25 at 250: A fossilized bison skull and the Friendship 7

0:00Mike Neufeld:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

0:22Kirk Johnson:Today, the bison is the largest land mammal in North America.

0:28Mike Neufeld:The Smithsonian unveils fossilized remains of a giant from North America's past.

0:43Mike Neufeld:It's Friday, April 17th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Shiko Theouni. Today on the show, we continue our series examining 25 objects that helped tell the story of America in honor of the country's 250th birthday. 3, 2, 1, 0, ignition, liftoff. NASA's recent Artemis II mission echoes the earliest days of American spaceflight. A curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum explains the history and modern significance of the Friendship 7 spacecraft. But first, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a new exhibit tracing the rise, near extinction, and recovery of America's national mammal.

1:32Mike Neufeld:A six-foot wide skull of an ancient bison named Junior is the centerpiece of the new exhibit that opens next month. Kirk Johnson is the director of the National Museum of Natural History. Here's his conversation with Deb Becker.

1:46Kirk Johnson:The skulls from American Falls Reservoir in Idaho, which is known to be a source for these gigantic bison skulls. And when we say gigantic, they really are immense. They're much, much bigger than modern bison. Six feet is on the small end. Some of them got as much as eight or nine feet wide. When you see these things, you think you're looking at the tusks of mammoths or mastodons, not bison horns.

2:07Mike Neufeld:So this enormous skull, I mean, is it fragile? How do you even get it from Idaho to Washington?

2:13Kirk Johnson:Pack it very carefully, put it in a wooden crate and ship it. It's not fossilized. I mean, it's not petrified. It's actually still the original bone. So it is somewhat delicate.

2:23Mike Neufeld:Does it have teeth?

2:25Kirk Johnson:Yeah, it's got the upper teeth. They don't have the lower jaws for it.

2:28Mike Neufeld:So what was the role of bison among Native American tribes as animals and humans evolved in North America. How would you describe it?

2:37Kirk Johnson:Well, it's sort of a interesting story because bison come into North America from Asia sometime after 200 ,000 years ago. So they're here first. Then humans get here at least 23 ,000 years ago. So for a while, there were bison in North America that lived happily with mammoths and macedons and horses and giant sloths. And then people got here and people began to hunt bison amongst all the other Ice Age animals like mammoths and mastodons, then the mammoths, mastodons, and the giant bison went extinct, leaving the modern bison and the people. Today, the bison is the largest land mammal in North America.

3:17Mike Neufeld:And how are they doing population-wise right now?

3:20Kirk Johnson:Right now, there's about half a million bison, but most of them are in managed herds. There's not a lot of wild bison. There's about 5 ,000 of them in Yellowstone National Park. So they're kind of, I would say they're functionally extinct, but they're widespread. But if you dial the clock back to 1800, there were probably as many as 40 million bison on the plains. So it's a relatively complicated story that has many chapters to it.

3:43Mike Neufeld:Now, bison are often confused with buffalo. How do you describe the difference?

3:48Kirk Johnson:Look, this is one of the great name confusions of all time. Bison and buffalo are the same animal here in North America. But there are water buffaloes and cape buffaloes in Africa and Asia. So there's a large group of animals. And this includes cows too. So from a scientific point of view, bison, buffalo, cows are all closely related. To further complicate it, the Latin name for American bison is bison, but also some people use the term BOS, B-O-S. So everyone is confused about this topic. No one should be. They're just the same animal in North America. makes no difference.

4:19Mike Neufeld:Okay. Now this exhibit opens in May. It's accompanied by bronze bison statues already up outside the History Museum. When we're telling the story of America for the 250th anniversary this year, why the story of the bison?

4:35Kirk Johnson:You know, bison are incredibly widely spread across the iconography of our country. You can go anywhere you want, whether it's Buffalo Wild Wings, the Buffalo Bills or the City of Buffalo or Buffalo Bill Cody. I mean, anywhere you go, you'll see the bison icon. It's in the national parks. But it has this really checkered history because they were incredibly abundant when the nation was formed. And they roamed almost all over the entire country. I mean, George Washington shot a bison in West Virginia in the 1700s. So they were everywhere. But they were kind of victims of the westward expansion.

5:08Kirk Johnson:There had been Native Americans living on the land, but they were pushed aside. The bison were pushed aside. And you have this incredible growth of a nation, but it comes at the cost of the Native Americans and the Native wildlife. And it wasn't just bison that were being killed. There was, you know, people were hunting game like deer and elk and all sorts of other game. And it wasn't until the 1900s that we realized that, oh, wait a minute, we shouldn't cause the extinction of wildlife. We should preserve them. So that led to the conservation movement in the early 1900s, which led to the rebound of wildlife and the slow rebound of the bison.

5:39Kirk Johnson:So it's a story of like what this nation did and how it recovered from what it has been doing. And so to see bison, they're part of this story. But think about this. We had Rosalind Lapeer, who was the Blackfeet Indian woman who helped us dedicate the bronze bison on the steps on April 2. Her tribe of people, the Blackfeet from Montana, are bison people. They've lived with bison for over 8 ,000 years. And she said that her parents and grandparents had never seen a bison when they were growing up. Like there's this thing that defined their culture was completely wiped out from where they lived.

6:14Kirk Johnson:And so for her to see the return of the bison, it's sort of a story of a not so great history and a pretty great comeback.

6:22Mike Neufeld:Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Thanks so much for being with us.

6:29Kirk Johnson:Thanks so much, Deb.

6:35Mike Neufeld:Coming up next, Scott Tong chats with a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum about another object that helps tell the story of one of America's most ambitious space explorations. Stay with us.

6:53Mike Neufeld:I'm Dean Rusk, senior producer for WBUR Podcasts. For the last two years, I've been dodging cyclones and robot wolves all while juggling the fate of our planet. Our new series for families, The Midnight Rebellion, transports you to the not-so-distant future altered by climate change. The good news? The choices you make can turn back the clock. So this Earth Day, discover your next great, uncharted adventure wherever you listen. The astronauts on the Artemis II mission are back to Earth after a remarkable circling of the Moon, which makes it a good time to look back at another historic flight on February 20, 1962.

7:36Three, two, one, zero, ignition, liftoff.

7:43Mike Neufeld:The MA-6 vehicle has lifted off. On that day, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. It was called the Mercury mission and his spacecraft, the Friendship 7, is on display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. And let's talk now to retired Smithsonian curator Mike Neufeld as part of our look at 25 objects telling the story of America in its 250th year. Mike, welcome to the program. Nice to be here. Thank you. February 1962, take us back to the space race with the Soviets. What was happening at the time? Well, we were always behind, at least in the most spectacular feats, because the Soviet Union kept scoring.

8:21Mike Neufeld:First was Sputnik, but the first thing hit the moon, and then the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. So the United States looked backwards, at least in space technologies, and this was embarrassing nationally. Yeah, and so in comes John Glenn in this mission. He was 40 years old at the time. Tell us about him. He was a marine aviator, yeah? Yeah, I mean, he was already at war. He had flown fighters in World War II in the Pacific. And then he had flown in the Korean War. He had shot down MiGs. And then he became a test pilot and set a transcontinental speed record. So he was one of the most famous of the first seven astronauts.

9:03Mike Neufeld:And how did he get picked? NASA was going to have an elaborate astronaut selection. And then President Eisenhower said, just take top military test pilots. And that simplified the process. And they went through a selection process, and they picked seven, three Navy, three Air Force, and one Marine, John Glenn. And let's talk about this exhibit. Now, the Air and Space Museum here in D.C., it's cavernous. I should note it's being restored beautifully. It went over last fall. This capsule is tiny. It screams claustrophobia to me when I even think about it. Only six foot three inches tall. Sketch out a picture for us.

9:39Mike Neufeld:What does it look like? It's a cone with a small cylinder on top. basically. And that cone was the nose cone that goes on top of a rocket. It was so small that the astronauts joked that you didn't get into it, you put it on. They had to squeeze. They were all had to be five foot 11 or shorter, and they were all very trim fit men, only about 150, 160 pounds to squeeze into this thing. And for folks who are visiting this exhibit in the museum, Can they go inside? What does it look like on the inside? You can see the Friendship 7 down in our Milesons of Flight Gallery, and you can sort of look into the cockpit and see how tight it is.

10:21Mike Neufeld:You go through this hatch, and then there's an instrument panel in front of you. You can get an even better view if you go up to Freedom 7 in the Destination Moon exhibit. That was the one that Alan Shepard became the first American in space. I see. In May 1961, and you can see just how tiny and how tight it is. You know, tidbit, footnote, I don't know, I found fascinating that inside the capsule was an eye chart. Did John Glenn have to keep kind of reading the eye chart to make sure nothing happened to his eyes in space? Yeah, I mean, that was certainly a question the doctors had. I mean, some doctors had very scary predictions about once your eyeball is weightless, you could no longer focus and you wouldn't be able to see.

11:05Mike Neufeld:And they had many other medical questions that were scary. And so John Glenn had to periodically look at the eye chart and determine how good it looked. Of course, the fears turned out to be wrong. There was no at least short-term effect on vision. I want to play some tape of John Glenn. This is the moment he reached orbit. And this audio is courtesy of NASA. Roger. Zero J. And I feel fine. Capsule is turning around. Oh, that view is tremendous. What a moment. And Mike, you were alive following this at the time. Do you remember that moment? I was old enough to watch this on TV. So I was a nine-year-old boy in Calgary, Alberta.

11:51Mike Neufeld:And I got up that morning and said, oh, they may launch John Glenn today. As it happened, there were multiple delays, but it took off before I went to school. So I saw the launch live on TV. In those days, you did not have instant audio. NASA would hold back the tape of the astronaut talking to Mercury Control, and then they would play it afterwards. So I'm not sure if I heard the exact moment. I see. I understand. Mikey, you know the story of space travel is always one of lineage. I imagine you're following the Artemis II mission to the moon and back. Do you connect today's mission back to the Mercury mission, John Glenn, 64 years ago?

12:31Mike Neufeld:Yeah, certainly. it was part of this history of putting humans in space, sending to the moon, and now sending them back to the moon. So John Glenn was obviously an extremely important moment for the United States, because that's when we put a man in orbit. That's when we showed that we were on the same par as the Soviet Union, or at least catching up one of the beginnings of Americans traveling first into orbit and then into deep space. We've been talking to Mike Neufeld, retired curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Mike, thank you so much. Great. I enjoyed talking to you.

13:33Mike Neufeld:Before we go, we hope you were able to file your taxes on time this year. As gas prices keep soaring, this year's refund may not feel all that big. Financial stress can be hard to manage. So that's why we called up financial therapist Megan McCoy. Maybe take a little time before spending. That might mean catching up on bills, making an emergency cushion. But no matter what you do, I hope that is intentionality and aligned with your values. your other financial goals. You can hear more at hereandnow.org.

14:16Mike Neufeld:Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Will Wackey. Today's editors were Michael Scotto and Kat Welch. Technical direction from James Trout and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And the executive producer of Here and Now is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend. We'll see you Monday.