DC -- Natl Museum of Natural History:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: Closed due to Covid-19. However, they still had the various signs about hours and such out by the curb. You didn't see the "closed" signs until you reached the door. They had kind of botched the communication.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Spiders: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, a number of options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm excited for your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1] SINH_200113_01.JPG
|
[2]
 SINH_200113_10.JPG
|
[3] SINH_200113_14.JPG
|
[4] SINH_200113_16.JPG
|
[5] SINH_200113_20.JPG
|
[6]
SINH_200113_23.JPG
|
[7] SINH_200113_26.JPG
|
[8]
SINH_200113_29.JPG
|
[9] SINH_200113_33.JPG
|
[10]
SINH_200314_01.JPG
|
[11] SINH_200314_05.JPG
|
[12] SINH_200314_08.JPG
|
[13]
SINH_200314_13.JPG
|
[14] SINH_200314_17.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- SINH_200113_10.JPG: Some of the Smithsonian museums have added donation boxes, hoping to get additional public funding given how Congress has continually been starving them financially.
Thanks a Million!
(Or Any Amount.)
The museum is free, but our exhibits and programs depend on our generous visitors -- like you!
Suggested donation: $20
Waiting for donations makes me a nervous rex.
That joke belongs in a museum.
Make your gift online today! go.si.edu/donatebox
- SINH_200113_23.JPG: Easter Island Stone Figure
This figure came from a rare inland ceremonial site called "Ahu O Pepe." Most moai, including this one, were carved from hardened volcanic ash found at a single quarry, Rano Raraku. About 1,000 moai remain on Easter Island.
This figure and another acquired at the same time are the only ones in the United States. Paymaster William J. Thomson acquired them in 1886 for the Smithsonian Institution. At that time, they were lying on the ground with six other toppled moai. They were hauled overland on special sleds to the ship USS Mohican.
- SINH_200113_29.JPG: Easter Island Stone Figure
Stone figures, called moai, from tiny, isolated Easter Island are some of the most iconic objects from the South Pacific. Carved at a single quarry, the moai were transported over roads and then raised on stone temple platforms, most of which were placed along the coast. The moai faced inland to watch over their communities. The figures represented illustrious ancestors who brought benefits to their living descendants. In ceremonies, people inserted white coral and red scoria rock into the eyes to activate the figures. Most of the moai on ceremonial sites were toppled during social disturbances of the 17th century.
Easter Island
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is an island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. Easter Island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
It is believed that Easter Island's Polynesian inhabitants arrived on Easter Island sometime near 1200 AD. They created a thriving and industrious culture, as evidenced by the island's numerous enormous stone moai and other artifacts. However, land clearing for cultivation and the introduction of the Polynesian rat led to gradual deforestation. By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island's population was estimated to be 2,000–3,000. European diseases, Peruvian slave raiding expeditions in the 1860s, and emigration to other islands, e.g. Tahiti, further depleted the population, reducing it to a low of 111 native inhabitants in 1877.
Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888. In 1966, the Rapa Nui were granted Chilean citizenship. In 2007 the island gained the constitutional status of "special territory" (Spanish: territorio especial). Administratively, it belongs to the Valparaíso Region, constituting a single commune of the Province Isla de Pascua. The 2017 Chilean census registered 7,750 people on the island, of whom 3,512 (45%) considered themselves Rapa Nui.
Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world. The nearest inhabited land (around 50 residents in 2013) is Pitcairn Island, 2,075 kilometres (1,289 mi) away; the nearest town with a population over 500 is Rikitea, on the island of Mangareva, 2,606 km (1,619 mi) away; the nearest continental point lies in central Chile, 3,512 kilometres (2,182 mi) away.
Easter Island is considered part of Insular Chile.
- SINH_200314_01.JPG: All of the museums were closed as the Covid-19 crisis spread to the capitol.
The Natural History museum screwed up a bit by leaving the regular signs out. The "we're closed" signs were on the windows of the building but you had to go up the stairs, passed the "Free Admission" signs to see them.
- SINH_200314_13.JPG: Temporary closure effective March 14, 2020.
Effective March 14, the Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC, including the National Zoo, and in New York City, have temporarily closed to support the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19.
The Smithsonian's priority is to protect the safety and health of its staff, volunteers, and visitors.
Please visit si.edu for updates on our operating status.
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
