000 coconuts today, but this is low,” explains Booncherd, citing last year’s scant rainfall as the source of this year’s scarcity.

The contents of an entire 7-Eleven aren’t enough to bribe Ai Thong to pick this many coconuts in a single day. But the next time you’re drinking a bottle of coconut water, keep in mind that those coconuts were gathered by people, in a way that’s changed little, if at all, in centuries.

Just another day in Hawaiian conservation.

In 2017, botanist Ken Wood ran into an old friend in the forest. He was wading through a thicket of ʻōhiʻa trees in a private valley in Kauaʻi, taking an inventory of rare plants for his job at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the island. It was fairly routine work—collecting specimens, recording their GPS locations, and describing the other plants growing in the area—until he spotted something familiar, a spiky green plant with purple, tongue-like flowers bursting from the trunk like stars. It was Cyanea kuhihewa, a rare Hawaiian lobelioid that Wood himself had first discovered almost 30 years ago, and was, until recently, believed to be extinct. “When I saw the Cyanea, time stopped,” he says. “I knew exactly what it was because of my intimate relationship with it.”

This newly discovered population of C. kuhihewa has allowed the National Tropical Botanic Garden a new chance at saving the species, according to a recent study in Plants, People, Planet, coauthored by Wood.

When Wood first discovered C. kuhihewa in 1991, he thought it was an entirely different species: C. linearifolia, which actually is extinct. He and a team of botanists from the botanic garden had helicoptered to the headwaters of a very remote, very tall waterfall in the Limahuli Valley in northern Kauaʻi. They weren’t looking for anything in particular, and were just set on surveying the plants growing in the remote and unexplored area. “But we were all talking about [C. linearifolia] that day,” Wood says. “It was one of those species that’s in my subconscious that I kept in the back of my mind to look for.” At the time, C. linearifolia was the only species of Hawaiian lobelioid (in the bellflower family) known to have narrow, linear leaves—hence its name—and was last seen in 1957, presumed extinct due to the invasive weeds and rats that plague Kauaʻi.

Wood spotted a large tree sprouting near the plunge pool at the top of the waterfall and decided to forge ahead, alone. He scaled it with the help of his spiked, split-toe jika-tabi shoes, and once on top, spotted unusual Cyaneas that looked a lot like C. linearifolia. He climbed to the plant and collected a specimen for study. “I remember thinking, there is some magic out there in the universe,” Wood says. “I laughed.” Everyone else on the team quite reasonably agreed the plant must represent the rediscovery of the extinct species, and the Hawaiian botanical community rejoiced.

Wood’s specimen eventually went to Thomas Lammers, a botanist at the Field Museum in Chicago, who realized something was amiss. Wood’s Cyanea had flatter leaves and larger flowers than the reference sample of C. linearifolia. Lammers concluded, surprisingly and maybe a little sadly, that Wood had actually discovered an entirely new species of Cyanea, and that C. linearifolia must still be extinct. The new species was named C. kuhihewa—in Hawaiian, kuhihewa means “to suppose wrongly”—and, like many species in Hawaiʻi, immediately declared critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Just a year later, however, Hurricane Iniki destroyed much of the canopy forest at Limahuli, paving the way for invasive rats, slugs, and plant diseases to colonize the area. The only known population of C. kuhihewa declined until the last known plant died in 2003, according to the study. This kind of blinking out is tragic but common in Hawaiian conservation, where dwindling populations of endemic species are attacked on both natural and unnatural fronts. “With one single population, you need just one landslide and it’s gone,” says Nina Rønsted, the director of research and conservation at the National Tropical Botanical Garden. Scientists from the garden are still searching for the last known wild ‘ōlulu plant, which may have died since it was spotted in 2013 in Kauaʻi. And in late 2019, the garden rediscovered a rare cousin of the hibiscus that was discovered in 1991 and declared extinct in 2016.

But C. kuhihewa never left Wood’s mind. Many of the areas he surveys are deep valleys or steep cliffs accessible only by helicopter. There was always the chance of other populations of C. kuhihewa, but finding them would take some time. In 2017, Wood found himself in the right kind of habitat, just a few deep valleys away from where the species was originally found. He’d flown in by helicopter, to a remote ridge thick with matting ferns. It was his last day in the valley, and his last chance to make this kind of discovery in the area. So when Wood saw three individual plants with long, narrow leaves, he didn’t have to hesitate. “The magic was here again,” he says. “Time stopped again, and it was silent. I felt this type of elation, a kind of endorphins, a high.”

Luckily, since 2017, no landslide or hurricane has come for Wood’s new population, but the botanical garden is taking no chances. Botanists have installed a thicket of rat traps to prevent the rodents from dining on the plant’s seeds. Wood visits the population often to collect those seeds to propagate the plants in the garden’s facility. When they sprout, they’ll be planted around the Limahuli Valley to increase C. kuhihewa’s chance at survival. “We currently have about seven plants in our nursery,” Rønsted says. “We hope to get 30 to 50 plants out in the Limahuli area, so that it becomes a resilient, sustainable population that can thrive.”

Meanwhile, Wood is still on the lookout for any new populations of C. kuhihewa in the wild that could increase the species’ genetic diversity. “Discovering this new population gives us a new chance to save this thing, as we didn’t make it last time,” Wood says. “But there’s always more hope.”

“One animal’s waste is another animal’s banquet.”

Antarctica is sometimes called the great white continent—but it’s not uncommon for expanses of snow to look reddish-pink, as though a giant has spilled some Kool-Aid, or, less charmingly, a terrible bloodbath has recently taken place. The phenomenon is neither whimsical nor gruesome: It’s caused by teeming communities of algae.

The algae known as Chlamydomonas nivalis gives the landscape its unusual hue. The phenomenon is also known as “watermelon snow.” At some points in the year, the algae makes the snow appear green; at other times, sherbet pink or berry red. “Snow algae have an interesting life cycle, with the ability to modify their pigmentation in order to adapt to changing seasons and environmental conditions,” says Alia Khan, an assistant professor in environmental sciences at Western Washington University. The algae is green during its reproductive stage, and then looks pink or red when it’s dormant.

It’s a seasonal shift, adds Ted Scambos, a polar scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who has made 20 visits to Antarctica. Red algae is a sign of “autumn colors in Antarctica,” Scambos says, in the same way that ochre or mustard-colored leaves mark the fall in deciduous forests. It turns red, he says, as it "hunkers down, so to speak, for the winter.” (Autumn is just arriving in Antarctica, and the continent will soon stare down a long, cold winter.)

In both phases—red and green—the algae will absorb solar radiation, says Khan. That lowers the reflectivity of the snow, causing a bit of melt and helping the algae to access more liquid water, which it needs to survive. During the red portion of its life, the algae contains much more of a pigment called astaxanthin than chlorophyll, the pigment that makes many plants green.

The other key ingredient is pooping critters. On its own, snow doesn’t necessarily possess much in the way of nutrients—but when penguins poop, they set the stage for other life. “One animal’s waste is another animal’s banquet,” says Scambos. When it comes to the poop, “a little goes a long way,” he adds. “Dust from dry poop is enough to fertilize a snow bank so algae can colonize it.”

The red wash is a common yearly sight, but the scale varies. “Every year, you might get some right by the coastal area, where the waves are lapping up, but this year it bloomed over a much wider region,” Scambos says. Antarctica recently logged its hottest day on record, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory—on February 6, the northern tip of the continent was roughly the same temperature as Los Angeles, California—and it’s been a big season for the algae. Scambos spotted it all along the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula in early February, while lecturing on a cruise ship sailing from Argentina.

Though some earlier research suggested that the algae might only thrive in very cold conditions, a team from the University of Innsbruck and the University of Salzburg, in Austria, studying alpine snow algae in the Austrian Alps, found that it could hang in there when temperatures warmed. Writing in the the European Journal of Phycology in 2005, they reported that C. nivalis could still produce oxygen (at least for a short time) when the temperature rose to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

As Antarctica warms, Scambos suspects that “watermelon snow” will become more widespread at higher elevations and farther from the coast.

This should probably go without saying, but: If you do get up close to it, don’t be tempted by its resemblance to sorbet. “It would not be wise to consume any of this algae,” Scambos says. Not only is it mildly toxic to humans, he says, you can also rest assured that it’s fueled by something foul: “It’s an indication that there are other things in the snow that you wouldn’t want to consume,” Scambos says. (He means poop.)

Traces from the ancient past are hidden in photographs from the Cold War.

In a darkened room of the U.S. National Archives, we stand over a light table, a special backlit surface for viewing film. Our gloved hands slowly turn heavy metal rolls of 9.5-inch-wide film, unspooling our way back in time to the Middle East of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Black-and-white negatives offer a bird’s-eye view of sinuous rivers lined with date palm tree gardens; villages ringed by agricultural fields; the occasional city, crowded with houses, markets, and mosques; and vast tracks of barren steppe-desert punctuated by dirt paths, isolated sheepfolds, or remote air strips. Among these rural and urban scenes, a careful viewer can also find traces of ancient and historical settlements and land use.

These images come from a special collection of footage. In the late 1950s, U-2 spy planes flew at around 70,000 feet over Cold War hotspots in Europe and Asia, capturing images that could show details as small as a person.

They aimed to cover places of interest for military intelligence such as foreign bases, airfields, and potential nuclear weapons facilities. But buried within the film rolls were high-resolution photos of historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sites and landscapes.

The U.S. government declassified many U-2 images in 1997, making them freely available to researchers and the public. But they remained unindexed and unscanned. There was no way to access the images digitally, nor could people highlight the particularly interesting frames or know where geographically each roll of film was taken.

In the past four years, with my archaeologist colleague Jason Ur at Harvard University, I (a landscape archaeologist) have worked to make this complex photo archive accessible to other researchers and to illustrate its importance for history and anthropology. The result is a resource that we hope many scholars can take advantage of, a window into ancient sites as well as historical Middle Eastern communities as they existed more than half a century ago.

Many people wonder why we don’t just look at modern satellite imagery. Surely newer technologies, they think, provide the best photos?

Satellite imagery—as many people know from Google Earth—has increased in resolution in recent years, allowing us to see finer details when we look at our neighborhoods and parks from an aerial view. But for archaeology and history, the newest images are not always the best ones.

Archaeology, in many ways, is a race against time. Humans are continually transforming the earth’s surface, erasing traces of the past. The rate of those transformations has accelerated in recent decades.

Old aerial images allow archaeologists to travel back in time. They transport us to the mid-20th century, before urban expansion, development, and agricultural intensification wiped away the surface traces of ancient communities, many of which had survived for millennia. Archival images can also provide a times series showing where 20th-century communities lived and how their lives and environments changed.

An observer can see things from the air that might not be obvious from the ground. The buried remains of ancient canals, fields, roads, or paths sometimes cause differences in the soils’ moisture, salinity, or chemistry. These changes in turn affect plant growth. Vegetation in the shallow but possibly moister soils above an old, buried stone wall, for example, may be thicker or thinner than plants just to the side in deeper, better-draining soils. The patterns created by such changes—such as long straight lines—are only noticeable when viewed from afar.

Scholars often liken it to the result of stepping away from the blobs of paint in an impressionist artwork. Take a few steps back and a meaningless cluster of colors becomes a woman with a parasol on a riverbank.

It isn’t a new idea for archaeologists and human ecologists to use historical aerial and satellite images. A lot of work has focused, for example, on images from the United States’ first-ever spy satellite program, CORONA, designed to image Cold War hotspots in a less dangerous way than from a U-2 airplane.

From the safety of space, CORONA cameras captured many high-resolution photos from 1967 to 1972. In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton declassified CORONA imagery, and the images have subsequently led to the discovery of many fascinating archaeological features in the Middle East, such as 4,500-year-old road networks in northern Syria and paleochannels of rivers and canals modified over thousands of years in Iraq.

This imagery also has limitations. CORONA photos only have a resolution of about 2 meters per pixel, too grainy to see anything but the largest walls of ancient buildings.

Further, some parts of the Middle East had experienced so much development by the late 1960s that many archaeological surface traces had already been erased. I have worked with historical imagery throughout my career and have always wished for older, more detailed imagery than what CORONA could offer.

In late 2012, Jason Ur met Lin Xu, a digital imaging expert who had gone to the National Archives to hunt down U-2 images of his hometown in China. Ur invited me to take a look at the images, which can approach a resolution of 30 to 50 centimeters per pixel, comparable to or greater than the resolution of most of the best imagery on Google Earth today. When we saw the amazing quality of the photos, we knew that it would be worth the detective work it would take to build a systematic index.

The very first film roll I browsed in my initial trip to the archives in 2015 began with the usual rivers, steppes, and towns in grayscale. Then, partway through the roll, an intensely white negative frame came into view, brightening the whole room. With the turn of the spool, I was suddenly flying over the black basalt desert of the eastern panhandle of Jordan.

The negatives’ blinding brightness was caused by mesmerizing geological patterns: The desert’s dominant surface rock formations are dark, marbled by bands of lighter sediment deposits. But within this landscape, human hands had moved hundreds of stones into distinctive shapes.

Star, diamond, or cloudburst-shaped enclosures connected to long stone lines, marking ancient gazelle hunting traps called “desert kites.” More mysterious circular stone structures resembled spoked wheels. Clusters of dwelling foundations or animal corrals dotted the regions around the kites and wheels and also more empty areas. The region today is sparsely inhabited, but nearly every negative over hundreds of frames showed dozens of features evidencing earlier human activity.

These features weren’t previously unknown to archaeologists. But having so many high-resolution photos from so long ago, and over such a broad area, is a unique resource. I was stunned by the sheer number of structures and the clarity of the desert kites in the images.

The work in the archives is cumbersome sometimes. It would be tedious if it weren’t for the fact that the images are so interesting and occasionally beautiful.

As I turn the spool of a film roll, there is a sense of exploration and discovery: I can visually re-create the pilot’s journey. Sometimes the plane flies over regions I know by heart, and I almost hold my breath, hoping that the plane veers just a little to the right or left to capture a place I really want to see—but as it looked 60 years ago.

To work with U-2 images, we first have to order film rolls from the National Archives’ “Ice Cube” preservation facility in Lenexa, Kansas, for delivery to the Aerial Film Section in College Park, Maryland. We unspool hundreds of meters of film over a light table, identify frames from sites already known to be of archaeological interest, photograph the negatives in pieces using a 100-mm macro lens, and then stitch them together and invert them in Photoshop.

Images taken from planes or satellites are distorted because the lens never has a perfectly vertical perspective. We geo-reference each frame in digital mapping software to geometrically correct it and give it real-world coordinates.

This process creates an image that we can use to map the particular place that it happens to cover. In addition, if we want to find U-2 frames covering a particular place, we have to generate a spatial index, which requires additional work.

We first tried searching CREST, the CIA’s database of declassified records, for documents concerning U-2 missions. However, the geographic coordinates in these documents were not very accurate, and some missions did not have declassified coordinates at all. If a CIA index of U-2 missions exists, it has not been declassified.

To generate our own spatial index, we turned to skinny 2.75-inch rolls of “tracking film” captured by a second camera on the U-2 planes. Unlike the main camera, which offers high-resolution images over stretches of the flight where it was activated by the pilot, tracking frames show low-resolution, horizon-to-horizon views under the plane throughout the entire flight. That means we have a much broader view, making it easier to recognize ground features. We matched this tracking film to modern satellite imagery to accurately reconstruct the path of the U-2 planes’ missions.

For example, we found that mission 8648 departed the İncirlik Air Base at Adana, Turkey, on October 30, 1959. It flew over western Syria, then over the desert to the Turkish border at Qamishli. The pilot turned east to visit Iraqi cities, made an extended detour south to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, then returned to western Iraq. After following the Iraqi-Syrian border north, the plane snaked its way back across Syria to Adana in the late afternoon.

Throughout the almost nine-hour journey, the plane flew close to 7,000 km and captured 5,053 frames in 39 rolls of film, plus 1,006 frames from the tracking camera. Among this single mission’s photographs are amazing images of the ziggurat (temple pyramid) at the early Mesopotamian city of Ur, the walls of the Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh, and the ruins of the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital at Raqqa.

Nineveh, in modern Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, in Syria, have suffered over the last decades in the face of urban development, and, since 2014, from deliberate acts of destruction by the Islamic State. Today ancient Ur is in the middle of the desert, but U-2 photos show paleochannels of the Euphrates River surrounding the city—features that are no longer visible due to the massive expansion of the adjacent Nasiriyah Airport.

Mission 8648 photos also show ethnographically important environments and communities that have since totally disappeared: most significantly, the drained marshes of southern Iraq, and hundreds of Marsh Arab villages within them. From the 1970s onward, these marshes progressively shrank as hydroelectric dams impounded the Tigris and Euphrates floodwaters that once sustained them.

In the 1990s, then-President Saddam Hussein systematically drained what was left, forcing marsh dwellers to abandon an ancient way of life. But the island villages, woven reed huts, networks of boat paths, and expansive reed forests that sustained that way of life remain preserved in U-2 photos.

In May 2019, we finally published our online, interactive guide for U-2 images of the Middle East, as well as a how-to guide for reproducing and working with the images.

The scale of this project is immense—both in terms of the work that we have already done and future work that others could do. The total number of U-2 missions is unknown, but must be in the hundreds.

We worked with the available film generated by all Middle East missions for which the National Archives has declassified film. Just these 11 missions generated 357 rolls of film holding 46,561 frames. Over four years of work, we have processed a few hundred of these frames for our own research projects.

Right now, our index only covers the Middle East, because we happen to actively conduct archaeological work there. But our published methods could be used by others to piece together indexes for other regions covered by the U-2 program, especially formerly Soviet Eastern Europe, the formerly Soviet Central Asian republics, and China.

We hope that the online resources we have created will enable other anthropologists and historians to search the U-2 photo archives for images relevant to their own research projects. For broader audiences, the photos provide a fascinating historical look at the Middle East—showing, for example, Old Aleppo long before the massive destruction wrought in the Syrian Civil War.

We believe the project exemplifies how open-access archival data from the U.S. government can benefit the public and researchers across disciplines—historians, environmental scientists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and more. Thanks to the U-2 program, anthropologists have an exciting new source of historical data on archaeological sites and landscapes—as well as the settlement and land-use patterns of 20th-century communities whose ways of life have since disappeared.

This work first appeared on SAPIENS under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license. Read the original here.

Indigenous farmers in Utah are championing an ancient spud.

On December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama designated Utah’s Bears Ears as a national monument. Named for its twin buttes rising from the Colorado Plateau, Bears Ears is a sacred landscape for five tribes: the Ute Mountain Ute, Uintah Ouray Ute, Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni. But less than a year later, President Donald Trump ordered an 85 percent reduction in the protected lands.

For the first time in history, Native American tribes called upon a U.S. president to protect ancestral lands under the Antiquities Act. The monument reduction is currently being challenged in court. And for some, the fight has been inspired by an ancient tuber.

“The potato is a model example of why Bears Ears needs to be protected,” says Cynthia Wilson.

Wilson is the Traditional Foods Program director of Utah Diné Bikéyah, a Native American-led non-profit that works to protect culturally significant ancestral lands. The potato is the Solanum jamesii, also known as the Four Corners potato. Native to North America and abundantly found in the Four Corners region of Arizona and New Mexico, its existence in Utah was previously unknown to researchers. But in 2010, Lisbeth Louderback, assistant professor of anthropology and curator of archaeology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, began analyzing stone tools recovered from an ancestral site near Escalante, Utah. On them, she found plant residues that resembled potato starch.

It is well known that ancient indigenous people in North America cultivated corn, beans, and squash. But finding evidence of potato consumption in North America, from long before they were thought to have been domesticated in the Andes, came as a surprise. The potatoes the world is most familiar with today are Solanum tuberosum, descended from a wild potato domesticated in South America approximately 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.

In 2013, botanist Bruce Pavlik was surveying the flora around the same ancient structures. There, Pavlik found a wild Solanum jamesii plant growing within 100 meters of the site, with the same microscopic characteristics as the residue found on the tools.

This was the first time that scientists had identified the Four Corners potato still growing at an ancestral site. Since then, it has been found growing in isolated regions in southern Utah, but only adjacent indigenous sites, suggesting that ancient people cultivated and transported the tiny, speckled potato throughout the southwest. It may be the first example of a plant domesticated in the western United States.

It’s a finding that’s “kind of staggering,” notes Pavlik, director of conservation at the Red Butte Garden on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City. “Where else can you say that a plant has been eaten at that same spot for 10,900 years?”

Pavlik collected samples from the site and began propagating them at Red Butte Garden. He wanted to grow the potato with respect for native culture, so he invited Four Corners-area tribe members into the process, giving indigenous farmers a head start on its cultivation. “It was, in fact, their potato,” says Pavlik.

Louderback and Pavlik approached Wilson in 2015 for help understanding how these potatoes may have gotten established on ancestral lands. It was through their work together that they learned that native elders still remembered the Four Corners potato, and that some still grow it or harvest it throughout the Colorado Plateau, including in the Bears Ears region.

Wilson herself was born and raised in a traditional Diné, or Navajo, family in Monument Valley, Utah. Her grandfather was a well-known medicine man who taught her the importance of indigenous food traditions. She always knew she wanted to pursue a career in healthcare. She notes that locally high rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer in her community are largely tied to the loss of traditional food knowledge and environmental issues, such as abandoned uranium mines and landscape degradation. “I am really interested in how my upbringing of traditional knowledge can help address a lot of these issues, when we are talking about reclaiming who we are as Diné people,” says Wilson, who holds a Masters of Science degree in Nutrition from the University of Utah.

Wilson first became involved with Utah Diné Bikéyah while advocating for the designation of a Bears Ears National Monument. The area is home to cliff dwellings, rock art, and burial sites, and remains an important resource for medicinal plants and subsistence hunting for native people today. Without adequate protection, sacred sites and ancestral foods, including the Four Corners potato, remain under threat from oil and gas exploration, mineral extraction, and other development.

The goal of Utah Diné Bikéyah’s Traditional Foods Program is to restore, strengthen, and celebrate Native American food culture. “Reclaiming local traditional food systems helps tribes heal from past wounds, and respects our intellectual property by allowing us to lead our own cultural revitalization as sovereign nations,” says Wilson.

Wilson spent her first two years as Traditional Foods Program director conducting traditional foods assessments and gathering information. “I really wanted the program to be guided by the voices of my elders, knowledge holders, and medicine people,” she says. Now, she’s excited about implementing this knowledge into practice, and restoring the Four Corners potato to prominence.

In 2018, the Traditional Foods program advertised throughout the Four Corners region to find native farmers interested in cultivating the ancient potato. Seven indigenous farmers, representing both the Pueblo and Diné traditions, traveled to Red Butte Garden in the spring of 2019 to discuss the potato with researchers. The farmers then returned in the fall to help with the harvest. Each farmer went home with a sack of tubers to begin their own growing operations in 2020.

According to Wilson, “they’ll be incorporating their own traditional farming methods, using their own traditional knowledge.” The project has also been awarded a Native American Agriculture Fund grant that will assist with irrigation needs and farming support.

To Pavlik and his researchers, working with the Four Corners potato has been a dream project. “I’ve done a lot of projects in my career and none of them have taken off like this,” says Pavlik. Shares of last year’s fall harvest went to local Bears Ears and Escalante-area restaurants, creating a future market for indigenous farmers. Wilson says the Four Corners potato tastes very similar to the domesticated white potato, but with a hint of earthiness. She also says it’s much more filling, and a “tiny superfood,” with three times the protein and twice the amount of calcium and iron than an organic red potato.

The Four Corners potato is much more than a delicious ingredient. “This potato is strong, resilient, and it is still here,” says Wilson, symbolizing her own community. “Native Americans are still here. We embrace the values of traditional knowledge as science.” And while the Four Corners potato may be small, it’s only the beginning of what respect for Native traditions can bring, both to scientific understanding and the stewardship of public lands.

The humanist scholar fudged a language into existence.

There’s a rhyme and reason to most made-up languages. Tenses and conjugations, turns of phrase and various voices—sometimes constructed languages, or conlangs, are even more complicated than long-extant lingos. Yet others, even when made to represent lofty ideas, are quite crude, with language rules akin to Pig Latin.

That was the case for a language invented by the 16th-century Englishman Sir Thomas More, who satirically envisioned an ideal nation with an insufficient knowledge of linguistics. More printed a map of his fictitious “perfect world,” with a quatrain in “Utopian,” in some early editions of his landmark work of fiction from 1516, Utopia.

Now a rare 1518 copy of the book, including the illusory world’s conlang, is for sale and will be presented this week among other very old books at New York City’s International Antiquarian Book Fair.

“[Utopia] is an example of that rare thing—a book that has never been out of print since its first publication,” writes Derek McDonnell, founding director of the Sydney-based bookshop Hordern House, via email. “This is the third edition of the text, but the most important of the early editions, as it has the beautiful illustrations and decorations by the two Holbeins [the German painters Ambrosius Holbein and Hans Holbein the Younger].”

Like the satirically perfect nation-state More imagined, the book Utopia was deeply flawed in the eyes of its author, and went through many different editions, sometimes excluding older bits while incorporating new information.

The work wasn’t entirely More’s, as his friend and publisher Desiderius Erasmus added some of his own musings. The unique Utopian alphabet, printed opposite a map of the made-up world, was either the brainchild of More himself or of his friend Pieter Gillis, another humanist printer, who claimed to be responsible for the cryptic language’s inclusion.

Nor was it the first conlang. That distinction goes to the Lingua Ignota, or “unknown language,” of the famous 12th-century polymath Hildegard of Bingen. But while Hildegard used her script in real life, More's Utopian was intended only to introduce readers (it appears at the front of the book) to an alien place where religious tolerance and universal education were par for the course. Imagine that.

The characters in the Utopian language walk the line between Greek and geometric runes. There is no casing, just large circles, squares, triangles and lines, with various accents attached. It would be gobbledygook if not for its accompanying Latin translation, which speaks to the creation of Utopia and its singularity as a philosophical—and aspirational—place.

“The alphabet reflects a general humanist preoccupation with classical Greek culture,” says Per Sivefors, a literary scholar at Linnaeus University in Sweden who specializes in early modern writing. “A word like gymnosophaon is clearly made up to sound Greek.”

“Beyond that,” he says, “I believe More and his humanist circle enjoyed using the available technology to explore a fundamental paradox at the heart of the work. The very title of course means ‘nowhere’ [More coined the word “utopia” from the Greek outopos], yet at the same time, the various visual devices, including ... the woodcut maps that were in the editions of 1516 and 1518, somehow compel us to see this as a ‘real’ place populated by real people with a real language.”

Perhaps that's what makes the land of Utopia so compelling: We know a lot about its geography. The island was located off the coast of South America, More writes, and shaped like a crescent moon about 500 miles around. Like Atlantis or Jurassic Park, the more it feels like a real place—complete with tangible cultural artifacts like a map and a language—the more achievable it seems.

Perhaps More could’ve done with a more Utopian setting himself. His life ended, after all, at the sharp end of an executioner’s axe, after the senior statesman refused to endorse King Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Perhaps the rarest edition of Utopia (only six are known), the classic for sale here will boast a price tag of $81,000. A hefty sum for some, but a small price to pay, some would say, for an early musing on what the world could be.

In the frigid city of Iqaluit, Canada, a men's jail has become an unlikely part of the art market.

Of all the places to buy Inuit art in the Canadian Arctic, one of the most unusual is the minimum-security jail in Iqaluit, capital of the territory of Nunavut. The jail isn’t on the maps handed out to tourists. It sits between downtown and the airport, and taxi drivers know it simply as “new jail.” On Federal Road, below a small Department of Justice Crest, a sign shows photos of a drum-dancer sculpture and traditional fur boots, with the words “Makigiarvik Clothing and Carving Sales” in English and Inuktitut.

In the Inuktitut language, “Makigiarvik” means “to go through hard times and start over.” This men’s jail, Makigiavrik Correctional Centre, was named in consultation with Inuit elders. Every Friday, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., it hosts a sale of everything from soapstone carvings to crocheted hats to animal bone jewelry. “Typically, we sell out every week,” says Jean-Pierre Deroy, Nunavut’s Director of Corrections. “Word of mouth in this town goes very quickly.” Sometimes, there are crafts and carvings from the nearby women’s jail.

Makigiarvik is a territorial jail for men who are awaiting trial for a range of alleged crimes, or who are serving sentences of less than two years. (Longer sentences are typically served in federal prisons.) Locals tend to know when a renowned carver has been arrested—and they know that carvings here are priced to sell quickly, so the artists can help support their families.

Tall fences surround the jail. Once inside, visitors will find a reception area that features a large glass cabinet filled with carvings. Most visitors don’t get to meet the carvers, who work on weekdays for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. But on a dark December day, I arrive at 3 p.m. with special permission to interview some. I’m warned not to photograph any doors, for security reasons. In a fenced-in, outdoor area, two carvers are working with grinders and files, wearing winter overalls, steel-toed boots, safety goggles, and ear protectors.

Elijah Jonah, a marine engineer from Iqaluit, is making a black soapstone raven and a green owl that he expects to price at around $230 in U.S. dollars. Usually, he sells his carvings at the local museum or restaurants—not the local galleries, “because they’re the ones making the profits.” He says the carving program gives him “something to do outdoors, something I like to do, and get paid for it.” He has experimented with roses, hunters, drum dancers, and even a Guy Fawkes mask.

Toonoo Sharkey, a full-time artist from Cape Dorset, works on an abstract bird. He’s been carving since he was 10, so his work is more elaborate, priced from $610 to $1,500. He sells his creations through the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, or a shop owner who wholesales to southern Canada. He sends money from jail sales to his family for food and clothes.

David Ross Pugh, a cook who is working on a loon, says that carving in jail “is like going to see a psychiatrist. You’ve got a piece of stone. You’ve got a file. All your anger, all your stress, all your effort goes into that piece of stone.” Otherwise, he adds, he’d dwell on his mistakes.

Here in Nunavut, temperatures stay well below freezing for most of the year, and the average yearly snowfall would have to be measured in feet, not inches. Around 38,000 people live in 25 remote, fly-in communities that aren’t connected by roads. About 85 percent are Inuit whose ancestors have lived for centuries in what is now Northern Canada, Alaska, and Greenland, and whose way of life traditionally revolved around the land, family, hunting, and fishing.

Indigenous people—Inuit, First Nations and Métis—have long been overrepresented in the Canadian criminal justice system. A recent federal report found that around 30 percent of the people incarcerated in provincial, territorial, and federal facilities are Indigenous, even though they make up just four percent of the adult population. They tend to be jailed younger, denied bail more often, and granted parole less often. These are some of the devastating impacts of colonialism, residential schools, intergenerational trauma, racism, and socioeconomic inequity.

To case workers at the jail, the carving program is about therapy and helping families. They buy soapstone, sell it to the men at cost, and the carvers keep 80 percent from each sale. They can use it at the canteen, for stuff like snacks and toiletries, or send it home. The other 20 percent goes to the system, which says it spends the money on communal carving supplies, coffee machines, treadmills, and PlayStations.

Ryan Farrell, one of the case workers, says he sees “a lot of anticipation” during Friday sales at the jail. Musicians, actors, the prime minister’s security team, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have all been customers. I first visited in 2017, and bought two pieces. Though it’s not Friday when I visit for the second time, I’m given permission to buy Pugh’s $65 Spirit Loon and two polar bear sculptures by Eegeesiak Shoo. (Sharkey’s mesmerizing sculptures are out of my price range, and Jonah’s rare raven isn’t finished.)

Inuit artists have long created stone carvings, fur clothing, and ivory tools, and historically traded them with settlers for things like guns, ammunition, sugar, and tea. Art sales really started in 1949 at an exhibit in Montreal, according to Darlene Coward Wight, curator of Inuit art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery since 1986. The gallery’s historic Inuit Art Centre is slated to open later this year in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to showcase the world’s largest collection of Inuit art, culture, and history.

Wight hasn’t been to the Friday jail sales, and rarely stops in Iqaluit when she travels north to meet Inuit artists and do research in smaller communities. (Those communities don’t typically have museums, jail sales, or informal restaurant sales; some don’t even have restaurants.) But she likes the idea. “The practice by the jail in Iqaluit of allowing inmates to create carvings to support their families is a good one,” says Wight. “That income is welcome as the largely male population is not able to hunt or otherwise provide for their families while incarcerated. It allows established carvers to maintain or improve their level of skill.”

Wight adds that most Canadians and visiting collectors buy Inuit art from galleries in the south, and never visit Nunavut or the artists who live there. Carvings Nunavut, a local Inuit-owned company, will send carvings around the world.

Nunavut is only a three-hour flight from Ottawa, but the most affordable flights cost at least as much as a transatlantic flight, and few tourists make the journey. Hotels and meals are expensive. Outside of Iqaluit, communities such as Pangnirtung, known for its crocheted hats and tapestries made at the Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts & Crafts, have only one hotel. Some communities do get occasional batches of visitors, though: Cape Dorset, renowned for its limited-edition prints, attracts cruise ships that allow artists to make cash sales on the street or in a local community hall.

There are, of course, other ways to buy art in Iqaluit—namely, going to a restaurant or bar and waiting for artists to come by with carvings, prints, sealskin bracelets, and tiny sealskin owls on strings, which double as Christmas tree ornaments. It’s a northern thing—elsewhere in Canada, everything is sold in stores. The Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association tags all Inuit art with the artist’s name and home community, along with the artwork title, material, price, and date it was created.

In a community where food prices are many times the prices in large Canadian cities, haggling is frowned upon, whether in public places or at the jail. “Many artists live by art only,” says Eva Aariak, the former premier of Nunavut and owner of a boutique called Malikkaat, which specializes in sealskin clothing, carvings, and jewelry. “Don’t worry about getting ripped off,” an old- timer tells me at the Royal Canadian Legion. “If you like it, buy it.”

The gift shop of a local nonprofit, Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum, is said to have great deals. Jessica Kotierk, a manager and curator, add a 40 percent mark-up on the art she purchases. But she pays up front in cash, and believes artists undervalue their work, so she sometimes offers more.

On a dark and blustery December afternoon, when Iqaluit only gets a few hours of daylight each day, Lucassie Kilabuk wanders in with seal-claw earrings and a necklace pendant. “Wow—those are so cool,” Kotierk says. “How much?” He asks for $30 each, and Kotierk quickly agrees. Then she sells one to me for $42.

The museum organizes its gift shop by artist, instead of theme, to show the scope of each person’s work. On a shelf full of polar bear, walrus, and inuksuit carvings, one of the names jumps out at me: Eegeesiak Shoo, whom I met in Makigiarvik jail while he was finishing up a walrus.

Shoo appreciates the ability to carve in jail, because it allows him to send several hundred dollars to his family each week and make purchases in the canteen. He lives in Iqaluit and prefers to sell to the museum, “because they give me the price I want.” On the outside, he also makes the rounds of the bars and restaurants. Sometimes, he says, people just drive up to his home in the nearby community of Apex, where he carves outside when he’s not doing his day job as a maintenance worker. “I’m a carver,” he says. “When I’m not working, I’m carving.”

No migration is too far for healthy skin.

Marine biologists have long debated what drives whales to undertake the longest migrations of any mammal on earth. The answer, it turns out, may be as simple as skin care.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper in Marine Mammal Science by Robert Pitman, of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, and colleagues. Adding to work that the team reported in 2012, the new data comes from 62 satellite-tagged killer whales, which make six- to eight-week winter migrations from Antarctica to the edge of the tropics and back.

Analyses of the whales’ behavior strongly suggests that sloughing the skin—and thereby letting loose a heavy film of microorganisms that congregate on whales in cold water—is what drives the mammals’ movements. It’s the whale’s version of a spa vacation (complete with a good all-over scrubbing) in the tropics.

All mammals and birds shed (and replace) their skin or feathers regularly—a process called molting. (We humans actually lose our entire outer layer, flake by flake, every two to four weeks; for each of us that adds up to about a pound of keratin per year.) Whales are no exception. And they carry a lot of extra stuff as well, especially diatoms—a form of algae—that attach to their skin with sucker-like valves.

Whalers in the early 1900s were aware of this phenomenon: They referred to whales with infested bellies as “Sulphur bottoms.”

Meanwhile, many whale species travel thousands of miles in winter toward the tropical waters of the equator, then back to food-rich cold seas to feed in summer. (Gray whales are the superstars of this epic migration, swimming more than 12,000 miles between breeding grounds off Baja, California, and feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska and Russia, respectively.)

Theories as to why abound. One is that calves do better—that is, grow larger and are more likely to survive—when they’re born in warm waters. Another posits that adults are able to feed and save energy (despite the long trip) by wintering in warm waters when polar areas are especially cold and light on prey. A third idea is that whales—especially baleen whales—escape predatory killer whales hungry for calves by moving to lower latitudes, where these animals are less common.

These explanations may apply in some cases. But the story of Antarctic killer whales suggests a different prime mover.

The orcas make their long-distance round-trip migrations of nearly 6,000 miles at high speed (five to 12 miles per hour), sometimes more than once a year, without major food stops, and with abrupt turnabouts to head back to Antarctica. Rather than taking months to travel, as some whales do, they zoom back and forth in just weeks. There’s little time on these journeys to feed or give birth—and, anyway, a new calf would be hard pressed to keep up with the adults on such a speedy return to Antarctica.

Scientists believe that orcas can and do give birth in cold water. And if calving were the reason to head north, it’s unlikely that males and non-breeders would take part in the migrations.

What whales of all species can’t do in icy seas is slough their skin—which needs to occur regularly to allow for wounds to heal and new epidermal growth. “We’ve seen killer whales so heavily coated it looks like fouling on a ship’s hull,” Pitman says, noting that this could affect swim performance (though it may also be somewhat insulating in cold waters).

To shed the funky stuff, he explains, blood must be flowing to the skin. But when the whales are feeding in Antarctica, “they could retain body heat by not shunting blood to the surface,” which would impede the molting process.

Returning from their trip to the tropics, however, the whales are squeaky clean—having shed the diatoms plus any parasites or harmful bacteria that have glommed on. (The whales’ speedy swimming may help loosen the old skin.) Molting may not be the sole reason they migrate, Pitman says, “but we think it is the main driver.”

“It’s a novel and exciting idea,” says conservation biologist Joe Roman of the University of Vermont, who was not involved in the study. “And it leads us to think about these movements in a new way.”

Before commercial whaling drastically reduced their numbers, millions of large whales used to move annually many thousands of miles—what Roman calls “a great whale conveyor belt of energy.” Even in smaller numbers today, “these animals bring all that biomass, releasing nutrients—carbon and nitrogen—from urine, carcasses, and placentas as they travel.”

Other organisms, from algae to sharks, benefit from those nutrients. “And now this work says, ‘Hey, there’s also all this sloughing going on, maybe even driving the movement.’”

No one has ever tried to quantify the sloughed-off skin, he says. “But as a pathway of movement for these diatoms and other microbes, it could be very meaningful ecologically.”

Pitman next intends to do the math and figure out the shed material’s ecological significance, including how much of a resource it is for other species. In tropical waters, “we’ve seen the surface just littered with skin, with gulls flying in to feed and fish coming up from below,” he says. “It definitely has an ecological impact.”

Speaking of impact, there’s a related whale-behavior question that this work may have resolved: Why do marine mammals breach—exploding out of the sea and landing with a giant smack against the surface?

They sure seem to be letting loose. And if the skin-care theory applies, that’s exactly what they have in mind.

Wind and waves sprayed freezing water from Lake Erie onto the houses of Hoover Beach.

Last week, homes along Hoover Beach in the town of Hamburg, New York, looked like gingerbread houses, polished off with a generous spackling of sugar icing. The reality was less dreamy: They were caked with thick layers of actual ice from nearby Lake Erie.

On Twitter, the retired Weather Channel winter weather expert Tom Niziol explained that this was caused by an unfortunately perfect storm—a combination of high water levels and limited ice cover, coupled with very cold temperatures and biting winds.

Typically, come winter, the water in Lake Erie—the shallowest of the Great Lakes, and usually the first to freeze—has a fair amount of ice cover, Niziol wrote. That ice is a buffer, he added, “keeping water/waves away from shore.” This year, warmer weather has kept ice at bay. On February 27, Lake Erie was entirely open water, according to the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL). That’s unusual—on average, over the last four decades, Lake Erie has had between 50 and 70 percent ice cover in February, with the percentage peaking at the end of the month.

Last week, when a small part of Lake Erie froze near Hamburg, the ice was thin and partial: quick to form and quick to melt, says Greg Lang, a physical scientist at GLERL.

And there’s a whole lot of water to slosh around. In summer 2019, Lake Erie brimmed at an all-time high, and February 2020 data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reveals that the lake is still fuller than usual, hanging 36 inches above the long-term February average. Wind and waves can loft some of that water into the air, and it can freeze and latch onto homes near the shore. Lang suspects that if the lake had been more covered with ice, the homes wouldn’t be.

Houses aren’t the only structures that can be wrapped in a freezing blanket. “I have seen similar scenes on Lake Michigan, but with lighthouses on piers,” writes Ernie Ostuno, a meteorologist with the Grand Rapids office of the National Weather Service, in an email. There, he says, houses sit farther from the shore, but the lighthouse perched on the very end of the Grand Haven South Pier, where Grand River meets Lake Michigan, often wears an icy winter coat. “Freezing spray from waves crashing against the pier can build up ice two to three feet thick,” Ostuno writes. That much ice lingers for a while, he adds. “It usually takes a couple weeks after temperatures go above freezing for it to completely melt.”

Lighthouses are designed to withstand wallops of sea spray, but houses typically are not. "It looks fake, it looks unreal," Hoover Beach resident Ed Mis told CNN, after his home was encased in ice. "It's dark on the inside of my house. It can be a little eerie, a little frightening." Ostuno estimates that a four-inch buildup of ice covering two 10-foot-by-20-foot segments of a roof would weigh roughly 3.8 tons. Mis, who chiseled his way into his home, told CNN that he’s worried that his roof can’t handle the weight, and that damage may worsen as the ice melts.

Meanwhile, the Town of Hamburg police are reminding would-be gawkers that the ice is precarious, and the homes are private property. However bewitching the scene may be, it wasn’t so enchanting for the people who experienced the chomp of the wind’s teeth. "It's a beautiful sight,” Mis told CNN. “But I don't want to live through it again.”

Hiroshima's heirloom hattanso lay dormant for a century.

Every year for decades, scientists at the Hiroshima Prefectural Agriculture Gene Bank have planted a small patch of hattanso rice. Its stalks are spring-green and spindly, its grains stubby, with a white core of endosperm visible in light. Hiroshima’s rice fields are fecund with Hattanso’s descendants, which farmers sell to sake brewers in dozens of prefectures across Japan. Hattan no. 35, which crop scientists bred in 1962, has hard grains that can withstand the polishing required for high-quality sakes. Hattan-nishiki no. 1 and 2, bred in 1984 from a cross between Hattanso and Nishiki rices, has medium-sized grains yield light sakes with an earthy tang.

Outside of the Agricultural Research Station, however, one variety of rice is conspicuously missing: hattanso itself. The cultivar hasn’t been used in sake production for decades. “Hattanso is very tall and hard to grow,” says Miho Imada, the toji, or master brewer, at the Imada Shuzo Kura, a fifth-generation sake brewery located in Akitsu, Hiroshima. “So everyone stopped growing it.” Imada spoke with Gastro Obscura via email through translator and sake expert John Gauntner, with assistance from Monica Samuels of U.S. importer Vine Connections.

Today, none of Japan's sake producers use the heirloom rice—except Imada herself. For two decades, as part of her quest to craft a sake that reflects Hiroshima’s distinct climate and agricultural heritage, or terroir, she’s been single-handedly reviving the heritage strain. “I was the only one who revived it, and even today I remain the only one who uses this rice in sake,” she says. The revival has required Imada to retrace Hiroshima’s sake history. She’s worked with local farmers to cultivate a seed they haven’t sowed in a century, and used trial and error to rediscover the perfect brewing process for a once-common, now-forgotten rice, whose folk roots make it less predictable than standardized modern cultivars.

According to sake experts, the result has been more than worth it. “It reminded me of everything that I had seen that day,” wrote Maiko Kyogoku, owner of New York’s Bessou, upon trying Imada’s hattanso-based Fukuchou Hattansou sake during a visit to the Imada kura. “The steady sparkle of the sea, the slow deliberate note of the shakuhachi, and most of all, the sake maker herself—brisk and full of grace.”

Hattanso’s rise, fall, and eventual resurrection began in Daiwa, Hiroshima Prefecture, in 1875. Two years before, the Prefecture had founded its first Agricultural Research Station. Officials were eager to document, collect, and research local agricultural specimens, part of a project of agricultural modernization that accompanied the Meiji Restoration. They had a stunning variety of cultivars to choose from: By 1894, the Research Station had already collected 500 varieties of rice, which were developed over the approximately 3,000 years that Japanese farmers have cultivated the staple crop. They were highly diverse, having been saved every year and passed down for generations.

Hattanso was the preferred local sake-brewing rice, as its large white core allowed for water absorption, which is key to the brewing process. But like many heritage cultivars, hattanso was hard to standardize. Farmers found its long stalks unwieldy, and its grains frequently broke during the brewing process, leading to uneven-quality sake. With the advent of modern plant breeding, agricultural researchers saw an opportunity to develop more standard sake-rice cultivars. Starting in 1907, they experimented with the rice, looking to breed varieties with shorter, easier-to-grow stalks and larger white cores that would be simpler to brew. By the 1980s, researchers had developed dozens of new sake-rice strains, most popular among them Hattan no. 5 and Hattan-nishiki no. 1 and 2.

But Hiroshima’s sake-loving scientists were victims of their own success. They started with hundreds of varieties of rice, each developed by farmers over generations. By 1995, however, around the time Imada started brewing, the Hiroshima government was recommending a roster of only 11 rice cultivars for local farmers. Many of these cultivars, such as the Hattan-nishiki crosses, were also bred for export to sake-producing regions around the country, leading to what heritage producers like Imada felt was a standardization in sake flavor.

In the early 2000s, a lucky accident introduced terroir back into Imada’s brewing. “One year, the seed bank had a good harvest and were left with a lot of [hattanso] seeds, more than they needed,” says Imada. “So they asked the brewers in Hiroshima if anyone wanted to try to grow it and make sake from it. I said yes.”

That willingness to try something new was typical of Imada, who had never intended to become a master brewer. She originally trained as a Noh traditional-theater artist, and was working in Tokyo in 1993 when her father asked her to return home to continue the family business. The kura had been producing small batches of highly regarded sake since 1868, even before the local government began developing modern rice strains. Imada brought new energy to an old family tradition. In 2000, she became the brewery’s first female toji, making the Imada kura one of only 50 headed by women out of Japan’s 1,500 or so kuras. She’s part of a recent rise in the number of women taking ownership of sake breweries, which were run by women in ancient times but have been male-dominated since the modern period.

Ask Imada about gender, however, and she quickly turns the conversation back to what she’s most passionate about: Hiroshima’s regional flavors. “It may be that there are very few female brewers in Japan. It’s honestly not something I think about very often,” she told Atlas Obscura. “The inspiration to make sake comes from a desire to make sake that reflects my region.”

The Hiroshima seed bank’s accidental abundance of hattanso helped Imada do just that. She turned to a local farmer, an elderly man with land near her brewery in Akitsu. No one had attempted to cultivate hattanso at this scale for decades, and the rice’s large stalks proved to be just as unwieldy as those long-ago researchers had determined. The rice also seemed to require higher altitudes to truly thrive. So Imada enlisted the help of three more farmers who grew at greater elevation. It took several more years for the farmers to grow enough rice for Imada to begin brewing. By 2006, she had started brewing Hiroshima’s first known hattanso sakes in decades.

Imada has made hattanso sake every year since. It took several years for her to determine the best way to brew with the rice. To make sake, brewers first wash and soak the milled rice, then steam it, sprinkle it with mold powder, mix some of the moldy rice with yeast, and then combine that starter, more steamed rice, and water into a sludge. The resulting mash is fermented, pressed, and filtered. A rice’s individual grain structure determines the exact timing for each of these steps, and tojis must constantly adjust the process to suit individual harvests and new cultivars.

An experienced sake sommelier can taste idiosyncrasies in the brewing process, such as whether a rice was over- or under-soaked. John Gauntner, a sake expert and Imada’s translator for this article, sensed hesitance in Imada’s initial hattanso batches, made with those early, more experimental harvests. “In my experience, often (but not always!) it takes a decade for a new rice to come into its own,” Gauntner wrote in his review of an early batch. “The first few years I tasted Fukucho made with Hattan-so, I found it just that way: astringent and tighter than most of her sake.”

Today, Imada’s is still the only kura working with hattanso. Her decade of effort to revive the heritage strain is reflected in her more recent brews. After a few years, Gauntner noted that Imada’s hattanso sakes had come to embody the flavors connoisseurs expect from her brewery: smooth, round, deep, and as gentle as the climate of Hiroshima. Indeed, this story of a Hiroshima treasure lost and then found again is reflected in Imada’s favorite hattanso sake, a junmai-shu sake, which is made without adding brewers’ alcohol, and which Imada says pairs best with “wild green vegetables” as earthy as heirloom rice. The sake’s name: Forgotten Fortune.

But without a return address.

She didn’t say so to her kids, but Julia Gogos thought the bottle would get stuck in a shrub after just a few minutes. In the absolute best-case scenario, she figured, it might drift in the Rhine River for a bit and just wash up in the Netherlands.

Seven or eight years later (it’s hard for her to remember the date with precision), Gogos was stunned to learn that this unassuming message in a bottle—deposited in the Rhine near Bonn, Germany, by Gogos, her children, and a friend and her children—had traveled much farther than she could have imagined.

“Dear Silas, Frida, Maja and Jan,” begins a letter Gogos received in the mail, addressed to the four children. “We found this message in a bottle and are sending it back from Auckland, New Zealand. It has travelled a long way!” At first, Gogos didn’t even remember what the letter was referencing. Within just a few days of having sent the bottle on its way, she says, “I never thought about it again.” Her daughter, Maja, was so young at the time that she didn’t remember sending the message at all, and Gogos had to explain what the response was.

Gogos says she got the original idea when she received an invitation in the same bottle. It wasn’t the unusual method of delivery that inspired her so much as the bottle itself. It had certain qualities—flat and rectangular, not curving and bulbous, and turquoise, rather than clear—that called to mind images from children’s storybooks. Despite being made of plastic, it looked like it would have been right at home in the hand of a pirate. And that got Gogos thinking of another storybook trope: the message in a bottle. Her children—between four and seven years old at the time—were just the right age for those kinds of stories.

So, on a sunny day, Gogos, her friend, and the kids walked to the center of town and dropped the message-bearing bottle into the Rhine. “Dear Finder,” the message read, “Please send us a letter when you find our message in a bottle.” From there, the actual journey it went on is anyone’s guess.

The Rhine originates in eastern Switzerland, then flows through much of western Germany and the central Netherlands and into the North Sea. There are many ways to drift from the North Sea to Auckland, all of them long. Gogos, of course, has no idea which route the bottle took, but each imagined possibility is better than the last.

North toward the Arctic Ocean, and then around the entire top of Russia, through the Bering Straight and all the way through the Pacific? Or did it go via the English Channel, out into the Atlantic, and from there either around the Cape of Good Hope and through the Indian Ocean, or the other way past Cape Horn and the long way across the South Pacific? Could the Northwest Passage have been involved? Or the Panama Canal? Seven or eight years is a long time to be at sea. Whichever route (or routes, because maybe it went around twice), amazingly, the message was found within a few hundred miles of Bonn's antipode—literally the opposite side of the planet from where it started.

Scott, Julia, Lea, and Alice Joy—the Auckland signatories—can’t answer these questions either, but Gogos and her family badly want to get in touch. Unfortunately, there was no return address, so the Gogos family has reached out via a Facebook post that has been shared nearly 2,000 times so far. “[We] would really like to thank them,” writes Gogos's husband, Christian, in the post.

That the message has traveled to the far side of the world and back is “a little miracle,” Gogos says. So many things—weather, currents, sea life, there actually being people there where it washed up—had to happen just so. Imagine if the Gogos family had moved? There was even a mistake in the address written on the bottle message, so it's a wonder that the reply arrived at all.

Scott, Julia, Lea, and Alice Joy: If you by chance get this message, too, the Gogos family wants to hear from you again.

A new home for Jeremy Bentham’s old bones is prompting a philosophical debate.

Jeremy Bentham is not unlike an aging British rock star: The older he gets, the more tours he seems to go on. Sometimes Bentham’s severed, mummified head accompanies the rest of him. Other times it’s kept in a climate-controlled room at University College London for safekeeping. After every trip, until its most recent one, the English philosopher’s remains—most of them, anyway—have been returned to a box within a box in a side corridor at the college.

In February, the “auto-icon”—Bentham’s skeleton, cocooned in stuffing and the clothes he wore when he was alive—made one of the shorter, albeit more permanent, moves in its 188-year history. Bentham was deconstructed, removed from the wooden boxes that’ve been home to his remains since World War II, and shepherded into a new glass case in UCL’s new student center.

“At the moment, UCL is in the middle of a big refurbishment program,” says Hannah Cornish, a science curator at UCL who helped supervise the cross-campus commute. “[A]s part of that we had to move the auto-icon. We’ve taken the opportunity to look at the best way to preserve it.”

Since Bentham's death, in 1832, his auto-icon has traveled across England, Germany, and, just last year, the Atlantic, to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But after every trip since it was evacuated from London during the second World War, it’s always returned to the wooden boxes in UCL’s Wilkins Building. Inquisitive students and curious tourists could find the dead philosopher’s wax replacement head gazing beyond them, toward nothing in particular. That same glassy stare persists today, only through a new, modernized container.

“What we were looking for is somewhere we could rely on the light, temperature, and humidity conditions,” Cornish says. “It brings the auto-icon into the center of the student body—and Bentham was a big advocate of education for all, regardless of things like class, race, and gender.”

Bentham’s resurrection as an auto-icon was inscribed in the late philosopher’s will, which requested that a number of fixtures be put in place to preserve his remains, that they be dressed in the clothes he wore in life, and that they occasionally be brought into meetings involving his still-living friends, so that what's left of Bentham might enjoy their company.

“It’s very hard to describe it to people because there aren’t any other auto-icons,” Cornish says. “[Bentham] thought it’d catch on.”

The auto-icon’s existence is a peculiar addendum to the life of one of England’s most radical philosophers of the 19th century. Bentham was a champion of utilitarianism, which posits that what does the most good for the most people is what’s best. He knew he wanted to donate his body to science after he died, in line with his ethical code—that people should be useful in life and in death. But he also wanted his remains preserved, in part to spite the church, which he frequently criticized.

Due to a combination of bureaucratic mismanagement and crude taxidermy, Bentham’s head became unsuitable for public display—it became too ugly, in other words—and his organs were separated from the rest of his remains. But the skeleton remains the literal backbone of the auto-icon.

The recent bump-up from two wooden boxes to a novel glass case has caused a stir in the UCL community, as students and faculty alike have weighed in on the aesthetic and practical utility of the move. Many have brought up one question: What would Jeremy Bentham do?

“For Bentham, assessing the move of the auto-icon—as indeed for anything else—would be a utility calculation,” says Tim Causer, a senior research associate with the UCL-based Bentham Project, an initiative to produce a new edition of Bentham’s life works and correspondence. “Does the auto-icon’s new location make people happy or not—that would be the only thing that matters.”

This isn’t the first time the auto-icon’s location has drawn criticism. In 1857, when it was just 25 years young, its creator (and Bentham’s longtime friend), the physician Thomas Southwood-Smith, lamented UCL’s placement of the remains.

“No publicity is given to the fact that Bentham reposes there in some back room,” he wrote. “The authorities seem to be afraid or ashamed of their own possession."

The auto-icon bounced around quite a bit—from Southwood-Smith’s charge to the UCL Anatomy Museum to the UCL Library to Stanstead Bury and back to UCL—but by the 2010s, its longtime mahogany-box home had become a haven for pests like carpet beetles and clothes moths, eager to take a bite out of the early 19th-century garb that clothes the stuffing-encased skeleton. That, combined with the Wilkins Building’s imminent renovations, made now an ideal time to find the auto-icon a new home.

So it was unboxed, dismantled, and shepherded through UCL’s Japanese garden, on a choreographed route to minimize the risk of what Cornish calls “birdstrikes”—pigeons confusing the stuffed person for a privy and defecating on it.

“It was wrapped in plastic, because we [took] the whole thing outside,” Cornish says. “It was a rainy day, so we wanted to make sure Bentham stayed dry.”

Once in the new student center, the auto-icon took the elevator down to its new case, where it was reconstituted in the image of Jeremy Bentham.

Soon afterward, concerns began to proliferate on social media. Some are upset that Bentham isn’t in his original box. (Only one of the older wood boxes—the smaller one—may be original. The larger wooden one dates to the 1940s.) Others have called out discrepancies between the wishes outlined in Bentham’s will and his new case.

Causer, however, notes that these wishes were bungled pretty much from the outset. Nor were the old boxes perfect. “There was a typescript label on the inner wooden box, stating Bentham’s name, dates of birth and decease, and wrongly claiming that Bentham founded UCL,” he says. “I’ve wanted to rip that label off for years, as that’s one of the myths about Bentham that refuses to die.”

Others have expressed concern that the auto-icon is merely on public display, rather than tastefully sequestered until a proper “Bentham commemoration event” comes along.

Treating Bentham’s remains in the manner requested in his will and ensuring that the objects remain preserved in perpetuity is “quite a difficult balance” to strike, Cornish says. “The way we looked at it is that the auto-icon is now a museum object that we’re responsible for. We’ve taken the approach that our duty of care is to preserve this unique object.”

There are also those who feel that the glass casing is too modernist, and is aesthetically dissonant with the traditional trappings of the dead philosopher (one Twitter critic likens the case to a “department store clothing display”).

But Causer says that some of Bentham’s own ideas run counter to this line of thinking. “While I have some sympathy with the view that the relocation seems to go against tradition and doesn’t look right,” she says, “Bentham himself would have had no truck with that argument. In his Book of Fallacies, Bentham discussed what he called the ‘Ancestor-Worshippers’ Fallacy’—that is, the argument that since something had always been done one way, it should always be done that way. Bentham spent most of his life, after all, taking that attitude to task in trying to reform the British establishment.”

One thing is inarguable: Bentham’s new location makes the auto-icon more visible and accessible—the UCL student center is located in the heart of London—and improves the conditions of its preservation.

“The auto-icon is undoubtedly a weird thing,” Causer says, “and Bentham evidently had a sense of high self-regard that he would ask for his body to be preserved in this way. But I would hope that the move might encourage visitors not to dismiss the auto-icon as a macabre curio, the final wish of a strange old man, or something ghoulish or creepy.”

Perhaps, as Bentham hoped, it can be wheeled out for events that he would have enjoyed in life: a good party or a lively debate, its presence spurring conversations about—and perhaps actions toward—the greater good. The move has already sparked discussions about what’s best for the remains themselves.

“People are very fond of the auto-icon,” says Cornish. “We hesitate to call him a mascot, because the auto-icon contains human remains. We treat it with a bit more respect. I hope more people will see him in the student center.”

Currently, the auto-icon sits next to a large panel that describes Bentham and his work in a couple of pithy paragraphs. Cornish says that a booth with more information and context, as well as a touch screen, are on order, and will soon supplement the auto-icon’s new home.

As eerily vacant as that glassy gaze may be, says Causer, Bentham, an atheist, is making a point from beyond the grave, vis-à-vis the auto-icon—his final refutation of religion and life after death.

“Even though to a visitor the auto-icon and its benign waxy smile gives the impression that Bentham is present,” he says, “it is not him any more, and is a reminder that Bentham the human is—like we all will one day become—‘senseless matter.’ And that what matters is to make the most of the life we have, and to promote the greatest happiness during that time.”

In Addo Elephant National Park, the smallest residents may be the biggest draw.

Pulled over at the side of the road in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park, a handful of motorists are witnessing a remarkable feat unfold. They’re watching with rapt attention as a beetle tries to roll a ball of dung three times its size across the wide gravel road. Head down, seemingly deep in concentration, the beetle moves backward into what looks like a handstand position, balancing on its two front legs as its back legs propel the sand-covered sphere forward.

It’s not the ball that’s giving the beetle problems. Nor are the small divots and pebbles in the road (though they do cause some backtracking). The real issue is that another equally determined beetle appears to be trying to steal the parcel of poo. Such thievery is common among dung beetles—often called “rollers” for obvious reasons—which fight over the precious droppings that constitute their food, their mating chambers, and their egg incubators.

Apparently unimpressed by the miniature spectacle that’s transpiring, some park visitors don’t stop but drive on in search of a more traditional safari show. One beetle-loving bystander won’t stand for it, though. Jumping out of his car, he stands in the middle of the roadway and flags down the next vehicle, insisting that it pull over and wait until the beetle has completed its trek. Cowed, the driver does as directed just in time for observers to see the second beetle make off with its purloined poo, crossing over to the other side of the roadway. Bereft of its precious haul, the first beetle—defeated—heads off toward the grass to look for a new pile of elephant dung.

Such are the daily dramas of Addo’s flightless dung beetles.

Addo Elephant National Park has, as its name implies, one of the largest concentrations of elephants in the world. But it’s the park’s much smaller, less photogenic residents that often steal the show. While there are nearly 800 species of dung beetle in South Africa, Circellium bacchus—the flightless dung beetle—is a rare subspecies endemic only to a few small areas in the southeastern part of the country. The largest known population lives at Addo.

Conservationists believe these insects once populated much of the country. But as some of the beetle's favorite poo producers—big game like buffalo, elephants, and rhinos—died off, so too did the beetle, which could not flee to new territory as easily as its winged relatives.

But there are other reasons for the rollers’ rarity, says Catherine Sole, a zoologist and entomologist at the University of Pretoria.

“The charismatic creature, who is among the largest of the African ball-rolling scarabs, is dependent on a constant supply of dung for feeding and breeding,” she writes in an email. "It’s thought to be prone to extinction (qualifying as ‘vulnerable,’ according to the IUCN) because of its large body size, low dispersal capability, narrow geographic range, and low fecundity … It only produces a single offspring per year, for which it exhibits a high degree of maternal care.”

In other words, if you’re a dung beetle, being a doting mother—while admirable—can have a negative effect on overall numbers.

Addo’s expansive elephant population makes it a haven for the scarce arthropod. Driving through the park, it’s common to see huge mounds of elephant dung swarmed by dozens of flightless beetles. The creatures pour over the still-warm excrement—fresh poo being particularly desirable, because the temperature makes it easier to sculpt into spheres—then spin off sections into individual balls that each beetle pushes to its own tiny, private corner of Addo. Once safely away from its fellow rollers, it will go about eating its prize or using the interior of the ball to mate and lay eggs.

A malaria-free, Big Five safari destination, Addo Elephant park is proud of its status as a beetle sanctuary, and takes its role as protector seriously. On its website, the beloved bug is described as “king of the road.” The park is peppered with signs that warn visitors that the beetles have the right of way, and that it’s forbidden to drive over balls of dung (lest a mating couple or precious egg be hiding inside).

“The flightless dung beetle should serve as a powerful lesson that we need to conserve all species,” says Graham I.H. Kerley, director of the Centre for African Conservation Ecology and a dung beetle devotee, “not just the iconic megafauna. Otherwise our ecosystems would no longer function. Who would deal with all that dung if we lost the dung beetles? It should also teach us some humility, as we realize just how charming such small species really are when we bother to pay attention to them.”

Whether or not you’re an avid fan of insects, there’s something about Addo’s beetles that stirs people’s passion. Wildlife watching, which normally requires participants to stay in the safety of their car or a ranger’s vehicle, can often be a solitary experience. Yet the beetle brings out visitors’ social side. Despite park warnings to “Beware of lions: Alight from vehicle at own risk,” people here routinely get out of their cars and huddle together near a mound of dung to watch the beetles at work—from a respectful distance, of course.

South Africa’s tiny, flightless dung beetles give visitors a number of big gifts: a chance to cheer on the underdog, appreciate Africa’s less glamorous game, and relish the one-of-a-kind opportunity to help a beetle cross the road.

Far-flung produce found a home thanks to Homestead's unique climate.

The Tropical Research and Education Center in Homestead, Florida—or TREC, as it’s known to local farmers—is nearly as far south and east as you can go in the United States before you hit salt water. Perched on a narrow strip of land between the peat marsh of the Everglades and the mangrove forest of Biscayne Bay, it’s just two degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer. Hot, sticky, and almost comically humid nine months of the year, the little toe of the Sunshine State is the only part of the contiguous United States with a tropical monsoon climate.

Geographically speaking, TREC is in the Caribbean Basin. Which is how this 160-acre offshoot of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences came to have one of the most impressive collections of tropical fruit in the country.

“Coming up is our white sapote,” says Jonathan Crane, TREC’s assistant director and a tropical fruit specialist with the university, as he points out to his orchards with more than a touch of fatherly pride. To celebrate the center’s 90th birthday, Crane is giving public tours from a covered metal wagon pulled by a pickup truck. We glide by mature avocado trees big enough to shade a house, their roots carpeted with crabgrass. We peer up at old Caribbean akees whose black-eyed ripe fruits hang open like little Chinese lanterns from branches now several stories high.

We pass by the 90-year-old tamarinds loaded with sour-sweet pods, and then a row of loquats, their leafy branches bouncing in a perfectly warm winter breeze. As we roll along, Crane points out the atemoya, with its dinosaur-like scales, and the sweet custard of the ripe green sapote. He pauses, taking in his audience, mainly South Florida farmers and those who work with them: “But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

Crane is right: Many of the riders on this trolley already grow these fruits, or live next door to those who do. Driving from Miami to TREC, which is sandwiched between the new condominiums and century-old farmland that share the 70,000-person city of Homestead, I passed fences lined with passionfruit vine, hand-painted signs hawking home-grown avocados, and the county-run Fruit and Spice Park, where visitors are encouraged to try the orange flesh of the Latin American canistel or get lost in an heirloom banana grove. It’s hard to believe you’re only an hour south from the neon-lit main drag of Miami Beach.

Or, maybe more accurately, it’s hard to believe you’re in the United States.

Unlike in most other agricultural regions of this country, nobody here does commodity soybeans or field corn, and only a few still grow winter vegetable crops like the tomatoes and green beans that were once sent north by the truckload each December. Homestead’s patchwork of farms, many run by people with roots in tropical regions around the world, today grow longan and lychee, jackfruit, dozens of varieties of mango and avocado, custardy mamey, crunchy starfruit, perfumed and intoxicating pink guava, little green guinep, and tiny Thai bananas, to name but a few.

All this produce makes its way to supermarkets and restaurants and smoothie blenders around the country, yes, but many are also grown specifically to give immigrants the freshest, most flavorful taste of home they can get. Produce imported from Chile or Mexico might be cheaper, but this is the only way a market in Atlanta or Boston or Chicago is going to get a passionfruit in season in just two days. If you’ve ever found firm green papayas for Thai som tum (most imported fruits are too ripe once they arrive), seen a Chinatown fruit stand with perfectly pink lychees (their colors fade as they slowly make their way through the import process), or bought still plump Pakistani mangoes (which tend to wither, if they’re not rejected outright by inspectors), Florida is likely where they came from.

These kinds of crops may not be indigenous to this landscape, but many have been cultivated here for a very long time. Mango and avocado—both planted in South Florida some 200 or more years ago—just happened to be among the few fruit crops that grew well in Homestead’s unusual limestone soil. It’s not so much soil but a thin layer of dirt atop a thick layer of rock, pinkish and shot through with prehistoric holes like coral, which it’s often mistaken for. (Though essentially nutrient-free, a thick, holey, limestone-rock barrier means a lot of this ocean-adjacent land doesn’t get too soggy, which is handy during summer monsoons or flooding from storms.)

Since the late 1800s, local farmers figured out how to work around this limestone slab, first by planting in the naturally deeper holes, then by breaking it up with pick-axes, and later, with help from places like TREC, by using more modern farm equipment and techniques that could crush it up into pieces and blend it with more nutrient-rich matter to grow almost anything.

Still, for much of the past century, Homestead farmers grew a limited number of more standard crops: winter produce, acres of limes, and supermarket-variety avocados and mangos.

According to Crane, the shift to a more diverse range of tropical fruits and vegetables began about 40 years ago. Hurricanes and diseases wiped out most citrus, while the North American Free Trade Agreement and foreign competition made growing only major-market crops less appealing, if not a total loss. But another big part of it, Crane says, “you can really trace to the ethnic diversity in Florida.”

Half of the region’s population has long been of Latin and Hispanic heritage, and 20 percent is African- and Caribbean-American. Many newcomers, says Crane, come from all over Asia. On the farm roads around TREC, farm signs hint at ties to Cuba, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines, all owned by farmers growing what they know.

TREC, which was founded by the Florida state legislature in 1929 as the Subtropical Experiment Station, has always supported local agriculture and horticulture. Its staffers run a clinic where farmers can bring in sick or dying plants, and they help homeowners learn how to put fruit trees in their front yards. They study how plants can withstand climate change, salt water, or extreme weather.

But a big part of the job has always been figuring out Florida’s next money-making crops, which is why its researchers are growing new varieties of the sweet West Indian squash known as calabaza, overseeing a test patch of two colors of trendy Australian finger-lime, and seeing how various vanilla orchids flower under different levels of shade.

Now, Crane says, the professional mode of thinking is that the more niche you can get with what you grow, the better.

“All we have here is specialty crops, the weird stuff,” says Margie Pikarsky, whose 24-year-old organic Bee Heaven Farm is just a few blocks away from TREC. Pikarsky, who spent her childhood in nearby Cuba helping her father grow in their backyard, is describing the current fields of her fellow farmers, but she is also poking fun at how the U.S. Department of Agriculture describes this kind of produce, along with almost all fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts. “Fruits and vegetables should never be called specialty crops,” she says. “What do you eat? Do you eat soybeans?”

Pikarsky, who sells at farmers markets and through a CSA, is the real rarity in this region, in that she sells winter vegetables and tropical fruits directly to local Floridians.

While the direct-to-consumer market might become Homestead’s next frontier—perhaps led by Miami Fruit, where a couple of twenty-somethings sell all manner of locally grown tropical fruits online as they build out their own two-acre farm—most farmers still send their product north and west, just as South Florida farmers have done for a century.

In fact, says Crane, he knows of many immigrant or first-generation families that own large food markets in East Coast cities, or in Midwestern cities such as Chicago, who have set up supply lines directly to friends or family members with Homestead farms. Some even send a relative down to start one for a vertically integrated operation.

Over the years, some operations have blossomed into their own brand names, like Jalaram Produce, a family-run importer and distributor with a 580-acre headquarters in Homestead. Owner Mahendra Raolji says he sends trucks north to places such as Patel Brothers—a chain of Indian markets along the Northeast coast and around the country—filled with produce including unripe jackfruit, bitter melon, taro leaves, long beans, and the yellow-green dosakai melons used for pakora.

Many of the most diversified farms are like 15-acre Khemara Farms, where Peter Pith and his wife Shirley grow dozens of kinds of Southeast Asian fruits, including guava, jackfruit, jujube, mangosteen, papaya, pomegranate, sapodilla, and sugar apple, plus the Southeast Asian herbs and greens the Piths grew up eating. Like many immigrant-run farms in this area, even their fence-line is lush and layered, wound with the cactus-vine called pitahaya, or dragon fruit. They sell most of their produce to national distributors who consolidate it and ship it out, says Pith, although a few Southeast-Asian Americans order directly from him through Facebook.

The Piths, as it happens, became Homestead fruit farmers by accident. When Peter Pith came to South Florida from Massachusetts on vacation with his family in 1986, the landscape reminded him of Cambodia and the farm he tended there with his parents. “Oh, there’s a coconut tree! And a mango tree!” he remembers thinking. “We were in a hotel for a week, and I decided when I retire, I come down here.”

Pith, who was then working in Massachusetts as an electrical engineer, originally hired a Cambodian family to run his new farm. But they quit after living through one of Homestead’s brutally humid summers. He tried again and, says Pith, “nine months later, same story.” He ended up moving his own family down and learning how to run a modern, mixed tropical fruit farm in the limestone rock of South Florida. Without help from TREC, he adds, he couldn’t have made it work. “I depend on Dr. Crane,” says Pith. “He helped me a lot.”

He’s now returning the favor. These days, Pith says, Crane’s students from TREC come around the corner to learn from him.

This ancient hadrosaur has some microscopic secrets.

In the Late Cretaceous period, near what is now the border of Montana and Canada, a baby duck-billed Hypacrosaurus keeled over and died. Seventy-five million years later, in the 1980s, the nestling’s skull fragments were unearthed by the famed paleontologist Jack Horner, then at the Museum of the Rockies; his son, Jason; and bone preparator Carrie Ancell. Once they arrived at the museum, the fragments were ground down and put on slides for further research, then tucked away.

“They were left in a box for over 20 years,” writes Alida Bailleul, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and lead author of a new paper on the fragments, published in the journal National Science Review, via email.

Back in 2010, she worked at the Museum of the Rockies, where her “research project was to analyze the bones of these hadrosaurs under the microscope. And that's when I saw these cells and chromosomes.”

Now, 30 years after the discovery, Bailleul and colleagues have identified cartilage that still retains proteins and nuclear material from the dinosaur. If the identified material is genetic, it will push back the earliest known DNA by many leaps. The oldest sequenced DNA to date comes from a 700,000-year-old horse frozen in Siberian permafrost. This potential genetic material from the Hypacrosaurus would be over 100 times older.

Dinosaur fossils are often characterized by their obvious characteristics: their color, somewhere between dusty chocolate and tar, and their huge size, with ribs so big they’d squash any barbecue grill and gaping maws filled with teeth that dwarf our own. But all that ossified bone fossilizes entirely, way beyond what’s visible to the naked eye.

Histologists—experts in miniscule tissues—can see where blood cells were in dinosaur bones, and can say how fast the creatures grew each year. Now, researchers say they can see even smaller structures than blood cells.

Bailleul’s team found the cells, possible nuclei, and chromosomes by staining the microscopic dinosaur bits with two chemicals that bind to elements of nuclear material, vividly colorizing them. Those elements—stained in similar fashion to modern emu remains the team tested—uphold the idea that the Hypacrosaurus retained some of its itsy-bitsy building blocks.

The next steps, Bailleul says, will be for researchers to better understand how these microstructures fossilize—how they change in the process of fossilization, their molecular signature. Only then can sequencing be considered. And even that’s a big "maybe."

In other words, this won’t be the basis for a Jurassic Park screenplay. If anything, it’s a debunking of how that cloning process works.

“The general public should never, ever think that we can get an entire genome from a dinosaur, and clone it,” Bailleul writes. “We have absolutely zero intentions—nor the power—to ever re-create a dinosaur. I love Jurassic Park, but it is way too far from what we are doing here that I think any reference to this movie should really be made jokingly.”

In the case of dinosaurs, perhaps it’s best that art merely imitates life—rather than the other way around.