Ligabue Magazine 75

18.00

Second semester 2019
Year XXXVIII

The journey around the world in this issue of Ligabue Magazine begins and ends in Venice. We start in the Museum of Natural History, one of the most important scientific institutions in the city and we end with Galileo Galilei, founder of the scientific method, and a highly significant Venetian episode in his academic career: the presentation of his telescope to the senators of the Serenissima Republic on 24 August 1609.

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The most celebrated exhibit in the Venice natural science collection is the skeleton of an Ouranosaurus nigeriensis, donated by Giancarlo Ligabue in 1974. This is just one of the very many items that he presented to the museum. If Giancarlo Ligabue had lived in another era, he would have been a great traveller and explorer, driven by his passion for the natural sciences and new discoveries. It is thus a fitting acknowledgement that the Museum of Natural History has recently been named after him. The dinosaur is one of the many items described in our first article, by Mauro Bon, head of research and science education at the museum housed in the Fondaco dei Turchi. He takes us on a tour to explore the collections in rooms that were completely renovated and given a new exhibition layout in 2010.

The mysterious world of dzi beads, a Tibetan ornament said to have magical powers, is the subject of the next article, by Jamey D. Allen, who hails from Seattle and is a leading world expert on this piece of jewellery with a remarkably high market value for collectors. All women and men in Tibet possess at least one bead, while the wealthiest inhabitants show off their many beads in elaborate ornaments that often also include red coral, turquoise, amber and precious metals. From the Tibetan highlands we move to South America and a fascinating discovery. Amazonia is not only a naturalist’s paradise, as we are used to seeing it, but also a mine of archaeological treasures, such as the rock paintings with animal motifs found in the Serrania de Chiribiquete in Colombia, a zone of high, sandstone table mountains, where the Amazon forest reaches up to the Andes. It’s a particularly inaccessible area, where nature has forged a strikingly unusual, impressive landscape. This world is described by Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist who has been working in Amazonia for decades and is head of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (cnrs) in France. From the heights of the Andes we descend to the atmospheres of an unspoilt nature, related by Maurizio Campisi,

an entrepreneur and writer who has been living for thirty years in Costa Rica, one of the countries with the greatest biodiversity in the world. In various environments “rainforests, woods, volcanos, savannahs and lagoons” 95,000 species (an estimated 6% of the planet’s total) find temporary shelter or have a permanent home. This is an incredible percentage for such a small country, which is well aware, however, of the importance of its environmental wealth: no less than 25 percent of its territory is protected
in 32 national parks and 51 nature reserves. Domesticated nature, on the other hand, can be found in botanical gardens. Alessandra Viola, a science journalist, deals with this topic. Italy pioneered the creation of university gardens. The oldest in the world is in Padua, where a palm tree, planted in 1585, was admired by Wolfgang Goethe on his journey to Italy and can still be seen today. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a sudden surge of interest in transplanting exotic trees, mainly imported from America and Asia. Exploring these treasure troves of nature, really is like travelling through geography and time;

Let’s go back to the world of prehistoric reptiles, we move from the African desert of the Ténéré to the Asian desert of Gobi, in Mongolia, where a “swan” dinosaur skeleton was found. An expert palaeontologist, Andrea Cau was invited to study the skeleton and, here, he describes its remarkable journey up to when it underwent a scan using a particle accelerator. The fossil had actually been illegally excavated and thorough studies were required to determine its origin and age. The Halszkaraptor, as it is called, was a semi-aquatic animal and behaved like many of today’s water birds. Venice is renowned as a city of art but much less so as a city of science. Yet it has also played an important role in the history of science.

One example is an invention by Galileo Galilei: “A new artifice of a spyglass made from the most complex ideas of perspective, which brings visible objects so close to the eye, represents them so large and distinct, that what is nine miles away appears to us as if it was only one mile away: here is something from which every maritime or terrestrial trader and enterprise can benefit enormously. This is the first description of the telescope” just one of the topics illustrated in the article by Piero Martin, an experimental physicist, lecturer at the University of Padua and Fellow of the American Physical Society. As you will read, the lagoon city never fails to amaze us. At this point all I can add is a hearty Bon Voyage!

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