5.13.26

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I and today I
will be reading National Geographic magazine dated April twenty twenty six,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:21):
the series I began last time entitled The National Geographic
thirty three visionary Paula Kahumba, the ecologist turned filmmaker amplifying
African voices. After becoming a hero in Kenya for pushing
its justice system to aggressively prosecute ivory poachers, Paula Kahumbo

(00:44):
hosted Africa's first nature documentary TV series made by Africans.
The experience inspired the National Geographic Explorer to produce documentaries
that for ground America African led conservation efforts. Last summer,
the organization she leads, Wildlife Direct, premiered a suite of
short films to promote a new platform for reporting environmental crimes.

(01:09):
Film fest Accolades followed, but the Real Award kamb Cahambu
says the campaign has already led to valuable tips and
even arrests. Next Nature's Ultimate Glowa, a new way of
seeing tiny creatures that can illuminate after dark. The sight

(01:29):
of a scorpion might make some people nervous, but Javier
as nar gonzaes the Ueda sees only a perfect muse
for his camera. The Madrid based photographer has spent years
documenting bugs that shine, and virtually all scorpions fluoresce when
exposed to ultra VOE light because of special substances in

(01:49):
their ecoskeletons that react to high energy rays. Fluorescence is
widespread in insects and arachnids. That why that's the case, though,
is a mystery. Scientists have hypotheses it might help with camouflage,
signaling to mates, or sun protection, but hard evidence is scarce.
During night walks, Osnar scouts for his multi legged models,

(02:12):
scanning the ground with a UV flashlight for telltale pops
of neon. To get the best shots, he modified a
pair of off camera flashes to emit UV light, which
he says shows us the world in a different way.
The resulting portraits reveal what's hidden. Dun colored scorpions, glowing
awkward marine caterpillars with soft hairs and insects with bright

(02:34):
spots that match their surroundings. Aznar hopes his images will
inspire more research into the role of fluorescence plays in nature. Already,
they're showing a side of these creatures we'd never see otherwise.
This by Karajaumol next Living History at the glittering New

(02:56):
Natural History Museum Abu Dhaba Abu Dhabi curators want to
bring visitors astonishingly close to the most fascinating creatures the
Earth has ever seen. Doing so required dreaming up and
then bringing to life one of the most ambitious museums
ever attempted. This article by Richard Kahiff. Dinosaurs are winging

(03:21):
in at five hundred fifty miles an hour from across
the planet Diplodocotis, Deysaurus, a herd of Tricepteras, and a
pair of Tyrhanosaurus wrecks, plus a carcass for the Tyrannosaurus
to do combat over. The museum has them in a queue,
along with thousands of other specimens, from a fog basking

(03:43):
beetle to a reconstructed Dodo. Some of them are waiting
to take off and some are in flight. Others are
being uncraded, condition checked, three D scanned, and quickly moved
out for reassembly on the museum floor, all to make
room for the next specimens. Just rolling through the livery
Bay door. It's early November twenty twenty five, and there

(04:03):
are twenty days left until the opening of the Natural
History Museum Abu Dhabi n h MAD, a three hundred
seventy seven thousand square foot structure being built and populated
on what even the museum's managers admit is an insanely
short five year timeline. With luck, the final major specimen,

(04:25):
the last of five seventy five foot tall sauropods greeting
visitors at the entrance, will arrive in time to go
on display a day or two before the soft opening.
That's when Abu Dhabi's royal families will arrive, fully expecting
to be impressed. At the moment, however, that dinosaur A Diplodocus,
is still in Canada and the mount is not yet complete.

(04:48):
No pressure, though. The new museum stands on a sandy,
low lying island named Sa'adiyat, separated by an inlet off
the Persian Gulf from metropolitan Abu Dhabi, the capital city
of the United Arab Emirates. Nearby in the neighborhood, the
Louver Abu Dhabi opened in twenty seventeen, plus the Guggenheim

(05:09):
Abu Dhabi and a new National Museum, both rushing to
come to completion at the same time as the Natural
History Museum. Much of the rest of the island is
also under construction, with high end hotels and housing for
the crowds. All these vaunted institutions are expected to attract
name brands, celebrated architects, and superlatives. Clearly matter ride a

(05:33):
hotel elevator in town and a thirty second film on
lou will remind you that Yas Island, Abu Dhabi's entertainment
counterpart to Sa'ad Yat, boasts a Formula one racetrack, the
world's fastest roller coaster in a Ferrari World themed park,
and the world's largest indoor skydiving flight chamber. It's all

(05:55):
part of a well financed push to transform Abu Dhabi
from a sandy desert petro state into a traveled destination
and a cultural heavyweight on a par with Paris and London,
or rather ahead of Paris and London. If Abu Dhabi
achieves its declared goal of attracting the thirty nine point

(06:15):
three million visitors a year by twenty thirty, up from
six point six million in twenty twenty five. That doesn't
mean the UAE is backing away from its chief business
of gas and oil exports, the opposite, in fact, but
the heavy spending to promote tourism and other industries marks
a deliberate shift away from dependence on fossil fuels, which

(06:37):
now account for just thirty percent of the national economy,
down from eighty five percent as recently as two thousand nine.
The Natural History Museum will be the first of its
scale in the Middle East. The people planning it meant
to acquire some of the most incredible specimens known to mankind,
like a chunk of the Murchison meteorite containing grains of

(06:59):
a Union Universe from before our son existed, or fossils
of a minature horse that once wandered Abu Dhabi itself.
They also want to reveal those specimens in ways that
bring the public much closer to the natural world than
other globally renowned museums have dared. Driving that ambition is
the man the museum's staff refers to as the Chairman,

(07:21):
Mohammed Khalifa L Mubarak, who heads the Department of Culture
and Tourism and various other entities, including the company's supervising
construction of the museum. He manages to visit almost daily.
He's everywhere every day, says a construction manager who has
experienced the Chairman's leadership at Yas Island, the Loeu and

(07:42):
other projects. He doesn't sleep, I think, adds a museum administrator.
The changes he makes rippels through the building less than
three weeks before opening. For instance, he orders the removal
of dozens of visitor information stations on the grounds that
they crowd the aisles can be read only by abel
bud adults and come between people and the exhibits. The

(08:03):
cables that powered them now snake up from the floor
to nowhere. They'll be gone too before long. The hope,
says al Mubarak in English americanized by his college years
in Boston, is that every child who visits will come
away thinking, I gotta do everything in my power to
safeguard what's here right now, whether it's the ocean, in
the deserts, the beautiful trees. I need to safeguard this.

(08:26):
I need to safeguard every single species. The museum, he says,
will be a place to look into a better future
for our natural world. Maybe one day soon, but right
now twenty days out. Time is short, and that Diplodopus
isn't the only thing missing from the museum floor. The
clock for the Abu Dhabi Natural History Museum started ticking

(08:48):
on October sixth, twenty twenty, in a Manhattan askitchen house
emptied by the COVID pandemic. When the final lot of
the evening, the celebrated Tyrhanosaurus rex fossil rubbed Stan, came
under the hammer, a twenty minute bidding war ensued, culminating
in a winning offer auction fees in all of thirty

(09:08):
one point eight million dollars. It was then the highest
price ever paid for a dinosaur. Outraged paleontologists worried in
news accounts that Stan would be lost to science in
some billionaire's private collection and that museums were being priced
out of the market. In fact, the anonymous anonymous buyer
was Abu dhab By the inexorable logic of the five

(09:30):
year plan that start put the opening of the Natural
History museum sometime in the last quarter of twenty twenty
five in Abu Dhabi, as a member of the museum's
staff later tells me, people often want things to happen fast,
to be high impact, to make a statement. To make
it happen, Abu Dhab turned to the woman who had

(09:51):
just completed a major updating of them museum National Museum
of Ireland. Judith McAllister signed on as an employee number
one in twenty twenty one, with a job of choreographing construction, finance, hiring,
acquisitions and whatever else came up, all happening in parallel
and compressed into the four years then left to opening day.

(10:14):
As project manager, McAllister brought a kind of contagious delight
to the making of a new museum. Rather than say
sheer terror. She is the beating heart of the museum,
says Philip Manning, who advised the team from the start
in between classes of the University of Manchester before becoming
the museum's full time science director in twenty twenty four. McAllister,

(10:36):
Manning notes, is also a blur for the speed at
which she made the choreography happen. Money was in an
issue for the museum in the ways that are normal
in the natural history world in Europe. They give you
twenty five euros and say go make an exhibit. One
staff member jokes, Oh, but there's overhead, so they take

(10:57):
back forty percent. Soon after Abu Dhabi stay on bid
became known, though, fossil dealers began adding zeros on to
their prices. Says McAllister, the museum was off being offered
things for insane amounts of money that every other place
in the world would be offered for a fraction of
the prize. She was outraged, and not just about the money. Here.

(11:18):
By then, the museum team recognized that it shouldn't be
driving up global prices and pricing out other museums. So yeah,
there's been a lot of negotiations, hard negotiations where we've
I've fallen out with dealers for a time, the callister says.
Based on advice from Manning and others well connected in
the fossil world, McAllister began buying directly from people at

(11:41):
excavation sites. They have all of the back story, She says.
Buying straight from the dig made due diligence easier. The
aim was to avoid the colonial plunder at the heart
of many past museum collections, as well as specimens with
tangled ownership histories. You want to open rights, says Mcallus,
and make sure that the museum is clean and can

(12:03):
be a trusted museum in that sense. At one point
the museum was offered an Archaeopteryx, one of only fourteen
known specimens of the celebrated Jurassic bird. It was the
acquisition of a lifetime, except for the tangled ownership history.
The paperwork was little to nothing, various letters from one

(12:23):
German person to another saying my friend is la la la,
says McAllister. We had to say no. It just was
too risky for us. Mention of the archaeopteris still brings
forlorn yearning to faces around the museum. Another deal for
a collection of extraordinarily preserved Dichthysaurus ammonites and other Jurassic

(12:46):
fossils from Goldsbaden in southern Germany also fell apart on
paperwork issues in negotiations with a dealer. More forlorn faces later, though,
it came back on the market being sold by the
original owners, which takes out such a huge layer of problems.
She says, So it is actually arriving next Monday. That

(13:07):
would be fifteen days to opening with twenty five enormous
crates coming through the shipping bay door. That's a big,
big celebration for us, because we thought we'd lost it.
In September of twenty twenty one, Philip Manning was driving
on the M one to London when an incoming call
from a Canadian number lit up his phone screen. I
heard your working on a new museum, the person on

(13:28):
the other end of the line said, would you be
interested in a blue whale? A few days before, on
September ninth, the whale carcass washed ashore on a beach
in Sambro Creek, Nova Scotia. It was a young, mature female,
a significant loss for a species still recovering from the
whaling trade. Marine rescue workers could find no evidence of

(13:49):
a ship strike, fishing gear entanglement, or other possible cause
of death. International law limited use of the whales remains
eighty two feet long and weighing sixty tons to educational purposes.
Manning and the museum pounced. Members of the local meek
Mack community performed a ceremony to send off the whale's spirit,

(14:11):
and as if they were part of the farewell ritual,
two bald eagles flew the length of the whale and
away into the sky. Then Research Casting International or RCI,
a designer and installer of specimens for museums worldwide, went
to work on the grim business of preparing the bones
for museum display. After stripping the bones clean, RCI buried

(14:33):
them for over a year in a manure mixture that
contained dermastide beetles to clean off the remaining organic matter.
Then it decreased the bones with a high pressure wash.
The plan was to ship the whale by commercial air
freight from Chicago direct to Abu Dhabi. The US officials
had given their approvals across the border based on permits

(14:56):
to comply with the Convention on International Trade in Endanger Species.
The bones were strapped down on foam cushioning in sixteen
crates sizes X X L and up, and trucks were
waiting to carry them down to the airport. But the
morning of the delivery, the guy at u S Customs
said no mc allister recalls. He wanted one more permit.

(15:17):
It would take weeks. People oceans apart spent the next
two days, says McAlister, going through all the different routes
checking how could we land there? Could we land there?
Hassenkamp at the company that had contracted to make the delivery,
found a charter air freight company to come to Toronto

(15:38):
for the pick up. On the third day, the whale
flew to Abu Dhabi on a private seven forty seven
with a refueling stop in Uzbekistan, which would not require
an additional permit to transit transit its territory. McAllister followed
it through the night on a flight trek or app
her third day of not sleeping from one part of

(15:58):
the world to the other. Until the whale's safe arrival
in Abu Dhabi. The whale still needed to be reassembled
on a steel armature and hoisted into place. Unlike the
blue whales hanging high at museums in London and New York,
the Abu Dhabi specimen would float just overhead, almost close
enough to touch above an exhibit on the community of

(16:20):
species that thrive around a whale fall. Because the room
remained a construction site, another company aptly name Unusual Rigging
built it a whale sized skybox climate controlled and impact safe.
For Manning, caught up in the endless uncertainties of planning
a museum at light speed, the whale's arrival in installation,

(16:42):
that moment whence when you kind of go it's real,
this is happening. It's a homegrown museum, he adds. And
that's actually really important for Abu Dhabi. It's the first
time at development on this scale on either Sa'adiyat or
Yas Island hasn't partnered with some global brand like Sea
World or the Louver. This is a big sign saying look,

(17:04):
Abu Dhabi has the capability internally to not only come
up with a vision, but to do the design, delivery,
fit out exhibitions and produce something that is well classed.
That homegrown ambition goes beyond the public side of the museum.
The museum was also working to become a major research
center equipped with the most advanced technologies at a cross

(17:28):
roads between global South and North. The names of these
technologies Maldi, TAFF, micro x, r X and the Life
Like all sound like cocktails, says Manning, but they will
enable the museum to build whole new layers of meaning
to fossils, For instance, running a synchrotron beam over the

(17:50):
fossil like a typewriter to and fro, he says, can
reveal the chemicals a dinosaur used to build itself in
life versus the ones that seeped in later as it
became a fossil. That means Manning's job isn't just to
help acquire and exhibit specimens, but also to future prove them,
ensuring the valuable scientific information contained in them isn't damaged

(18:13):
when they're being prepared for display. Apart from al Ai Mobarik,
the museum's leadership has largely come from abroad. That's not
unusual in a country where eighty nine percent of the
people are expatriates, but nh Mad now has five Emadi
assistant curators studying everything from the spiders of the Arabian

(18:36):
Peninsula to a fifty foot long brides pronounced brew Dais
whale skeleton that turned up in a mangrove forest fifteen
minutes from the museum. We had one hundred and twenty
volunteers come to help bring the bones in from the forest,
says Nura Abolushi, an assistant curator with a special interest

(18:57):
in marine mammals and parents come with their kids, who
was amazing to just see everyone come together and help
support us. The hope is that Emiati assistant curators will
move up as they gain experience and advanced degrees in
their specialties. The Museum's Arabian lens on the natural world
shows up mainly in exhibits exhibits about the wildlife of

(19:20):
Abu Dhabi today and in a distant past. Seven million
years ago, during a brief watery interlude in the arid
history of the region, a river flowed through a coastal
area of western Abu Dhabi. The surrounding forests and grasslands
were alive with monkeys, giraffes, hippoes, antelope, small three toed

(19:42):
horses called hyperions, and elephant relatives like the four tusks stegatrobalodon.
You have to imagine sabertoothed cats chasing hyperions and chasing
the antelopes, says curator Mark Beach, a long time pale
intelligence who worked in the Binu Na formation. So it

(20:04):
really gives us an idea. You can imagine the rivers
and then the savannah grasslands getting a bit drier when
you get farther away from the river. It's a reminder
both how rich the Arabian world can be and also
how changeable. The Arabian lens shows up in one other
surprising way. We are now in the sixth mass extinction event,

(20:24):
and our climate is rapidly changing because of human activity.
A sign declares at the entrance to an exhibit area
titled Our Future. In early discussions, says McAllister, design consultants
included ways of phrasing the issues that were less start,
and when we brought it to the highest powers in
the UAE, they were like, no, we just want you

(20:45):
to talk about the science. Don't try and soften it.
This is a science museum and we want this to
be a science to be a museum for the twenty
first century. Other displays make the UAE a central part
of that story. The fossil fuels that power are our
travel have a giant carbon footprint. One video declares, with
transportation emidding billions of tons of greenhouse gases annually to

(21:09):
address climate change, it's essential that we steer away from
these fossil fuels. Then it ships to the UAE's plan
to cut forty percent of domestic carbon emissions and fifty
six percent of transport emissions by twenty thirty, the sort
of commitment it might arguably achieve, given the country's penchant
for going fast and making statements. The same displays don't, however,

(21:34):
mention the major investment by the UAE, now the world's
eighth largest oil producer, to accelerate oil production for export
over the next few years. The reality is that museums
in the UAE, as elsewhere, can only educate, and only
so far. They don't make government policy, even when built
by the government itself. Six weeks before opening a contractor

(21:58):
installing the museum's largest dinosaur, a Brachiosaurus, discovers a fifteen
millimeter discrepancy in the floor under one of the fossils
two main supporting posts. It's hardly noticeable a half inch
over a distance of sixteen feet, but it's too much
for the dinosaur. When you build a mount that's perfectly balanced,
says Manning, you want all the load being translated correctly

(22:21):
down to the concrete floor. He uses his water bottle
to mimic the positioning of a properly balanced dinosaur a mount,
and if you're out of that load by just ten millimeters,
he lets go of the bottle and its smacks down
on the table is not a crisis, says Manning. The
museum has found a local company two engineer steel plates,

(22:42):
leveling up the floor and spreading the load over a
larger surface. It's just a road bump. Asked about another
potential road bump, the no show diplodocus for the Hrium,
Manning becomes lyrical. The process of excavation, preparation, consolidation, producing
bat black sas smithied mounts, which carcass, which caress the bone,

(23:04):
then grasp it just enough to take the load, but
not enough to leave an impact. These things take time.
You've got three hundred bones in sauropods, a lot of
smithing to do. He is unworried taking big. Calculated risk
is built into the culture. It shows up, for instance,
in how the museum chooses to display one of its

(23:25):
most prized specimens, the celebrated Tarrantosaurus rex stand of the
thirty one point eight million dollars price tag, has become
widely known in its original pose from photos and three
D printed copies exhibited at other museums. He stands with
head high, mouth wide and long, butcher bohite teeth, prominent,

(23:46):
as if roaring his ravenous appetites at the world. The
Abu Dhabi team has chosen instead to exhibit him in
combat with another slightly smaller torontosaur, and stand appears at
least momentarily to be losing head down, mouth partly open,
as if gasping for breath and about to be bitten
on the neck by his adversary. That pose fits the

(24:09):
scientific evidence of combat scars on stands, head and neck.
It also puts museum goers eye to eye and tooth
to tooth with stan. It's a stunning transformation. The pressure
to get things done is intense inside. We're all screaming
when staffer confesses in places, though the mood is almost
serene over in the African and Savannah Baiome, a taxidermy specialist,

(24:34):
kneeling beside and Acacia Bush holds up a weaver's nest
on a branch and then a weaver just above it.
The zoology curator Sebastian Kirchhoff stands below, and they trade
thoughts on placement, as if hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree.
Ardvark coming through a colleague Warren's wheeling past a model

(24:55):
meant for elsewhere in the exhibit. Next up as a bat,
also destined for the acacia bush. Is it better? Kerchoff
wonders for it to be put out of the light
so children have to discover it, Mom, there's a bat?
Or will it just be missed? They ought to trust
in the power of children to discover almost anything. Elsewhere,

(25:15):
The noise is appalling. One room full of fossils as
delicate as glass is a maze traveled by six different
lifts and cherry pickers, continually beeping their way into position.
When one of the lighting mechanics goes to work up
at the ceiling, it sounds like a lunatic attacking a
metal drum with a sledgehammer. Every few minutes, the emergency

(25:36):
alarm system rips the air with warning glass ring, ring,
your and a robotic voice commands, please leave the building
immediately by the nearest available exit. Do not attempt to
use the lifts. Then it happens again. In Arabic, that's
been going on since April or May. I don't even
hear it anymore, says Matt Pair of RCI. He has

(25:58):
been waiting a week to install all Comorosaurus in the
Mesozoic era, but doesn't mind that either, since he and
his crew have so many other parts of the project
to get done. Being imperturbable is item one in the
job description. In the hallway, Fair strikes up a conversation
with a worker from Ksen Hasenkamp, the company that arranges

(26:20):
the dinosaur flights, then delivers on packs and sometimes installs
the specimen in their final display space. The Hasenkamp crew
does its work with grace and efficiency. When a worker
balances on a simple device called a j bar to
ride a massive crate gently down to the ground, it
is half skateboard trick, half ballet. Ferri says he needs

(26:43):
a machine with a suction head powerful enough to lock
onto a two point four billion year old slab of
banded iron rock weighing eighteen hundred pounds and move it
into place. We've never done that before, says a man
from Hasenkamp. Neither have we sas grinning. When the window
finally opens for the Kamarasaurus installation, the steel posts and

(27:07):
the horizontal armature go up quickly, followed by the torso
wind legs. Two days later, Fair is on a lift
installing the neck. He clutches a vertebra to his chest,
then raises it up and inserts the rod on the
underside into the corresponding socket in the top of the armature.
A twist of a wrench and he is on up
to the next one. They go in at the rate

(27:28):
of about a minute apiece. Speed is a good thing
just now, because the window for this installation is quickly closing,
with a few days left to the opening. The callister
is sitting on a plinth in the Mesozoic. She eyes
the ceiling of the room alive with a dazzling constellation
of model pterosaurs in one area, ammonites in another, and

(27:50):
in a third big fierce fish hotly pursuing one another
across a distant age. This concludes readings from National Geographic
Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you
for listening, Keep on listening, and have a great day.