A podcast started by the Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH) hopes to make the sciences more easily accessible to the public. Hosted by VMNH Administrator of Science Ben Williams, “The VMNHcast” primarily focuses on the work being done in the museum.
Williams said he “interviews with curators talking about interesting things they’re working on. I also talk to board members” and occasionally brings in folks who are not museum staff or directly related to the museum.
“We did an episode a while back about a paper. It was a collaboration between Dr. Nancy Moncrief, who’s here, and Dr. Brinkerhoff, who’s a scientist of another institution,” he said.
A recent two-part series was an interview of Dr. Art Evans, an entomologist who previously served as the Director of the Insect Zoo at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, about his career and published works.
The podcast began in April and there are currently 13 episodes, Williams said, noting that he tries to put out one or two episodes each month.
“The idea came about, it was late 2021, Dr. Adam Pritchard and Dr. Hayden Bassett, who are our paleontologist and archeologist respectively,” Williams said. The two “approached me about the idea of doing a museum podcast. I thought it was a great idea, and they asked me what I thought about being the one to host it.”
After some research and purchasing the necessary equipment, Williams published the first episode about the museum’s Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab.
The topics presented during episodes depend on what’s going on at the museum and Williams’ own ideas.
“Sometimes, I’ll just have an idea like ‘hey, that’s an interesting story let’s talk about it.’ Sometimes the curators will say, ‘I just published this paper, or I’m working on a paper and it’s a pretty interesting topic, do you want to do a podcast about this,’” he said.
Like the topics covered, the podcast’s episodes also have a variety of play times, with the shortest being 11 minutes and the longest at 55 minutes.
“I’ve never been a fan of minimum word counts,” Williams, a former journalist, said. “I think a thing should be as long as it needs to be.”
Williams said his favorite episode involved People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) contacting Dr. Kaloyan “Kal” Ivanov and Dr. Joe Keiper, the museum’s Executive Director, in 2021 to help investigate an animal cruelty case in the Midwest.
“It was a case involving the death of a large cat that PETA believed was due to neglect,” he said.
The two men were called in because PETA wanted forensic entomologists to study the insects and insect egg casings to pinpoint with a degree of accuracy when the cat died.
“So, they were being brought in to determine the time of death of this tiger,” Williams said.
In talking to Ivanov, Williams said he realized the person under suspicion of neglect was Jeff Lowe from the Netflix show “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.”
“Somehow, no disrespect to Joe and Kal, but somehow PETA had found the only two people in America that had only not watched Tiger King but were totally unaware of its existence,” Williams said. “I was just floored. I was like ‘you guys know this is a really big deal, right? Like you could end up on a season of this Netflix documentary.’”
Based on the evidence Ivanov and Keiper found, Williams said it seemed that Lowe had not been entirely honest about the nature and timeframe of the tiger’s death.
“We did a whole episode where they talked about that experience and how forensic entomology works and how that trial turned out. That’s one of my favorites because it’s such a crazy story and the fact that the Virginia Museum of Natural History of all places got involved in that,” he said.
Williams said a future episode will focus on Dr. Adam Prichard’s paper on drepanosaurus, a Triassic Period reptile.
“Drepanosaurus were these weird-looking reptiles that had very short and almost club-like arms with a really long claw on one of the fingers,” Williams said and explained “the belief is that they would use that claw to dig beetle grubs out of trees. They wouldn’t have eaten ants because ants didn’t even exist at this time to my understanding.”
Williams believes it’s often easy for people to find the sciences inaccessible. His goal is to make the podcast something that anyone can listen to and get something out of.
“One of my main goals with this podcast is that I didn’t want it to be very dry, and I didn’t want there to be a lot of jargon,” he said.
Williams said he thinks this is part of why he was asked to host the podcast.
“Even though my title is Administrator of Science and I work very closely with the curators, I’m not a scientist. I was an English major, and in fact, physical science in 7th grade was one of the worst experiences of my life,” he said, laughing.
But, like his work with the museum, he approaches everything as an enthusiast.
“I hope that a lot of the questions that I’m asking scientists are the questions that the average person, the layperson, would ask if they were in my shoes,” he said.
With each episode, Williams hopes to provide something light and accessible to listeners.
“I even crack jokes occasionally, and on rare occasions some of them are funny,” he said.
The podcast can be found at www.vmnh.net/research-collections/vmnhcast, Apple Podcasts or Spotify by searching “The VMNHcast.”
