ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 26, 1996 TAG: 9611260062
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
Outside the glare of the microscope, the beetle is small, brown and ordinary.
But through the lens, his hard shell appears gold.
"They're little gems," said Richard Hoffman, curator of recent invertebrates at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. Meet Pseudolampsis guttata, a species of leaf beetle typically found in warmer climates. Only Hoffman found this little guy with about 100 others near Emporia.
That makes it interesting, Hoffman said, and that makes this leaf beetle the most recent Bug of the Month here at the museum. Technological innovations though, are making it harder to discern where, exactly, "here" is.
To amplify: Hoffman, his dog, Karla, and his insects, spiders and millipedes take up space, shelves and closets in the downstairs of the Martinsville museum. Other curators and researchers are in the museum, too, along with their own expansive collections and a mammoth exhibit of dinosaur bones. That exhibit has squeezed some of the others back into storage.
There is plenty of space, however, on the Internet, and that's where the museum is expanding. Starting in August 1995, the museum took over a strand of the World Wide Web. Countless other museums have established an Internet presence as well - the University of California at Berkeley lists 114 natural history museums alone.
The Martinsville museum's features include Hoffman's Bug of the Month (at the end of the year, visitors get to crown their favorite), museum news and information about fossils and skeletons. Recently, mammal curator Nancy Moncrief added a feature called "The Fur Side." Soon, the museum will put a searchable catalog of its books on-line, along with information about American Indian tribes of Virginia. Eventually, the museum hopes to have its collections on-line, making it easy to share information with other scientists and the public, especially kids.
"If you can interest kids in science while they're young, they're more likely to study it later and stick with it," said Susan Felker, weaver of this Web site.
She hopes the pages will encourage more people to visit the museum or, if they can't make the trip, to learn a little from home.
The museum's curators are teachers, people like Hoffman, who is trying to document Virginia's insect population, or as he puts it, "our little friends in the fields and woods." And people like Moncrief.
"Part of my job is education," she said. "This helps us reach a larger number of people."
In "The Fur Side," for instance, she asks her audience questions like: Which mammal has a set of identical quadruplets each time she gives birth? Answer: The nine-banded armadillo, of course.
Moncrief doesn't really study armadillos, which have been spotted as far north as South Carolina - her specialty is smaller mammals like mice and moles and shrews, and she's currently studying a population of fox squirrels.
But when she finds something interesting, she wants to put it out there for people to see.
Felker agreed. "We must try to think of ways to reach more people and provide information on natural history in Virginia," she said.
The museum's site isn't the flashiest on the Web; the dinosaurs don't move and the insects don't fly. Felker tries to use simple images that can be downloaded quickly. The site is updated fairly often, but not daily or hourly.
Still, it's serving its purpose, and each week more people seem to be tuning in.
Felker often sees questions from teachers - not just from Virginia, but from across the country - on Indian tribes. She's received e-mail (anonymous) from a person claiming to have found the world's largest dinosaur, something bigger than the Supersaurus, whose ribs are on display in the museum's dinosaur exhibit.
"One great advantage of the Internet is you can disperse things you're not even sure about," said Nicholas Fraser, curator of vertebrate paleontology and keeper of "The Skeleton Closet" on the Web site. "You can put up an image and say, 'Has anyone seen something like this?'''
It lets the museum open its halls even more to the public.
Fraser talks about the possibility of showing a fossil (a dinosaur femur, perhaps?) from all sides, not just the front and back as you'd see in a journal or magazine.
"The sky's the limit," he said.
Or in his case, the ground, for that is where he finds fossils and bones, some of which he hauls back to the museum for display.
The solite quarry in Cascade has provided a wealth of fossils of Triassic insects so well preserved in the shale, you can make out the hairs on the insects' legs, he said.
The 14-million-year-old whale bones in Caroline County are staying put for right now, but the Internet may be a place to display some recent findings, he said.
It gives Hoffman a place to tell people, if he's so inclined, that spiders are misunderstood and need a better public-relations officer.
Other curators will likely be on-line soon, too, including Jim Beard, a geologist with the museum who inspired Hoffman to write about the Bug of the Month by his frequent inquiries.
Perhaps, Felker said, Beard will offer something on killer rocks. "Rocks can kill, remember Pompeii!" for instance. "Well, it's one idea."
You can find the Va. Museum of Natural History home page at http://www.bev.net/education/museum/vmnhmvl/vmnh.html
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY\Staff. 1. Nancy Moncrief, curator of mammals,by CNBdisplays a small part of the museum's collection of fox squirrels.
Moncrief runs the on-line feature called ``The Fur Side.'' 2.
Richard Hoffman, curator of recent invertebrates, is pictured with
his dog, Karla, and a small part of the museum's bug collection.
Hoffman has a Bug of the Month feature on the Internet, profiling
some of ``our little friends in the fields and woods.'' One of his
favorites from the musem's estimated 30,000 collected species is the
Pink Tipped Ant Lion (inset). 3. Susan Felker (above) created the
web site and hopes that it will encourage more people to come see in
person such critters as this millipede (left). color.