Burke Museum

A first-of-its-kind museum has opened in the Pacific Northwest: a historical showcase of the state's Spanish-speaking communities from World War II to the present. KNKX's Rebekah Way takes us to the museum's celebratory opening day in this audio postcard.

The Burke Museum in Seattle holds more than 16 million objects related to natural and cultural history. At any given time in the past, only a tiny fraction of the collection has been visible to the public.

Soon a much greater percentage of the objects will be visible. After closing its doors to the public more than nine months ago, the Burke has moved into a new building.  

In May of 2015, Jason Love and Luke Tufts – two friends who met at the University of Washington – went fossil hunting around the Hell Creek Formation in Northeastern Montana, a region known for its fossil sites.

On their last day, the two went out on government land to cover some more ground before heading home.

“Fifteen minutes into it Jason walked onto to a big boulder with some bones in it,” Tufts said.    

The Burke Museum is getting a new exhibit: A Tyrannosaurus rex skull. Seattle paleontologists unearthed the fossils in northern Montana last summer. It began when two museum volunteers, Jason Love and Luke Tufts, found fragments of large bones belonging to a carnivorous dinosaur.

Greg Wilson led the expedition and is Burke Museum’s adjunct curator of vertebrate paleontology. He says the excavation team had a feeling they were on the trail of a T. rex. Hear him describe it:

From mastodon bones to special baskets used just for clamming, the Burke Museum houses vast numbers of objects from the natural and cultural world. There are so many pieces, in fact, that unless you’re with a curator, there are many items you might never have the opportunity to see. But that’s going to be changing when the Burke moves to a new building in 2019.

  Washington State has its first dinosaur.

Researchers at the Burke Museum say they excavated a weathered, 80 million year old thighbone from a beach on Sucia Island in the San Juans. It is the first verified dinosaur fossil ever found in Washington.

Leading up to the Super Bowl on Sunday, there have been lots of rallies for the Seahawks. One of the most unusual took place in the Burke Museum, a natural history museum on the University of Washington campus.  

If you walk through Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood with Peter Lape, he can show you the things that used to be.

Standing at the corner of First Avenue and Washington Street on a recent day, he gestured downhill.

"About half a block down is probably where that shoreline was ... when non-Native settlers moved here," Lape said.

Just where did the Seattle Seahawks’ logo come from?

Amid the fever pitch of last year’s Super Bowl run, one of the art history classes at the University of Washington got curious.

Paleontologists with the Burke Museum will excavate the giant mammoth tusk unearthed at a Seattle construction site earlier this week, and move it to the museum. 

The owners of the lot in South Lake Union said they've given the paleontologists permission to remove the tusk. 

Plastics have only been in wide use since the 1940s, yet they are everywhere, from sandwich bags to phones, to keyboards, to rain gear. Even the cans of soup in the grocery aisle are lined with it.

It's hard to imagine a world before these conveniences. What would your life be like without plastics?

Seattle resident Samantha Porter decided to find out. She works behind the scenes of the Burke Museum, which is hosting an exhibit titled "Plastics Unwrapped."

The  University of Washington’s 113 year-old Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture is debuting a new look and feel. Curators there say they want people to think more about everyday objects and how they evoke our place in the world.

“The Life Before You” is the new tag line encouraging visitors to discover and explore the Burke’s collections. First up, as the rebranding rolls out, is a new temporary exhibition called Plastics Unwrapped.

A researcher at the University of Washington says he’s identified the oldest dinosaur ever – pushing back the emergence of dinosaurs by millions of years.

The fossilized bones were discovered back in the 1930s, in Tanzania, in a major find that included a vast collection of specimens. They were gathering dust at the Natural History Museum, London, until the scientist who had custody passed away. 

Longest unpublished dissertation ever?