 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries both in Nebraska and across the country. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, and the show is officially an hour long. If you can't join us on Wednesdays, that's fine though. We do record our show every week, and it is posted onto our website. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can see our archives and watch all of our recordings. Usually, we use the GoToWebinar online meeting sharing system to do Encompass Live shows. Today, we are using Zoom, a special event we have going this morning with our University of Nebraska State Museum. So, a little different today, but it's working great, I think. On Encompass Live, we do have a variety of things that we do here. We do book reviews, interviews, demos, mini training sessions, basically anything and everything you can think of that's related to libraries. And there's any kind of libraries out there. We are at the Nebraska, for those of you not here in the state, in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for all libraries. So, public academic schools, K-12, special museums, of course. We provide services to any and all of them. We do sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations about things that we are doing here at the Commission, but we bring guest speakers as well. And that's what we're doing today, obviously. On remotely with us is Annie Mumgard, who is from our University of Nebraska State Museum, which is just actually up the street from us here in Lincoln. But we're doing a live show here with her at their location to take us on a virtual field trip through some things that they do there at the museum. So, good morning, Annie. Glad to have you here. If you do have any questions or comments throughout the session today, you guys do all have microphones I can see. If you want to, you can unmute your microphone and ask a question, but there is a Zoom chat in there. If you just click on and open that, you can type in there. And Annie can see that as well. And she did mention earlier, if some of you weren't on, that you can also chat amongst yourself there if you want to. It doesn't have to always be a question to her. You could just be, you know, commenting about things. But she does have a separate computer there that she can see anything that you're typing in there as well. So, I will just hand it over to you, Annie. That would tell us about what you got going there. All right, well, good morning, everyone. As Krista said, my name is Annie Mumgard. I am an educator here at the University of Nebraska State Museum. I am in our Ellison Hall. I'll show you that in just a minute. I do want to say the reason I have on these big earphones is because we do come live from our galleries. And our gallery today is going to be very busy. So, hopefully, if you ever can't hear me, just point to your ears or Krista can point to your ears and we can figure it out. But, hopefully, you can always hear me. I have the microphone close enough. As well as you can put it on the chat line. If you do put it on the chat line, we will find out how talented I am on multitasking, doing visual and reading all at the same time. So, we'll go from there. Well, with most virtual, kind of, I only have several online. Has anybody been on a virtual field trip? Raise your hand or wave at me if you've ever been on a virtual field trip. Okay, from the ones I can see, the answer would be no. Oh, there's Tammy. Yes, Tammy has been on several with us. I'm going to expect her to helpfully pitch in on how she could, how it can best be used within a library. Because I believe, Tammy, we came to you this summer with The Rock program, correct? Yeah. And Tammy also joined us in Ash Falls. So, we have an expert librarian here who's been on virtual field trips. So, we'll have to hear from her a little bit. So, I will just start with, on a virtual field trip, the first thing I always do is give context of where I am. And I am here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and on the campus here in Lincoln. If anybody knows the Huskers, there's our big stadium down the street from us. They have the distinct privilege to be one block from us. And we are the Museum of Natural History, which means that we have everything in it from the rocks and animals that we, rocks and animals that we walk on, that used to live here to the animals that live here now. We're also a research institution, we're a Smithsonian research institution, which means that we have, what we have in our museum is about 1, 1,000, 1,100, depends who you ask about what we actually have in our whole collection. So, we started doing virtual, we have been doing informal education, such as gallery programs for over 30 some years. We have a touch and feel kind of position, placed down in the museum, like many museums. But we noticed probably about five years ago that the yellow school buses just were not coming to our museum as often as they used to. And so we were looking into doing the virtual field trip programs. And so we got a very nice grant about four years ago to get us all set up to do it. So we've been doing virtual field trips for about four years. Now, we originally started, geared them towards our classrooms, a classroom teacher. But in the last year, it's always been my intent, but these would also be fantastic and could definitely work within a library system. They can also work within an adult education system or an adult senior center. Because our programs, not only ours, but there's a whole bunch of us who provide virtual field trips. Our way for you to reach out and bring the world to you, that you don't even have to leave your library or your institution and you can bring the world on in. And that is kind of our goal with our virtual field trips. So I'm gonna show you just a quick little video about kind of how that works for us. Part of being a big 10 university, part of the university is we get a few little perks. And one of them is they thought we were doing such a great job. They did a little commercial about us. So here is, and this kind of shows for you what a virtual field trip can be. Like I said, this is classroom oriented, but we can talk libraries. The reality is today, kids are not taking field trips as often. Our state is over 400 miles across. It can take a lot of time, money and resources to get here. So what we're doing is knocking down our walls to share what we have here at the States Museum. Our virtual field trips can bring students from all across the state of Nebraska here to Lincoln to their natural history museum. Hello everyone. How are you guys doing? Good. We are live in the gallery and it is not a green screen. We are actually in the galleries. So they actually are walking through the halls just as they would if they were actually here. A lot of these kids do not have the opportunity to travel north to go to the UNL State Museum. So if we can bring that into the classroom, it's given them an opportunity they would not normally have. So just to recap that, when you think about what is a virtual field trip? One thing I really wanna make very clear is that two-way interactive digital extension of your classroom, your library, your media center, wherever. It's very, we are very much, oops, standards-based. We're actually very object-based too because we are a museum. We believe strongly in sending along the, we have many kits. Most of our programs have a lot of kits that we send to you and you can have a hands-on aspect. The virtual field trips themselves are also, like I said, we've been doing an informal education for over 30 years. And we are based on the inquiry-based kind of learning and teaching. And that means not just standing and telling but having them touch and feel and think through, ask questions, questioning back and forth. And our virtual field trips are very much built on that as well. So just that second here and then get a different. When you think about the virtual field trip for your library, one thing we'd like you to think about is, well, what kind of programs can you do? I had to get the right, excuse me, what do you need to connect? Well, you need to connect with what you have right now. And in your libraries, it's the same thing or your media center. So I'm gonna keep saying libraries. I know many are media centers. I know many might be you work with libraries or you work with schools because of your work. And it's the same just about wherever you go. I also want to just add in right now, we keep talking about Nebraska, but the biggest thing is that we can go anywhere because the first thing you need is an internet. And as you are all from everywhere, I noticed last time we had Wisconsin and Washington, the same would be doing a virtual field trip with this. As long as you have an internet, you do need about 12 up, 12 down what they call megabytes is the best way of doing it, of connecting, but we do a lot of testing. And so we have been known to, now Tammy, you can tell me, and Dinoa, I'm not quite sure. You have a fairly low bandwidth, but we connected with your school. Is that correct? Right, it is connected with the school. Through the school. Yes. Okay. And I know in Nebraska, one thing that we're only working on is up being the bandwidth for all libraries in Nebraska. And that is a big initiative. And one of the reasons would be is so that you could bring virtual field trips to your library. Because as I said, it is a way of bringing the world into your library. So what else do you need to connect? You have the internet, then you need a laptop or a computer. It's best if you have a webcam because it's two-way interactive. We can see you guys, you can see us, but we also want to see everyone in your building, in your room. And also good to have a microphone. There are these Logitech cameras you can get, which are fairly cheap, $100 or so that have both of those. So it makes it pretty easy to connect. And then the Zoom app. The reason we do the Zoom app is because we have found that it's one of the easiest ways to connect. It's a free app that you can download and that we connect that way. It makes it nice and simple for us. And it has a lot of other features in it like this as well. So we have all that you're connected. So what exactly would we do and how would we do it with you? This summer, we knew that your summer program across the country was Libraries Rock. And we also knew that that was kind of looking at music when we kept looking at all the pages. We're like, well, we don't do music, but we do do a lot of rocks. And so we did create a program for this summer about library, about rocks. And we called that Steady as a Rock. And with Steady as a Rock, we made this, it was pretty much made for about a, we made it so we could go kind of pre-K through six. It was a very general audience. And we have soon discovered the nice thing about this is that we then were able to take that and now use it for third or fifth graders here. We learned a lot from doing that pilot this summer. And that one thing is that we know that your audience can go from a six month old to your grandmother sitting there in your summer program, watching your summer program. And we did do an interactive with Play Doh with that. And we found a way, we kind of were able to be very flexible and kind of help there. Because we can see you, it's like we're in your room. We work with you, who works with your audience and making things work. Tammy, you wanna tell a little bit about how that worked for you? I'm sorry to put you on spot. No, it's great. And what was exciting is my library board president and her husband, who are both retired teachers, attended the study as a rock program. And both of them said, oh my gosh, that was fabulous. So worth every penny. So that's a good testimony. Very, thank you very much. Very interactive. All the kids had their own Play Doh. We were advised to have that. And so they were able to use that to manipulate as Annie discussed the different things about the different types of rocks. They had pre-printed cards about the different kinds of rocks, so they got to go into their own little groups. So the kids were very engaged throughout the whole presentation. So great job, Annie. Oh, well, thank you very much. Our goal is to do that, that we don't want you just sitting and looking at us and listening. I always have a joke that adults would rather sit there and look and listen to us. But kids are much more like, what are you gonna do to make me to entertain me? We're not here so much to entertain, but we do use a lot of to interact and engage with your students. And we're gonna do a little bit of that in just a minute here. We're gonna take a look around. I'm gonna show you how if you brought your students here and we would look at some of our elephants here in Elephant Hall, which I promised you, I would show you, and I have not shown you yet. So here, I'll go to the end of the second. We do have a variety of other programs. We have about six programs. And one of them is called, that I think would be fabulous for support libraries, is called our science chats. And this is where it's a 15 minute chat with a scientist that you can talk about when do they decide they want to become. If you talk about their science, we have had them talk about when they knew they wanted to become a scientist, what they had to do to become a scientist and like things that they had to learn when they were younger to become a scientist. So we have these three are rock stars. They've talked about Jith there. He's figuring out how to make biodiesel fuel from algae. So he actually shows kids how they do plant DNA. Sean, Shane there, he's fantastic paleontologist. We actually talked to some kids from Florida and he connected it to, he had been to Florida just recently on a dig. So he was able to connect it to their lives. And Maria there is doing work and she's very young getting her PhD. She's working with birds and kids have loved talking with her because one thing she talks about is she couldn't be a scientist, she would be a writer. So she kind of really does this lovely career. They all three have done this lovely career base. Jith talks about how he didn't like science until about ninth grade. So it's kind of a great way. Now, how I could see science chats working well with light and within a library is if you are wanting to have them jump off and write something or if you're reading a book about something and your light would like to see a career base aspect to it. This would be a great way of doing it. Another program we have for our general audience would be great for you all would be called our Tesker Power. This is a 30 minute program which here in our elephant hall. I'm gonna give you a taste of that in just a minute. Just kind of helps gives you a taste of paleontology, a taste of how these huge fossils were found and how we know what we know with them. I talked about studies of rock and another one is called animals in the hall. And this is for pre-K through second grade. This has a kit that we send to you and you actually help the kids make dioramas. We're downstairs, we look at our dioramas of animals in our Nebraska Hall of Wildlife Animals. Again, we have done this not just for Nebraska but we've done this for Florida, we've done this for Canada, we've done this for New York and we can make it very appropriate towards your audience because animals are animals. We happen to have animals that are native to Nebraska because we are in Nebraska's science museum but we talk about habitat, we talk about adaptation and we have kids do a lot of interactive with that. That we have them think about being a zoologist and this just kind of shows one of the interactives is that one thing we have them do is they have to listen and figure out what the animal is. I'm gonna have you listen. Anybody have an idea of what animal that might be? They're very loud. Is it a wolf? Wolf? Good guess, good guess. Or coyote. It's a coyote. What I would say is that we don't have wolves in Nebraska. We used to have wolves very long time ago, they weren't extinct. We no longer have wolves in Nebraska so it's kind of making you think about place and time and so forth. So that's just one of them. We also do a little activity with kids about using wolf, sorry, no, I'm saying it. Coyote ears and not our ears and the difference between how he is a predator looking for his prey and how he uses and is adapted to do that well. I'm sure you're all wondering this. Well, this is all lovely, I would love to do it but what does it cost? And so these are our costs just for real quickly. You can also find this on our website for a 30 minute program or $80 for a 45 minute program or 95. Now, this is actually where you can find a lot more information about us on all of our programs. I'm sure Krista can also send this forward when she puts the stuff out, puts information out. Now this is about us and of course we would love to see you in our museum but I also wanna just put a pitch out there. There are lots and lots of folks, there's over 150 providers that I know of that are doing virtual field trips. So when I say you can open your library to the world, I truly mean it. And there's this group called Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. C-I-L-C for short, C-I-L-C dot org would be where you would find them. And you can put a keyword in there like something you are looking at wanting to do and it will give you all the folks and the kind of programs that they're doing. Now there's a lot of programs that are free. NASA has some great free programs. I know that this summer your program is about space. It would be fantastic to search NASA to see what kind of programs they can give you. There's another group, if you put in space, I can't remember their name offhand. They're the Jesuit College in Kentucky or something like that. They do this amazing program that is about your kids are like in a module and then they kind of work with them as if they're real scientists. Astronauts go in up in space. I've heard really, really great things about them. So this is a great resource for you if you're thinking virtual sounds like something I might really want to look into. Another resource and this is because again, we're in Nebraska, those in Nebraska and another place to look is enviz.esucc.org. This is an org put together by all of our distance learning folks out in Nebraska and it has a lot of the institutions in Nebraska that do virtual as well as other programs. So that is a lot of information. Before I hop off and show you our elephants, are there any questions? I see something on the chat line. Everyone's hope, somebody guess, any questions? If you have any questions, unmute your microphone, ask the questions or type into the chat, whichever you prefer, anything you want to ask now. I think Tammy did answer the question, she knew the coyote. Very good. I know that one suggestion that was made to us from a media center was that this would be a great, actually good for adults that come to your libraries because like a daytime program because we can cover a variety of things. Like I said, it looks like we're very kid oriented but we'll do test for power. That's not kid art, that's for a general audience. Our science chats could definitely be for adults as well. If you go to CIOC you will find a ton of stuff that are fantastic. There's like Cincinnati Museum of Art has a really solid program and they do a lot of program looking at their art. The Smithsonian even has a bit of a program. They do it a little bit differently to a part of it. Well, there are no questions and what I'm gonna do is give you just a little taste of what it's like to take our program called Test for Power and I have to revamp myself just a little bit. So hold on for just 30 seconds here. I have to get rid of one PowerPoint and go to another. And more importantly, I have to kind of get my brain to go, okay. This is when somebody is supposed to be singing like do do do do do do. Let me get here. Sorry, I meant to have this up and I did have it up and then I talked to like five people in between and that was not a good idea. Well, I'll just share quick that when you first started the Ash Falls program it was kind of exciting that our directors meeting we actually did a virtual field trip as one of their pilots. So we were the first ones to see the pilot of the Ash Falls and then we got to all the directors got to give our insights. Well, we would like to see more of this or this was fantastic. Got to do some productive criticism. That was a great opportunity, Annie. So you guys were the guinea pigs for them. Yes. They were, I think the very first guinea pigs and one of the things was we can't hear you very well and that's because we had not quite figured out our microphones at that point in time. I did not point that out but we do have a virtual field trip to Ash Falls which is our sister museum. Ash Falls is, they don't like it when we say they're remote but you do have to put effort to drive there. They are out in part of Nebraska where it's not that remote, it just takes a while to get there. And in long story short, it is fossils that are in situ they're actually left in the ground and they're about 12 million years old. All comes from an ancient volcano but the really cool thing about that virtual field trip is that our educator actually takes the camera into the fossil bed. So you get a closer look at the fossils than if you were even to go to the Ash Falls themselves to visit. They are only open till November, till Thanksgiving time. We have to put the fossils to bed after that because the roof is not exactly leak proof so we have to cover up the fossils to keep them safe but then they open up in about March and then they would be available all next summer. So that would be another interesting good trip. You will find them, I think we have a link to them on our website but you can also go to Ash Falls Fossil Beds and that's another great place. Okay, so I'm gonna try to change my brain here and we're gonna go to Tesker Power. Now if you're visiting me for Tesker Power I would explain to you who I am. I would explain to you where I am and then I would ask you the question of I would tell you that I am here in the land of elephants. Now when I drove to work today I didn't see any elephants. Did you see any elephants Tammy as you were looking out your window this morning? No elephants? Well that's very odd because actually Nebraska is known as the land of elephants and that is because our ancient propositions lived in this state. I am in the museum and I am in our gallery. Let me get to the right button here. That I'm gonna show you really quick. I'm called in, I'm in what we call Elephant Hall. Elephant Hall was created when we built the museum. It was created as a way, now my camera's gonna be a little weird here. It was meant to be a parade of elephants. Let me hold on here. My camera's coming into focus. As you can see we have a whole bunch of great kids. So we're meant to be a parade of elephants and that would be like you can see all around the walls here. We have all of our fossils and going down here and here I am, hello, and down and all this way. And we go from our ancient elephants and we can even all the way to our more modern day elephants. And we don't have modern day elephants here. Well we do have modern day just to show as an example. So here at Elephant Hall we have all of our elephants because Nebraska is known as the land of mammals. Now because we have 35 million years of fossils because the ice age did not sweep across Nebraska kind of stopped right at the edge of our border. So the animals that were living here before the ice age which came and went, we still find many of their fossils here in Nebraska. So the first question is what's a fossil? Anybody wanna tell me, give a guess on what a fossil is? Oh I know you all have microphones. You can just type it in too, what's a fossil? You've got to have an idea? Old bones, someone says. Old bones, fantastic. Now when I asked you to tell me the first kind of fossil you think of, I want you to shout it out. Everybody open your microphones, open your mics. I'm gonna ask you, when I say fossil, what do you think of? Fossil. Yeah, dinosaurs. Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, everybody thinks of dinosaurs, right? And of course dinosaurs are fossils because that's the only way we know about the history of dinosaurs is the fossils that they left. But being, we wanna give a good definition of fossil. The fossils are the remains of plants and animals and other organisms that lived a long time ago. So we think of bones, but we also have many fossils of plants. It's very important for us to find fossils of plants because that also helps us to understand what the creatures would not only be eating but how much oxygen there might have been in the air. So we talk about being here with paleontologists. University has been going out and digging up fossils for over 125 years. We have been going just about everywhere. I love that picture. Shows a little bit about how they had to adapt their own clothing. Look at the nails on those boots. And then preparing the fossils to bring them back here into the museum. Now the first fossil, like I said, I'm kind of giving you a condense to my brain's going to. The first fossil that, so we have a lot of elephants in here. And the question is, well, how did we even start working on elephants? So about 1857, there was a gentleman by the name of Lieutenant G.K. Warren. And he was a soldier and a topographer and an engineer. And he was sent out, this was to come out to the place called the Nebraska Territories. And he was sent out here to make a map. And he was sent out to make the map for the Kansas Nebraska Territories. He sent out to make a map for the railroad because they wanted to go across the country. So he came out about 1857. And he was kind of scouting around and up for Nebraska, which at that point was land that belonged to the Sioux. And he found the first, let's just say recorded fossil. And because we're pretty sure the fossils were being used by the first peoples before we did, but he has the first recorded fossil. And I'm going to go over there and I'm going to show you what it was that he found. And he found, I'm coming, I'm coming. He found a fossil that looked very much like this. Anybody have any idea who this, what this is and who it might have belonged to? Is that a tooth? It is a tooth. And who do you think it might have belonged to? Mimeth. Or. Very good. We're going to give Kristen A by the end of this. Okay, everybody, we're going to, she's going to have to get a round of applause for being our first piece. Guys, this is a tooth. He found a tooth very much like this one. And it is the first recorded tooth. Now when I show this to kids, they pretty much always think it looks like an Adidas shoe print, which I would have to agree with them. It does, yes. Does it not? This is a mammoth tooth. This actually is the tooth that came from our friend Archie. Archie is the largest mounted mammoth in the world. He is about 14 feet tall and he is about 30,000 years old. He was found in the 1920s and he was found by a relative of the dinosaur. Anybody have an idea who a relative of the dinosaur might be? Birds. Birds, very much so. Archie himself was found by chickens, needless to say. And he was found by the chicken and in Mr. Carragher's farmland, the chickens kept digging around in the same area. Mr. Carragher was like, why are they digging there? He went over and looked and he found the, very front, the tusks, Archie's tusks. Now he was kind of an entrepreneurial kind of farmer and he pulled out those tusks and he went around the state fairs and he was charging people to come on in to look at his tusks. And then here at the museum, we finally got ahold of them and said, do you think we could get the rest of this elephant out of there and use it for the museum? I do not know if they pay to him any money or not, but we did get by Archie. When he was first exhibited, this is how he first went up and those are Archie's legs. So as you can see how tall he is, we could walk underneath his legs. He then came over here when we built the museum and we mounted him and he's been mounted here in the museum since 1920s. Now, there are a few things we know about Archie. Now I told you that he was found, he was not found, the first mammoth tooth, recorded mammoth tooth was found not by a paleontologist, but was found by someone who was more of an engineer or a topographer and a soldier. But the thing about paleontology is that they have to take, and most scientists, you use what you know and you ask questions to apply it towards what you don't know to find some answers. So as a paleontologist, what you would do is you would look at, and I told you we had some modern day animals, you would look at here in the museum and move the camera just a little bit. Next to Archie, we have modern day elephants. These are some Indian elephants and male female and a baby, they're not related, but they kind of look good together. And what you would do as a paleontologist is you would know, compared to that anatomy, you would know the structure of an elephant and then you could compare that towards Archie. Now here's the cool thing about Archie. He is made of seven different fossil finds. When we found Archie, we found his tusks, his skull and his femur, his shoulder bone there and some of his femurs. So we knew how big he was, but it's hard to find a full mammoth fossil. So he's what we call a composite fossil and this is in many museums. They use a variety of finds and they put it together so you could see what one whole creature would look like. And so hence we have Archie. Now like I said, this is his tooth. He only has one of his teeth, this is one of his teeth. Being a probicidian, a member of the probicidian family and the thing we know about elephants, probicidians are creatures of long noses, that they would have four of these in his mouth. I'm just going to show you real quick his mouth so you could be like, what, how does that work? I'll just show you how close we can also get to some of our creatures. I moved my camera here. So that is Archie and now his tusks are about six to eight feet long and just because I want to show off, I can actually even get closer to Archie and we can see exactly where those teeth would go in right there. So that is about, that's about at least 14 feet up, 15 feet up because I could not make it there. Now another thing if we were actually doing this with your kids that we would have them do and I just, I'm not going to do it right now is we would have them, well, I'll do it with you. We would have them do an interactive. So at this point, we talk about teeth and how we know about teeth. So Archie's tooth kind of looks like an Adidas tennis shoe. The reality is it's nice and flat and so when you have a nice flat tooth, we know there's a few things we know about how a tooth like that is used. I want you to go ahead and put your hands together like this. Go ahead, I can see you. There we go. And we're going to pretend we're Archie's tooth. Archie's tooth is he is not, he would be a grinder. He would go up and down and he would grind like that. Now, if you were grinding, I was saying, I don't think I put this on my, my thing. If you were grinding, would you be grinding? Keep grinding here. I'm going to show you something real quick. If you were grinding, would you be grinding grass, bushes, conifers, or fruit? I need somebody to have to tell me. What do you think you would be grinding? Yes, all of the above. All of the above. Well, let's think about it. Do you have to grind your fruit or can you just mash them? Yeah, well, yeah, I guess this need to be ground. No, no. Yeah, you just kind of mash them. Soft enough to just go. What kind of animal, what animal life today do we know that kind of grinds their food? Kind of like chews, pulls and chews and pulls and chews. We got a lot of them here in Nebraska. Oh, like a cow. It's even a cow. What does a cow eat? Grass, hay. Mostly grass. Let's see if you're right. Let's give her a drum roll. Everybody go, go ahead. Give me some drum rolls. There we go. And grass, you're absolutely correct. And so for Archie, one thing we know about him, he would be eating grass. And the other thing we know about him is that because of the fossils we find with Archie that he would be living in a cool and dry place because all the other animals that were alive with him could live in a cool and dry place. This is what we think Archie would look like. Archie is 20, this guy's about 30,000 years old. He lived to be about 10,000. The mammoths were in Nebraska till about 10,000 years ago. People showed up around 11, 12,000 years ago in this area. And so there would have been humans walking around with him and this is how big they would have been next to our friend Archie. And in Nebraska, these are the places in which we have found a variety of fossils. Now, the question is, this is Nebraska. How in heaven's name did these guys get here? And elephants came across about 14 million years ago. They came across on the Bering Strait. So that is just Archie. This guy, who's 14 feet tall, would have weighed as much as seven cars, was found by chickens and has tests that go like this. He's kind of like a ballerina when he walks around. But there are a whole lot of other ancient elephants around here. So this guy was found by chickens. I'm going to go over here and we're going to show you some other elephants that were found because of chickenpox. Here we go. I'm going to turn my light. There you go. These guys are called gompatheers. Sometimes called fortuskers. You might be able to see why they might be fortuskers. Let me get my camera just right so you can see them. And I get my lights here. So gompatheers, they came over about 14 million years ago on that Bering Strait. They were around this area until about three million years ago. This guy right here, as I said, Archie was found of chickens. This guy was found because of chickenpox. In 1913, there was a big outbreak of chickenpox. Now some say it was measles. Some say chickenpox. Nobody wrote it down. I'm going with chickenpox because that goes well with my Archie fan there. The Mr. A.C. Woodford, the principal, was a hobby paleontologist. Everybody else got sick. They had the day off. He shut down the school and he went out and he went looking for fossils. And this is what he found. He went to this place called Devil's Gulch here in Nebraska. That is what it looked like. Now most of Nebraska is pretty flat and maybe rolling hills. The Devil's Gulch up in northern Nebraska looks very much like this. It has these really sandy areas. This also would be very close to the place that our soldier in 1857 found his first known fossil as well. And he was down here in Devil's Gulch. He found something very interesting. He came back. He told the museum. The museum sent out a team. And this is us pulling up some of the femurs of this guy. They're probably about 200 pounds there in that wagon, pulling them up the Devil's Gulch. And this is a variety of the other fossils they found. They're all in what we call, they're all in their castes because to save a fossil. You know, as I like to tell kids, if you would you throw your grandma over your shoulder or would you be afraid you would break her? Most of them say, of course you're gonna break your grandma. I'm like, well these guys are way older than your grandma. And so we have to put them in these castes so that we can safely bring them here. Now here's a very cool thing about this guy. I told you about Archie. We could kind of figure out, he lived on a dry grassland and it was very cool. Well with our gompatheers, by and large, every single time we have found a gompatheer in Nebraska, we have found with him alligator teeth, garfish scales, these little mouse deer, fossils from the mouse deer, petrified wood as well as the tusks. Now you're a very smart group. I'm gonna ask you, what kind of habitat would have alligator teeth, fish, wood, small deer, and elephants walking, running around in it? Swamp? It would have to be a little swampy, right? Would it ever get cold? I don't know about you. Not with alligators, they wouldn't survive. Very good, not with alligators, they would not survive. So when we find the small fossils that we find with our large fossils, really help us to understand habitat. We're gonna take you to this guy real close here. Mr. Gompatheer here and show you his jaw just a little bit so you can get a little bit better idea of why they got their name Fortesker. With kids, I would also at this point say, tell me something that's different than Archie. Three things that you see that you notice are different as well as something that's different about him than modern day elephants. We'd have a little bit going back and forth because we're can't, everybody's unmuted here, we're just gonna give forward. One thing they all mentioned is his jaw, and that's a good thing to look at because his jaw is really unique. The reason Mr. Gompatheer here, he has, he's called a Fortesker because when he was originally found, this is a tusk right here, that's his two tusks, but then they also found this jaw line, this is his mandible, this jaw right here. And it goes all the way down to here. And some of the original thought was like, wow, did he have Fortesks or is that his jaw? And this is his jaw. Now this is his tooth. Quite different from Archie's tooth, as you can see. Much smaller than Archie's tooth. Again, he's a proboscidian in which he's from the elephant family. How many of these hold up fingers? How many of these would he have in his mouth? There we go, you're right. He would have four of them in his mouth, still pretty big, but also are very different shape. That's because Mr. Gompatheer here, if he, he's a masher, if we'd have kids put their hands together, he's mashing like this. I always say if he was a superhero, he would be like Hulk. He'd be smashing his food and he'd be eating mostly fruits and vegetables. When we find all these other small animals with him, we know we can kind of put all that together and we can kind of figure out his habitat. And this is our theory of his habitat is that he lives in a forested grassland, very warm, never got cold, never froze, and rather wet. Not exactly a swamp, but definitely not the grassland that we have today. Now, Mr. Gompatheer behind me, he is over 11 million years old. This is what we think he would look like. He would never have lived here with people. They did not war not around, but if people were standing close to him, this is what they would look like. Now, Mr. Gompatheer is found mostly up in Northern Nebraska and out West. Now, what geological type on my map do you see? Where do we mostly find our Gompatheers? What kind of natural element are we finding them? That question makes sense. Along the rivers? Yeah, near water. And near water, absolutely. Because these guys are so old, they are down deep in our sediment and we have to have, we find them mostly by the rivers. The rivers have channeled down and gotten as deep enough so that we're able to find our Gompatheers. Depending on your age range of kid and or audience, we can then go in to talk about the different sediment formations and what kind of different fossils we find in them because of the way the geology works. So that in a nutshell in like really quick 20 minutes is well, a lot of the interactive is our task for power. So that kind of shows you the range. With adults, we can have more questions and answers. We did this one time with an adult senior center and boy, did I get grilled on modern day elephants. So I learned to figure out more about modern day elephants and how we knew what we knew to apply it to ancient elephants. And with kids, like I said, it depends on your audience. You can kind of tell us, we can do a range of, do you want to know more about paymentology? Do you want to know more about fossils? Do you want to do some geology within there? And so forth. It can be really customized to whatever is going on in their curriculum at the time. We can be very customized. No, we can, and I know most providers can. We're really here to support. I didn't talk about this before, but virtuals I really see can do three things. They can engage your audience in a topic matter because they can take you outside of your own world and take you someplace to engage you in whatever it is you want to be talking about. They can really involve you in that because they can extend your classroom learning because or your museum learning because again, they take you outside of your classroom or your library and give you more information. And the last one is that they can really kind of really give you that hands on without really getting there. If we send you a kit that gives you some of that hands on and then inquiry based learning can happen as well. So it's really good. It can really fulfill a lot of inquiry based needs and learning by doing a virtual. If you have a kit, even without a kit, like you saw, we can do interactive so it can give you a feel for the space. I'm just gonna throw this out there right now. We haven't quite done it, but for this summer, we understand that the summer reading theme is... Space? For next year, yeah. For next year. So what we are considering and you can put it in the chat line if you think it'd be a great idea, we're considering taking, we do have some meteorites from space here in our museum and we're thinking about taking our rocks program and kind of expanding a little bit and looking at the difference between the meteorites and what they're created for it and what our rocks here on Earth are created with. So like if you were an alien looking at our rocks, how would you understand them? Much as we try to understand meteorites from outer space. So I think that's what we're gonna try to develop for libraries for this coming summer for the reading program. We'll really do it if you email me and tell me to. I think that's a great idea. I think that's awesome coming from that direction of it and just showing that there's... You think of the state museum as just history but you can just mix it up and just have it be anything really if you just think outside the box. So yeah, well, that's what we'd love to have you do. What do you think, Tammy? Would that be something or anybody else in the line? What do you guys think? Oh, so Ms. Chat says, Keith says, absolutely go for it. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Okay, well, we probably will then. We were also told last year that we had to have it done by November and we started to laugh. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, it's some of the libraries. Depending on the libraries, they're starting at any time from like now through like next spring getting things planned. So definitely if you're gonna be doing something that they could build into their budget or their planning, letting them know as soon as possible that you've got something in the works, that's the thing too. I mean, if you just wanted to say, hey, this is coming, we'll have it for you by the time you wanna do this next summer, let us know and we'll make sure we get it ready for you. That sounds good. And I'll just wanna add to that. Remind you about that CILC site. This sounds like a great idea. It's a nice way to, if your budget is getting smaller, but it's a great way of bringing speakers into your museum, check out CILC and you can find out all kinds of different providers who can do different kinds of stuff. So I have a young friend here who's waving at me saying this is cool. Ha, ha, ha. So there's actually, I was just writing myself a note here too Annie, I'm here at the Library Commission, Sally Snyder, you may know her, she's our Children's and Youth Services Coordinator and she is actually starting, I think next month, doing her summer reading workshops across the state here for our libraries. So I may let her know or have her just contact you about including in her talks the fact that you guys are developing something that they should, cause this is like a half day or all day workshop about here's some things that you can do for next year's program. And she can get you at least to let them know that this is something being developed. So keep an eye on it or reach out to you to let you know, like you said right now, that you, how many of them want to have it be a thing. Also, if you're interested, one thing we have done for several of the different library districts is on when they had their own workshops, that they, we connected with them for like 15 minutes. And we just did that, that quick little what's a virtual and this is how easy it is to connect. And these are a few things we can do for you. We wouldn't give them the full spiel like we just did here with the elephants and everything, but gives them a nice view. And it also kind of takes away that a little bit of that, oh my gosh, it's technical, it must be really hard. I can't possibly do that. And hopefully we kind of show them that it's not really, it's very quite easy to connect. I know Eric helped me big time and I know Tammy's done it. So it's very easy to connect. And it kind of gives a really good hands-on show and tell of how you can use it as a resource. So if anybody, any place would like us to do some, that kind of professional development for you, please contact us. We're really, we're really, we'd love to help you do that. We have a 15 minute presentation we can do for you that kind of gives the full picture. Awesome, yeah. Great. Well, thank you for inviting us and my apologies again for last week. I hope it was worth your wait. We're all back today, so it all works out, yeah. I know I had, the reason I had invited Annie to come on the show was that we do have here in Nebraska our youth services earlier in the summer that she presented that, that I didn't get to attend but I definitely wanted to see some of this. So I kind of use Sometimes Encumbered Slide from my own little, I want to see this. And it was also a couple of weeks ago at our library association, Nebraska Library Association and School of Brands Association. And you'd mentioned the beginning about presenting with, that you do this with other organizations. I think there you also, you had the asphalt but also the Alma, the Henry-Dorley Zoo. We connected with the Henry-Dorley Zoo, the agate fossil beds out in way Western Nebraska and with the Jocelyn. That's right. The Jocelyn. And you know, the Jocelyn would be another great, they have a piece of art by Jackson Pollock called, I don't know if it's called space or it's called space walk or it's something very space-oriented that would be another, and I think they might be free. I'm not ever sure about that but the Jocelyn has the ability to also do the virtual. We are going to be doing a program with, I look like I'm not even focused on it. We're going to be doing a program with the Omaha-Henry-Dorley Zoo on November 8th. We're doing it three times during the day. If anybody's interested, it's free. We already have over 2,000 kids signed up to come but that's okay, we can take some libraries if you would like to open it up to maybe an adult audience. We're going to be talking about elephants because we'll be talking about our ancient elephants that came over 14 million years ago and they walked here and we're going to then talk about modern day elephants who were flown here and to Henry-Dorley Zoo and we're going to talk about the similarities and differences and we end up with conservation because obviously our elephants went extinct. We don't want elephants today to go extinct so we're kind of ending that and that's kind of how we're celebrating National Distance Learning Week but if you look on our website you can find out it's called Elephants in America. I'm going to warn you, we're like we are, this is our first time we've tried this and we are, to say we're a little overwhelmed by how many people want to come is a little bit of a, we're having a conversation today. We have an idea of how we're going to do it but we're like, whoa, 2,000 kids, we better get, we're going to have the seal packed. Yeah, so is this something that is just going to be, there's, is there a max of number of connections you could have to one of these sessions? Do you know or? We're going to do it through a webinar and the max on the webinar is I think a hundred. We don't want a hundred because just like today I can only see three of you, it's kind of very hard to do a- I'm making a lot of people in one of these, yeah. But with that program we will be using the chat line so we will be having the classrooms talk to us via the chat line and we will have someone dedicated to reading that and throwing us questions that are coming in. Yeah, you need other people there to help. Yeah. Yeah, this isn't one person event. Right, so for you, for our viewer you can set it up so you can see all the other classrooms which is kind of cool because then you can see, in this case it's mostly kids across Nebraska just because we've not put the word out there nationally and we're kind of glad we didn't because we're, I guess we already got 2,000, we're super excited, but there will be that and you can see others that are there or you can make it so all you'll see is us and you can do your chat line. So- Tammy said, Tammy's already registered, she said. Oh yeah. Oh, someone else, you're very good. And are any of our sessions recorded? We don't record our sessions usually mostly because we want you to come and be live with us. The interactive part is really important, I think, for what you guys do, yeah. Right, right. The few times we've done it is if somebody missed it and they were planning on doing it and they missed it and they knew they were gonna miss it and they let us know, we did do that, we recorded it once and made it available for a week. I think it was for a teacher who was trying to do six classes and something happened and her sixth class couldn't take it and so we recorded it so they could use it. But by and large, we don't record because it's that two-way aspect. Yeah. So let's see, did anybody have any other questions here? I just want- Anybody have any other questions? Unmute yourself and ask or type into the group chat. Either way, it works. And I will, I want to, you did mention about the different websites. There will be when we do, you know, Diane did ask, do you ever record? We are recording today, but that's a special case because this is our weekly webinar that we do here at the Library Commission. And when I do put up the archive for this, we'll have the recording, hopefully, fingers crossed. Annie's doing that at her end and she'll send it to me. But we also do have in the page, a link to their website of all the different virtual events that CILC, one that you did, I took notes about the other, all the other ones that say things that you mentioned. So we'll have some links out to them as well before you so you can have all of that information. Well, thank you very much for having me. I will just assume that I was brilliant and that's why there were no questions. And you have now made my rest of my day and I appreciate that very much. Yeah, I think it's great. Well, thank you. Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna share my screen now, hopefully, and see if we can get this, let's see, share. You should be seeing my screen here with the page. Yeah, okay. I wanted to look when you were mentioning, yeah, the Elephants in America, here it is on the UNL site. And this is on, I just went to, this is the link that we actually do have on our page for today's event. I just had already had a hot link here to the virtual, and I had to just scroll down a bit. And here's all the other ones. You can see some that include the kits and this is how you can register for them. And then there's the Elephants in America once if you are interested in doing that, November 8th, and they're the three times, 10 a.m. till 30 and 2 p.m. central time. Adjust for your own time zone if you're not here in the middle of the country. Okay, thank you. And the other one would be just Asheville. Go to the Asheville. I don't know if we have a hot link on ours, we used to, but Asheville is one of our, they also have a virtual that's really pretty cool. But like I said, you have to do it, be by Thanksgiving or after March. But they would be great for next summer. Absolutely, all right. So, yes, that will, I think, if nobody has any other questions, I want to just say thanks, good job, all right. I think you did awesome. I'm so glad I got to have you. And I was very, I'm kind of a little upset that I didn't get to see the full session of the test gear power, but it was very, very cool and interesting. I liked it. I think I might have to come by and take a visit at them till the museum began. Museum again, I haven't been there for a few years. So we're good to take another walk through and see everything. Let me know, I'll bring up a tooth for you to touch. Awesome. All right, so that'll wrap it up for today's show. It will be, as I said, it will be on our website. This is the page for today, but on our main and campus live website, we have our upcoming shows. And right underneath there, there's a link to our archives. This is where all of our recordings go here, almost recent ones at the top. So when today's is done, it will be listed here. This is the one that we did most recently. We'll have a link to it. We usually post it up to our Nebraska Library Commission's YouTube account, which hopefully will be working. I heard yesterday there's issues with YouTube, but generally it works. So you have a link to that. And as I said, we'll have links to any of the things that Annie had mentioned will be here. Anyone who was here with us live today or did register for today's show will be sent an email from me, letting you know when the archive is ready. It'll take some time for them to get it processed and it to me to upload it. So by the end of the week, I'll say, just to play it safe depending on what goes on with it. So that will be for today's show. I'll be joining us next week when we will be talking about strategies for identifying fake news. Some things going on in our world today is a proliferation of fake or at least dubious. We'll be diplomatic about it, news. And Judy Henning is a professor at University of Nebraska at Carney. We'll be joining us also remotely to talk about how we can work with students to identify these things and get them to do some critical thinking about it. So please do join us for that. Sign up and register for that one and any of our other upcoming shows. This looks like we only have a couple of shows coming up. I'm working on confirming some shows for November, so this will be getting filled in. So don't worry about that, just keep an eye on our page and you'll see what our other shows coming up will be. We are also on Facebook. I've got a Facebook link here and over here is our Facebook page. I do post here reminders of shows that are coming up. Here's a reminder to log in for today's show when our archives, our recordings are available. I post on here. Got a lot of pictures of Archie because that was the most recent one. Here we go. The recording of the previous one. So if you're a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. I'll only post a couple of times a week announcing the current shows, upcoming shows, whenever the recording's ready. So if you wanna keep up on what we're doing over there, give us a like on Facebook. Other than that, that wraps up for today's show. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you for being here with us, Annie. This was awesome. It was a lot of fun. And we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye. Bye. All right. Thank you so much, Annie. That was great.