Members’ Night

Every year, members of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University are treated to a special evening. They can meet our staff, see the collections, and experience the breadth and depth of work that takes place behind the scenes. Specific activities may vary from year to year but our members' favorites include:

Meeting our scientists: Meet and talk with an: environmental scientist studying wetlands, a botanist studying flowers, a paleontoligist studying fossils, or any one of a number of Academy scientists. You’ll be visiting them in the labs and offices where they work.
Dusting dinosaurs: When it comes to our dinosaur skeletons, it usually “hands-off,” but on Members’ Night you can cross the railing and help us keep them clean.
Exploring our collections: The Academy holds nearly 18 million biological specimens. You won’t see them all, but you can see many of them, whether they’re insects, birds, fishes, mollusks, lizards, plants, fossils, or more.
Clipping fingernails: You read it right! One of our environmental chemists will take a sample of your fingernails. It turns out that your fingernails provide clues about what you eat. Academy scientists use similar techniques to study food webs in the environment.
Caring for our live animals: Watch our animals keepers trim nails, talons, and beaks while you learn how we keep our live animals hapy and healthy.
Looking through a microscope: We use many microscopes at the Academy. You can look through some of them.
Skinning birds: It's not as bad as it sounds, but it is a little gross. Watch our ornithologist prepare birds for the collections.
Testing for toxins: Join our environmental chemists as they test water samples for toxic chemicals.
Meeting the archivist: Meet some history too. Many of the letters, pictures, field notes, and other artifacts she cares for are well over a hundred years old.
Pressing plants: Learn how to press, mount, and even curate a botanical specimen.
Saving the image: The Academy cares for many rare—and often fragile—books, pictures, and artifacts. Watch how we scan these treasures to make them more widely available for publications, posters, exhibits, and the web.
Aging fish: Our fisheries scientists can determine the age of a fish by counting the growth rings in its otoliths, which are small bone-like structures found in the inner ear of fish. See how they do it.