Office Artifacts: Peter Busher

CGS prof’s display runs from fur to fossils

Office Artifacts: Peter Busher

CGS prof’s display runs from fur to fossils

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Peter Busher, CGS professor, displays runs from fur to fossils in his office

Busher started teaching in the London College of General Studies Program in the Natural Sciences 14 years ago. In this photo, he and students are looking at Cretaceous fossils near the large town of Eastbourne.

Busher commutes to work via bicycle and the MBTA. “Be aware, be assertive, but not aggressive,” he says of biking in Boston. “It’s a fine line. Don’t do anything too crazy, because if anything happens you’re going to get hurt—the car won’t get hurt.”

This ammonite fossil is from the coastal town of Lyme Regis on England’s Jurassic Coast. You can break open the mud flats and this is what you find, Busher says.

Busher won a Metcalf Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009 and to tease him, his coworkers got him this mug.

“You can see the incisor marks,” Busher says about this log. “Incisor marks can tell you how old a beaver is, and these are slightly small, so this was probably a younger beaver.”

Beavers were hunted for their pelts, almost to the point of extinction. The animals are no longer endangered.

Click on the circles above to see more of what Peter Busher displays in his College of General Studies office.

May 10, 2017

Amy Laskowski

Cydney Scott

The beaver pelt in his office reminds Peter Busher of the college road trip that drove him to study beaver ecology.

“When I was a junior, my oldest brother knew I liked to ski,” recalls Busher, a College of General Studies professor of natural sciences and mathematics and acting chair of the Division of Natural Sciences & Mathematics. “I was in San Francisco, and he asked if I wanted to drive to Utah, which has great skiing. All I had to do for gas money was pick up some beaver pelts in Salt Lake City for him.”

Then a biology major, Busher struck up a conversation with a rancher on the beaver farm and was drawn to learn more about the mammals. Since then, he’s accumulated scores of interesting beaver facts and has become a well-known expert on the semiaquatic rodents.

Beavers, for example, are second only to humans in their ability to change and adapt to their environment. The herbivores, once prized for their fur and almost hunted to extinction, use their strong teeth and powerful jaws to bring down trees. They create large log, branch, and mud structures to block streams and turn fields and forests into ponds.

Construction projects aside, beavers are among the 3 percent of mammals that are long-term monogamous, staying in relationships from 3 to 10 years.

“Beavers are very important to the environment and very interesting behaviorally,” Busher says. “They are big rodents, but they have very complex behaviors. Their food habits are very interesting. Their influence on the environment is very interesting. So I guess what I like about beavers is that there are a lot of questions, a lot of things to explore.”

In our series “Office Artifacts,” BU Today highlights interesting artifacts professors display in their office. Have a suggestion about someone we should profile? Email amlaskow@bu.edu.

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