Dear MARMAM subscribers, On behalf of Smithsonian Libraries and the National Museum of Natural History, I wish to invite you to a free symposium, open to the public, opening the forthcoming "Whales: From Bone to Book" exhibition in the Evans Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C. This exhibition, presented in collaboration with Smithsonian Libraries and the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Paleobiology, explores the Smithsonian’s legacy of studying cetaceans using original photographs from the field, actual museum specimens, and scientific literature. The exhibit also features rare books from the Joseph F. Cullman 3d, Library of Natural History and the Kellogg Library of Marine Mammalogy. The histories of each object, and their connections to the overall study of cetology, provide compelling illustrations of the different narratives in the process of natural history, tracing how bones travel from a beach or cliff wall to a museum collection, and then, finally, published on paper. The exhibition will run from May 2013 through May 2014. The symposium, "Whale Research at the Smithsonian - Past, Present and Future," will be on Thursday June 6, 2013, 10:30 am – 5:00 pm in the Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History, on the Mall in downtown Washington, D.C. Speaker list includes: Prof. R. Ewan Fordyce (University of Otago); Prof. D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University); Dr. Stephen Godfrey (Calvert Marine Museum); and Dr. Nicholas Pyenson (Smithsonian). The symposium is FREE and OPEN to the public! Please RSVP to SILRSVP@si.edu or 202.633.1699 For more information, see: http://library.si.edu/events/whales-symposium and http://goo.gl/RjJMX Sincerely, NDP __________________________________________ Nicholas D. Pyenson, Ph.D. Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals Department of Paleobiology National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution MRC 121, PO Box 37012 10th & Constitution NW Washington, DC 20013-7012 USA Tel: 202-633-1366 Fax: 202-786-2832 Email: PyensonN@si.edu Staff page: http://paleobiology.si.edu/staff/individuals/pyenson.html Lab blog: http://nmnh.typepad.com/pyenson_lab/